Already has serious damage to the warp core

earthpressnews

After more than 20 years of waiting, a new Star Trek strategy game arrived on Steam on Thursday, October 12, 2023. The user reviews are already critical, and the first test reports on Metacritic seem mixed. Our author Schuhmann also watched Star Trek: Infinite and gave a red alert.

This is the situation: Rarely has a game sounded better on paper:

  • 24 years after the great strategy game “Star Trek: Birth of the Federation”, a new 4x Star Trek strategy game is now released with an official license, Picard on the cover and everything.
  • The publisher behind the game would also be Paradox, the big strategy specialists from Sweden who have more expertise and experience in the genre than anyone else.
  • The game would then be based on Stellaris, the masterpiece that has dominated Steam in the SF sector for years and which has now received 19 DLCs and expansions, making it extremely mature.

    • Star Trek Infinite – Game features and pre-sale bonuses

    More videos

    Autoplay

    A weak 66% on Metacritic – Steam reviews are only 55% positive

    This is how it works in reality: Not good at all.

  • The game currently only has 55% positive reviews on Steam – a “balanced” rating: These are games that – to put it bluntly – sink and disappear into obscurity.
  • Metacritic gives the game 66 out of 100 points after 13 reviews – that also sounds like it’s below average, a 3 or 4+. GameStar gave one of the best ratings with 73%.
  • According to Steam Tracker, the game had 5,500 players at its peak when it was released, which isn’t that great either.

    • What are the good sides of the game? Star Trek: Infinite combines the gameplay of Stellaris with the great Star Trek universe that many love and an idea from Europa Universalis IV: mission trees.

    Mission trees give the game structure.

    Each of the 4 starting nations has special missions that provide a clear plot and also grant the player freedom. While Stellaris often leaves beginners disoriented, with Star Trek: Infinite you can always see what the game expects from you: There is a clear common thread.

    With the Federation, once you have collected enough metal, you unlock the Enterprise under Picard. With the Enterprise you can then complete missions and unlock further bonuses.

    In any case, Star Trek fans will find many allusions to the series in events and characters: Spock, Data, Captain Janeway and Picard, even Commander Sisko makes an appearance.

    There are also many well-known species from the series: After Andorians, Tellarites and Vulcans, the Betazoids are usually the fifth race to join the Federation.

    Star Trek: Infinite breaks the usual formula of 4X games

    What are the bad sides of the game? Star Trek: Infinite is a 4x game. This stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate.

    Typically, these games start with you spending the first few hours exploring the environment and founding new cities or bases until you meet the first player, then the expansion of your empire pauses. The early game is over and you start building your own cities and thinking about how you can outdo your opponents.

    This is the natural progression of every 4x game from Civilization VI to Stellaris to Galactic Civilizations 4.

    In Star Trek Infinite you start with a relatively large empire, 4 starting planets and you also see the 3 opponents right from the start: As a federation, you border on Romulans, Cardassians and Klingons.

    The 4 peoples.

    But you also have a huge universe behind you that you can explore and conquer. The short phase in which you normally expand your empire without resistance is therefore extremely stretched in Star Trek Infinite. Because the developers want to prevent expansion too quickly (through construction ship spam), an artificial shortage of the “influence” resource is introduced: So you explore areas, but you have to wait until you can take possession of them, until the necessary one Influence has grown back painfully slowly.

    This leads to a lengthy early game that never ends. This is an unusual gaming experience for every 4x player. In attempting to recreate Star Trek, Star Trek: Infinite breaks the conventions that work in and define the 4x genre.

    In addition to this break with convention, Star Trek: Infinite lacks many “Quality of Life” improvements:

  • So you can’t just jump to events or missions that the logbook shows you, but you first have to look for the mission location, which is sometimes even outside your own area. Precisely because your own territory is so unmanageable, it becomes difficult to follow the course of the game over time
  • Even individual missions that require bringing a science ship and a military ship to exactly the same place are extremely annoying after the third time at the latest and do not leave a good feeling in the game
  • Ships indicate that they can be upgraded, but it doesn’t work very well
  • Accepting new peoples into the Federation seems mechanical and not well thought out. This aspect of the game also becomes boring after a few minutes
  • The events are difficult to read and fly past the player
  • The expansion of planets is already not Stellaris’ strength. This makes a game like Galactic Civilizations 4 much better. The base construction in Stark Trek: Infinite is very similar to that of Stellaris, but different just enough to be annoying

    • Conclusion: Star Trek: Infinite was a great idea on paper, but in practice the product seems immature and needs more polish. Somehow the basic narrative conditions of the Star Trek license, to which one obviously feels bound, seem to collide with the actually smooth gameplay of Stellaris. A plus (GamePlay from Stellaris) times a plus (Star Trek universe) doesn’t seem to reinforce each other here, but rather hinder each other.

    It would have been enough to simply let the game start earlier to avoid this dilemma. As a 4x player you are used to starting with a single base and a black card. Starting with 20 areas, 4 bases and a clear picture of the strategic situation is unusual.

    However, Paradox is known for improving games that start out difficult in many cases. Therefore there is still hope.

    Per

  • Official license for Star Trek
  • After 24 years a new SF strategy game about Star Trek
  • Publisher has an impeccable reputation for further development of games
  • Stellaris as a good foundation
    • Cons

  • The game is difficult to read
  • The comfort features of the game are unnecessarily weak
  • Breaks with established conventions of the 4X genre
  • Star Trek license comes at the expense of fun
  • Seems like an older, weaker version of a big brother

    • Star Trek: Infinite also has such a difficult start because the SF epic Stellaris clearly serves as a template and the game now seems rounded and polished after years of improvement. It is said that Star Trek: Infinite is essentially a “branded skin” for Stellaris.

    There is also a good Star Trek mod for Stellaris (via steam). Many people on Steam now compare the game Star Trek: Infinite with this mod and say: The free fan mod beats the €30 game by far.

    The release time for Star Trek: Infinite could also be unfavorable. Galactic Civilizations IV will be released in the “Supernova” edition on Steam next week:

    I subjugate humanity with a gang of ram-crazy space rabbits

    mmod-game