Star Trek: Resurgence

When I bought this , I had no idea that it was a big portion of the ex Telltale team but it didn't take me long to see their finger prints all over this game.

It's an engaging well written story like all of Telltale games and it's certainly a good game but it sadly lacks the polish of Telltales work and has some slight issues that can cause major irritation that would of been solved with a bit more play testings.

Let's start with the bad bits.

1. This game has some serious lighting issues that make finding things quite challenging , I don't know if this is because I'm playing this on an Xbox one instead of my Xbox S but sometimes you can die in the game because you standing in the wrong spot and the light doesn't seem to go activated , who knows but it's a major irritations.

2. There can sometimes be a stuttering delay with dialogue it only lasts for about 2 seconds but it's frustrating.

3 Occasionally clue don't appear in your recorder , close it and the clues are back.

4. The graphics can sometimes seem quite low resolution in parts.

The Good Bits 1. The voice acting is as polished as you would expect.

2. The script feels very Star Trek.

3. You can still buy this game on disc, something that is becoming more challenging as time goes by.

4. It's feels very much a Star Trek game , use the phaser, fly a runabout ( even though it's on rails) and use a tricorder.

5. The characters really do feel like they were designed for Star Trek , it feels the right side of cheesy to be great entertainment.

Summary It's a good game that so easily could of been a great game with just a bit more polish , the only thing I wonder is, are the graphics better on a later console and does the sound stutter.

To put simply , it's a 7 but with just a modicum of play testing would of easily been an 8.

The story is pretty good for the most part and the characters are mostly likeable with few exceptions. However the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired - at best it's okay and at worst it's just annoying and tedious to play.

The technical issues are just all over the place.

The fact that I had to install a mod just to be able to set a resolution higher than 1080p, disable motion blur, increase FOV and have cutscenes run at more than 30FPS is just inexcusable in a 36 Euro game in 2023.

Not only that but there are literally zero graphics options to choose from except for a choice of resolution which by default only goes up to 1920x1440 anyway. Ultrawide is also unsupported without a mod.

But the technical issues don't end there - the QTE mouse controls are absolutely awful because the mouse sensitivity is all over the place - in some minigames it's incredibly high and sensitive, while others require you to whip your mouse several times across half your desk to get your cursor to the destination. It boggles the mind how a game focused on QTE can not get the controls for them right.

The aiming in the combat sections is absolutely atrocious - it's floaty, delayed and unresponsive. Which is really weird since in UE4 you literally get default starter projects that come right with the engine that already have PERFECT 3rd person aiming already implemented so the devs must've just thrown all that away and made their own, inferior version.

Finally there's lots of smaller issues, often involving poor QA - there's clipping animations, background characters walking into walls, inconsistent voice line loudness (some characters are literally twice as loud as everyone else when they talk), subtitles missing lines or using wrong words and of course the graphics - while this is certainly not the worst looking game, it's also not the best and the graphics can be pretty inconsistent, especially when it comes to lighting - some of the scenes look pretty poor while some actually look surprisingly nice - and sadly the nice graphics are mostly in the second half of the game as if the devs were slowly learning UE4 lighting throughout the development process and never went back to fix the earlier areas.

However despite the issues the game hasn't crashed once and I have not experienced a single game-breaking bug so I guess that's something to celebrate nowadays.

QTE for the most part were just tedious and uninteresting - often making something that should've been a quick one button action and stretching it into a long series of boring QTEs that add nothing to the story.

The combat sections were especially bad - they tried to do a cover shooter style combat but failed horribly - waves of enemies coming out of nowhere, awful aim controls, sometimes very poor visibility and limited range of motion as well as unskippable cutscenes every few seconds (in one instance in the mines it was like 2s of shooting, interrupted by a cutscene, followed by another 2s of shooting, another cutscene and finally 10s of shooting). It was pretty reminiscent of on the rails shooters - though not very good ones.

They took something which should've been the most fun part of the gameplay and executed it so badly that it became it's worst aspect - an absolute slog to play.

And finally the dialogue choices - most of the time they weren't terrible, but sadly some of them, and especially the more important ones, were often not clear enough and would lead to some very unpredictable results and the characters would react in very illogical, unreasonable and unprofessional ways - I think it's actually something pretty common in telltalle style games.

Oh and a minor criticism - the game just never gave you time to breathe - it would've been so fun to just walk around the ship - maybe interact with a few members of the team, see some different areas, maybe help around with some tasks here and there or just have any time off - but no, we're just completely on the rails at all times and there's no freedom to do anything. And the few times you could explore it was always pretty discouraged by some characters waiting for you and literally telling you that you need to hurry up despite there being highlited areas to interact with.

Despite all that I liked the game because it does feel like Star Trek, but it's certainly not worth 36 Euro, especially with it's poor technical state. You're better off watching a gameplay on youtube.

I'm a big fan of all things Star Trek and was excited to play a game of this type in the Star Trek universe. The story was quite engaging and you can see that there were a lot of inspired elements in the game. Some cut scenes were surprisingly well directed and I felt compelled to play the game to completion. I've just played it the once and am not entirely sure how my choices affected my experience, though I have the impression that they did make some meaningful differences.

The game play itself is upsettingly simple. There were a few cool puzzles to solve, but for the most part, it felt like I was just propelled from cutscene to cutscene by pressing the trigger and a directional button.

In addition to that, the game is not very well polished and should not have been released in this condition. There are several instances where the dialogue is inconsistent (very muffled at some points or the tone of speech is inexplicably varied), audio is not consistent with the scene (the transporter sound when there is no transporter being used), dialogue does not match the scene (swapped with a soon followed scene), and too often the subtitles did not match the dialogue. And that's just a start.

I don't regret buying and playing this game. I was definitely entertained, but was also keenly aware throughout the experience that it was very sloppy.

This game is fine, it's not particularly bad or good. That said, I do not recommend it unless you're a big Star Trek fan desperate for a TNG-era style story that is new.

Mind you new does not mean innovative or necessarily creative, this feels like the same kind of story that you would find in older Trek games like Hidden Evil. The plot seems to come from a generic sci-fi story with Trek elements added to it, so much so it relies on space anomalies to cripple the ship's abilities and universe technologies from being used.

The characters are okay, alternating between the outsider first officer and a Boimler-like lower deck engineer, which is great to present the classic A/B plots and keep everything intertwined but neither are particularly interesting.

The gameplay is really bad, made of many stupid minigames that don't feel good to play and mostly ruin the narrative flow of the story. The puzzles are simple and mostly just a break from the story and the minigames like flying a shuttle or firing a phaser are not nearly as exciting as you'd expect them to be.

Tl;dr: you're better off watching a playthrough on YouTube than wasting your money on this.

Finally after so long without, we have a star trek game that scratches the itch all trek fans have been having.

A game that puts you in the forefront of truly being in a true trek adventure on the final frontier.

Putting you first hand in the action and giving you the range to make choices and determine outcomes for yourself.

If you're like me and always wished you were a member of the crew when watching the show, then you will love this game.

I will concede some of the quick time events and setting oversights are irritating but it is all worth it.

With heaps of replay potential I look forward to my next run-through.

I hope more people get try out and experience for themselves this amazing game.