In Review: Star Trek: Resurgence (PS4)

Summary: Star Trek: Resurgence is a narrative video game that tells an original story that takes place shortly after the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unravel a sinister mystery involving two alien civilizations on the brink of war!

The Story

In Star Trek: Resurgence you play the roles of Commander Rydeck and Petty Officer Carter Diaz who are the two key crewmembers that the story focuses its narrative around. Charged with a mission to try and negotiate peace between two planets in the Hotari System. Rydeck must prove herself as a trusted first officer to Captain Solano while Diaz must negotiate both his friendships and the demands of being an overworked engineer who is part of a short-staffed engineering department. But the main story sees Rydeck having to play diplomat in an unofficial capacity in order to gather information for Ambassador Spock and Captain Solano who are trying to broker peace between the Olidians and the Hotari who are fighting over the ownership of a dilithium mine, which happens to trade the dilithium with Starfleet.

The Story sees Rydeck making a lot of command decisions, which is just as well given that Solano isn’t really much of a leader when it comes to making informed decisions. While Carter Diaz has a lot of the game’s action beats, which see him space-walking and piloting shuttles as well as solving engineering problems.

The Gameplay

The gameplay is fairly simple as you get your hand held a little throughout the action so that the story can move forward at a respectable pace. However, I did find that the controls were a bit unresponsive at points in the game, and found myself having to push a button more than once in order for my command to be executed. This was particularly annoying when playing some of the more action-based missions.

I also experienced certain scenes from the game where a character would repeat the same line more than once, which came across as somewhat unnatural. There were a handful of scenes in the first hour that trailed off into the unintelligible. Hopefully, these issues will get addressed in future updates. As it was somewhat annoying as I was getting invested in the story.

Voice Acting

Krizia Bajos and Josh Keaton do a great job of leading the cast as Commander Rydeck and Carter Diaz. Bajos delivers a believable character in Rydeck who is thrown into the mix with a ship’s crew that seems to have a mixed view of their Captain thanks to his previous deeds, which were depicted in the comic book prequel series. In the story, Rydeck has an uphill struggle to build trust between herself and the crew. In his role of Diaz Keaton delivers a likable character who is enthusiastic about his job and the friends he has made. But he struggles to relate to the Vulcan Chief Engineer who is forever chastising him for being nearly late for briefings. In short, both actors do brilliant work with the plotlines that they are given and the various relationships that we see them play.

Special mention should go out to Piotr Michael who manages to capture Leonard Nimoy’s voice perfectly for his performance as Ambassador Spock.

Graphics

The game’s graphics are a bit of a mixed bag if truth be told. While the character models are brilliant and emote really well when it comes to facial expressions. I found some of the backdrops. Particularly those of different planets to be a little underwhelming. However, it didn’t take much away from my immersion in the story. The parts of the game set in space are thrilling and were well-represented. However the parts of the game where you are on the planet talking to the Hotari. Well, put it this way. If it were a Star Trek TV show it would resemble the original series in as much as the character models looked more real than their surroundings.

Where the game really shines is during the parts where you are out in space or on the Bridge of the Resolute or anywhere on the ship. It looks very much like Star Trek and felt very much like a Star Trek ship.

Soundtrack

The game’s soundtrack is brilliantly done and mixes and matches cues from various different Star Trek movies and television shows. There is a segment at the very beginning of the game in the first 10 minutes of play where I could have sworn I heard a similar tune to one of the many music cues that were used in the original series of movies. I also loved the music that played when we catch our first look at the Resolute in Spacedock.

It’s obvious that the people involved in scoring the soundtrack for this game had a lot of love for the composers of the past that have scored Star Trek and wanted to pay homage. It’s really a love letter to Star Trek from a musical point of view.

Overall

I enjoyed the time that I spent playing this game, but it was not as smooth as I’d hoped it would be as far as the controls were concerned, and some issues with character dialogue. The story was really solid and the characters that you play and the decisions that you made for them really impacted the game and the way that you were viewed by supporting characters. At its heart, Star Trek is about relationships and trying to be our best selves when put in the throws of extraordinary circumstances. It’s always been a TV show about what it means to be human and I feel that the writing team on this game perfectly captured that by giving us a great set of characters and a fun mission to play through. It felt very much like a pilot episode for a brand new Star Trek series and I would not be against revisiting these characters if Dramatic Labs ever got the go-ahead to do a sequel.

Star Trek: Resurgence is not a perfect game. But it’s well worth a playthrough for the story and the characters if you can forgive some of the first-week bugs that the game seems to have.

Aside from all of that. As a PS5 owner. I was a bit taken aback by the fact that this is the only Playstation version of the game, which is made for PS4 and is relying on PS5’s backward compatibility. I’d really like to have seen an enhanced version for the PS5 and hope it comes at some future date as an upgrade as I will not be prepared to pay for the game twice.