Star Trek Resurgence review 2023: a captivating sci-fi adventure

Unlike its famous counterpart from Lucasfilm, Star Trek hasn’t had a great history with video games. There have been licensed Star Trek video games for 50 years, but there has never been a truly great Star Trek game that is popular with more than just its fans. Even the best Star Trek games, like Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force from 2000, Star Trek: Bridge Commander from 2002, and the long-running MMORPG Star Trek Online, put a lot of emphasis on fighting, which is always a last resort in Star Trek stories. Gene Roddenberry’s cosmic polemic has a lot of action, but it’s never about the action.

Star Trek Resurgence: Description

Instead, Star Trek is about caring, being curious, and getting along with others. To really capture the spirit of the space adventure series, a video game should have as much to do with talking as it does with flying and shooting. This would let players explore new worlds, make friends, and face tough moral choices.

Star Trek Resurgence, the first game from Telltale spinoff Dramatic Labs and the first Star Trek game in a long time to focus on characters and dialogue as much as the TV show, seems to be trying to do this. Set on a new ship with almost an entirely new cast, Resurgence is a branching story with more interstellar intrigue, interpersonal conflict, and explosive space action than any Star Trek game in decades, or maybe ever. It’s not very good as either a game or a piece of software. But as a Star Trek story, it earns its pips for sure.

Star Trek Resurgence: Pros and Cons

System requirements Table

Star Trek Resurgence: Made up

Resurgence introduces two new species: the rocky-faced, hardy, and once subservient hotari, who mined on their planet’s moon, Tau, and the tall, militaristic alydians, who look like Kelpians or Kaminoans and used to control the hotari by making them work in mines that they technically owned. Jara and the rest of the crew of the Resolute have to keep the two races from fighting over the mines and the Dilithium inside them. Only, there is ancient, advanced Tkon technology and trickery at work here, and not everyone is who they say they are.

The Tkon are an ancient civilization that was first mentioned in The Last Outpost in Season 1 of The Next Generation. For those who don’t know, Season 1 is when Riker doesn’t have a beard and sits in chairs in a unique way. In it, a Tkon guardian named Portal 63 challenges Riker. Once Riker solves Portal’s riddle and proves humanity’s worth, Portal lets go of the Enterprise and a Ferengi ship. At the end of the episode, Portal says, “I’ll sleep until I’m needed again.” For an episode that came out in 1987, that was a hell of a hint at what would happen in the future. Even though it’s always fun to see familiar faces in Star Trek, I was very excited to see the two new species that were made just for Resurgence.

It’s one thing to come up with a name for a species, but how do you make two races that fit into the Star Trek universe? Especially since most of the aliens in Star Trek were made to look real by using prosthetics. Instead of prosthetics, we have detailed alien faces thanks to the Unreal Engine. The facial animations for the Aldyians and hotari are certainly emotional and dynamic, but the human faces have a lot of Mass Effect 1 stray eyebrow energy, and everyone always looks mildly confused and slightly annoyed. Lucky for me, it takes more than a showy side eye to turn me off of a Trek game. Even though the final frontier can look beautiful, Resurgence has a clear “last-gen” look, and the environments have some distracting low-quality textures. The animation for running, in particular, is pretty weird and slow as hell.

Star Trek Resurgence: Tapestry

At the start of Resurgence, players meet Jara Rydek, a half-Kobliad Starfleet Commander with a mysterious but impressive service record that has earned her a lot of respect and fame. If you don’t know what a Kobliad is, don’t worry too much about giving back your tricorder. They’re not a very well-known race in Star Trek, and they have a genetic defect that requires them to use a substance called Deuridium to stabilize their cell structure. This is important to the plot in a few ways, and it also gives Rydek, who seems like a superhero, a flaw that was foreseen.

After some tutorials and setting the scene, the game introduces the secondary protagonist, Petty Officer Carter Diaz. He is a member of the long-suffering “lower decks”: the grunts who do all the work below the bridge and often pay the price with their bodies (or their lives) without much fanfare. Diaz is happy and works hard, which is a good balance to Rydek’s seriousness and focus on strategy. However, how players develop both characters through the choices they have can change their personalities within certain limits.

The game spends a lot of time setting up some of the initial tensions and relationships, which pays off: the game is much longer than it probably seems it will be, clocking in at around 12 to 13 hours for a single playthrough (assuming you don’t run into any frustrating gameplay parts that make you stuck for a while), and the first third of those hours are spent setting up the current state of the Resolute and the crew on board.

Some of the things you might expect to see on a Star Trek crew are: A Vulcan and a Trill who aren’t joined together. This is a plot point and a bit of an oddity in the lore, since most Trill aren’t joined together, but it seems like the writers wanted this to be a bigger deal than it is.and a Bolian, before introducing the Hotari, who reminded me of orcs, and the Alydians, who look like they belong more in Star Wars or Mass Effect than Star Trek.

Final Words

Resurgence does a great job capturing what Star Trek is all about. This series is based on the idea that you should always do the right thing and be kind to others, and the many well-written choices you have to make here show that. The choices are almost never easy, but the lack of a morality system or any indication of what you are “supposed” to do gives you a sense of freedom to act as you think these characters would.

we wish some storylines had more closure, and we would love some kind of chapter select, but by the time the credits rolled, we was happy with the choices I’d made and entertained by the many Trek-themed minigames, and I was already thinking about what I’d do differently next time. And that’s really what Star Trek is about: making decisions. We can choose to be better than we were yesterday, to accept each other, and to try to do what is right. That’s fine with Resurgence. Jara Rydeck says, “As we take our next steps into the unknown, the most important things we’ll learn about each other are the most important things we’ll learn about ourselves.”

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