Review for Ep.2
I'll start this review by saying I know next to nothing about Star Trek. I like sci-fi in general and this happened to catch my eye so I figured why not. I can't speak to how close it is to source material, but if you're like me and are thinking about trying this despite all that I suppose this review is for you.
Being candid, the first episode was kind of mid. Had I only played that I think I'd have a much worse outlook on this. There's two problems that I ended up finding being pretty consistent. The first: accessibility as a non-fan of Star Trek.
This game is very apparently made for the people who are fans of the series. It kind of throws you into the thick of it with all these terms, races, history, etc without explaining any of it to you. As a player I just didn't really know what people were talking about half the time outside of guesses based on context. Now on one hand I think this is a good thing. It would be annoying if the game stopped every five minutes to explains things to you like a child. But on the flip side I'm left drawing blanks on a lot of elements of the setting. What this really needs is a codex. Something giving me blurbs of information about all the different star trek terms and lore that keep cropping up, because there is a lot of them.
The other and more serious issue was pacing. The game moves a mile a minute in the first episode. There's no... fluff is maybe what I'd call it. The game cuts super fast between all the key events that it ended up feeling more rushed than anything. Similar to how it doesn't tell you about Star Trek terminology, it also doesn't tell you much about the characters. As I said, you're thrown into the thick of it. You're already a seemingly seasoned captain with a crew full of characters that all have these established relationships. Once again going to me as player, I know nothing about them. It feels like I'm missing context for a lot of things. It's not as if the context doesn't exist either, but it's all happening off screen it seems. There's something to be said for showing and not telling no doubt, and I'm not saying I need their life stories out of the gate, but even a couple quick lines about these characters would suffice.
Episode 2 was a huge improvement. Both the problems I mentioned are still present, but everything I was liking about the experience felt like it started to shine through a bit. Despite not knowing much about the characters, they do have personality. The writing doesn't feel incompetent. It took time for some smaller scenes that did favors in fleshing things out a bit. It started to give me that info I was looking for. It made me feel a lot more hopeful about it to put it simply.
Beyond that the usual things to mention are that the renders look nice, the characters models are hot, and I love the sexy space suits honestly. Sex scenes suffer from that same problem of being too short and fast paced, but the animations were fine. I always like when a game has appropriate music and sound effects as well. I also think the little cut scenes at the beginning of the chapters are a nice touch.
I still think there are improvements to be made, and I honestly think the game would really benefit from a rework of the first episode where it eases you into the experience and tells you a bit more about everything going on/introduces you to the characters more. Still, if this keeps improving as it has, I can see it turning into something pretty solid. There's definitely potential.
