Review: STAR TREK: RESURGENCE Has a Great Story Weighed Down by Imperfect Presentation

Recently, developer Dramatic Labs and publisher Bruner House released Star Trek: Resurgence. This is a narrative adventure game that plays like a choose your own adventure story with additional interactive components. The game is available to play now on PC (Epic Games Store), PS4 (PS5 thanks to backward compatibility), and Xbox consoles (affiliate link) for about $40. Dramatic Labs was kind enough to send me a copy of Star Trek: Resurgence on Xbox to review but the thoughts below are my own.

Star Trek: Resurgence is a narrative adventure game featuring dialog choices, relationship building, and exploration. Alongside dialog-driven role playing and rich branching storylines, you will also engage with the Star Trek universe in a variety of other gameplay styles, including shuttle piloting, phaser fights, tricorder scanning, stealth, and micro-gameplay mechanics.

I’m going to start with what I think is the best praise that any licensed game can get: Star Trek: Resurgence made me want to go watch Star Trek. If a licensed game can make you want to go experience more of that franchise, it has done a good job in my opinion. The game takes place roughly 16 years after Will Riker met with the Tkon in Star Trek: The Next Generation (“The Last Outpost”) and has the Tkon Empire playing a massive role. It felt very much like a story you’d watch on The Next Generation in my opinion although it was stretched out to roughly 9 hours. Kudos to the team.

I think the writing for Star Trek: Resurgence is good and the ideas are solid. The ways the team wants you interacting with the world around you work really well for the most part. The way you can seamlessly flow between two characters with each chapter is sometimes impeccable and never a problem. The music and sounds have also been fantastic to listen to and full of the Star Trek energy and vibes you would hope for. All of that said, there are some problems with the game.

First, a fair amount of the game looks fantastic, but there were some areas of animation and graphical glitches that were less than stellar. First, there were random graphical glitches for me where characters would pop up for less than a second where they shouldn’t or just a glitchy effect would occur randomly. Second, a decent amount of the walking animations felt very stiff and awkward. Third, some of the faces, particularly humans and human-adjacent species, looked mediocre. Fourth, some of the visual cues didn’t seem to be completed. There was a section where I had to use my tricorder to scan things and usually it uses a contrasting color to indicate the anomaly, but there were a few times where the contrast color didn’t appear adjusted correctly which had me literally combing through the space and trying to scan every inch of the area until I was successful. Finally, the animations for speaking were out of sync with the audio which was distracting. This game is very akin to a visual novel with dialogue being a huge part of the game and to have the audio and visual components not in-line can take you out of the experience.

Another problem I had with Star Trek: Resurgence were that some of the gameplay elements weren’t quite polished. One area that confused me was that some of the button icons on screen didn’t seem to be consistent. Sometimes you’d be shown a circle and prompted to use the right trigger, other times it was more of a trapezoid that looked like the trigger on the controller, etc. This led to a few times where I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to do in the moment. To make this worse, there was a moment I was playing towards the end where I literally could not figure out what I was supposed to do with the controls and I tried it several times before eventually telling the game to retry in Story Mode because nothing I tried worked. I had to do this one or two other times as well because the controls work for the most part, but sometimes they feel a little clunky and unwieldy, particularly when trying to do firefights with your phaser.

One problem with accessibility that I noticed in Star Trek Resurgence was that the subtitles didn’t always work. I would be playing with subtitles on and then there would just be random stretches where there were no subtitles. Also, the subtitles were sometimes different to what was being said as though the voice actors read a line differently than what was in the script and they never updated the script for the subtitles causing a little disconnect. Also, you’re prompted to choose dialogue options a little too early in some instances. These are timed events, but sometimes characters speak for another 2-3 lines after they pop up meaning you have to waste time to make sure you get the whole context before making a choice.

That’s all my negativity for the game. I did really appreciate how if you failed a section the game would give you the choice to retry in Story Mode and it would only be for that one section. If one area is giving you problems, replay it in Story Mode and then the very next section will no longer be in Story Mode. That being said I don’t recall seeing any option for turning Story Mode on if you really want to just breeze through things.

At the end of the day, Star Trek: Resurgence is a fun Star Trek game that I’ve enjoyed. The $40 price tag makes it more approachable, but there are still some problems that could be addressed. It gives me an urge to go back and watch Star Trek in a good way and the story is well done. If you’re a big Star Trek fan, I’d recommend it, just be aware that it’s not perfect.