Here’s a game tricky to review. On one hand, it’s a fairly simple proposition. Star Trek: Legends is a turn-based RPG where you play as characters throughout the franchise’s history. On the other, it’s a belated console iteration of a mobile game that originally had microtransactions, since removed. It’s a shallow experience, with not much depth. But I’ve also put 25 hours into it ahead of this review and have been glued to it in my free time.
It’s pretty straightforward. You play as the commander of the USS Artemis as you enter the Nexus, a plot device from Star Trek: Generations. It’s quite a clever decision for the writers as the Nexus is basically Star Trek heaven. An anomaly that passes through space, sweeping people up and keeping them in a state of timeless bliss. People including famous Star Trek captains, crew and enemies from the franchise’s past. You collect your first three companions – Michael Burnham, Worf and Bones – and fight through missions to discover the secret of the Nexus. On the way, you meet other famous faces from Trek and can recruit them into your party. Except it’s all quite a lot more complicated than that.
You see, when you recruit a new crew member, they won’t be as strong as the members of your current party. So, you need to level them up. You could do this by replaying missions you’ve done before, but the experience gained is minimal. You can also use a ‘biometric gel’ to improve their stats. There are five types of these, collected by doing missions, buying them from the shop using Latinum, or working on side content. You also need to level up the various actions they can do. This involves using the correct Protomatter for the type of character they are. There are five different classes of character: Command, Security, Medical, Engineering and Scientist. You can also equip your character with equipment you find in the game, and level up that equipment using a mix of five or so different types of items you find. Two Particles can also be assigned to each character to boost their stats and prove one of five effects. If this seems like a bit of a mess, that’s because it is. It feels like a free game designed around microtransactions, but it doesn’t and never has had microtransactions. Terribly confusing.
Adding to the microtransaction feeling is the shuttle missions. To level up your heroes and collect new items and equipment, you can send them off in a shuttle to complete an away mission. These take real-life time – either 15 minutes, 4 hours or 8 hours. When they’re finished, though, you end up with a more levelled-up crew, ready to take on the main story missions. You only have three shuttles, however, and only four crew can go on each shuttle. It sucks for me, because I currently have 52 crew in need of levelling up and there are 95 possible characters to unlock. These shuttle missions feel like the kind of thing a game might charge you to speed up. But it doesn’t go down that route. I guess that’s good. Microtransactions designed to save you time often feel quite manipulative. But then, why have the time element at all? Why not make the away missions a little mini-game or something?
It’s quite important to do the away missions because the main questline has some quite tough difficulty spikes that can only really be overcome by levelling up your crew.
Each level has you selecting missions from a map that fall into three categories. Intel, Explore and Combat. Intel is just a straightforward info dump to move the story along. Explore gives you options. You might be asked to pick a path or a plan of action. Combat is … combat. We’d have liked the Explore options to give more of a moral dilemma in typical Trek fashion. But they are mostly either just blindly choosing ‘left path’ or ‘right path’. Occasionally you can perform another action if your stats are high enough. For instance, if you have a high-level engineer, you might be able to disable a forcefield and find an alternate path through the level.
Combat is your typical turn-based RPG affair. Pick a skill, from the three or four available, and then wait for the enemy to hit back. They’re a few different types of skills. There’s your typical phaser firing attack (or in the case of Commander Data, an attack where he hilariously slaps an opponent with the back of his hand), but there’s also healing, buffs and shields. It all sounds good, but most characters don’t have their four abilities available at any time. Many abilities have cooldowns, meaning you can only really perform them once every couple of turns. Even worse, a lot of those abilities start a battle with a cooldown, meaning they can only be accessed after a certain number of turns. This means you’re really only picking from at most two things every turn. It really limits how tactical the game feels. As a result, I spent most of the time with the ‘battle speed x4’ and ‘auto-battle’ toggles on. I’m thankful that they’re there. But they’re also an indictment of how fun it is to battle in this game. A shame, as most of the missions are combat focused.
And yet…I’ve enjoyed my time with Star Trek: Legends. After every mission you get some energy that allows you to pull a virtual gatcha machine and a new member of Star Trek history will beam into your game. I’ve just unlocked Jadzia Dax. All the characters are rendered quite lovingly and have their own artwork and personalised skills and animations. It’s a shame some characters are only available to unlock by buying the DLC. I had to part with £1.79 to add Chief O’Brian to my crew. It’s fun to unlock a new character, even if it is a pain to level them up.
I found the story fun, too. Granted, I love Star Trek and have a Pavlovian joyful reaction to seeing Geordi La Forge, but the little character interactions are well done, even if it’s a shame that there’s no voice acting.
As well as the main story, there are events to complete, arenas to conquer and a bridge to staff. It doesn’t feel like a slim package. But unfortunately, it’s often remixing the same dull combat. I wish the game was more focused on the story. It all just feels a tad confused.
It doesn’t help that the Switch conversion isn’t great. I’ve had a few unexpected crashes (not so bad as the game saves regularly) and encountered a few bugs. But it’s the loading times that kill the momentum. I’m at the point where it takes longer to load into a battle than it does to complete the battle and going from the bridge to the mission select screen is a full 30 second wait.
If you’re a Star Trek fan, this is worth checking out. You’ll miss the fact that there’s none of the iconic music present, but you’ll have fun unlocking all the characters and seeing Bones being Bones. For everyone else, it’s a harder sell. It’s a flimsy RPG with weird systems that can feel rather…illogical.
QubicGames’ Star Trek: Legends is out now on all formats. Also available on Apple Arcade.
