Star Trek: Resurgence - Review | Some of the best Trek in DECADES...

Star Trek: Resurgence is a story-driven adventure game by Dramatic Labs, a studio created recently by former Telltale developers who wanted to carry on the tradition of games they were previously known for like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and countless others. If you're familiar with any of those games then you should already know basically what to expect with Star Trek: Resurgence -- a lot of cutscenes where you pick dialogue options and react to timed prompts, alternating with moments of limited exploration, light puzzle-solving, and scripted action sequences, where the decisions you make along the way influence the way the story shapes up. The story, of course, is the main draw, here, with it basically being like a good multi-episode arc from the 90's era of Star Trek TV shows, expanded into a 10-12 hour runtime that allows you to really immerse yourself in the setting and feel like you're actually taking part in a series of Star Trek, in more elaborate and involved ways than what would typically be shown in the actual shows.

Now, you don't necessarily have to be a fan of Star Trek to enjoy Resurgence -- at a minimum, you just have to enjoy "choose your own adventure" style video games and be open to an optimistic sci-fi space adventure story, which requires no prior knowledge of Star Trek since it revolves around an entirely new cast of characters trying to resolve a conflict between two entirely made-up, new-to-this-game species. The game is sure to explain any relevant lore details from the shows or movies that a new player might not know, or that an established fan might have even forgotten about, while other things can be easily deduced as you go along; for example you don't need to know what the Kobayashi Maru is to infer from the surrounding context clues that it's a notoriously difficult test, which is all you really need to know to understand the point of that conversation. So it should be fairly easy to follow along with everything even if you don't know anything about Star Trek.

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For fans of the franchise, there will be plenty of references and deep cuts to appreciate, but they feel very natural since they're usually presented as just being a factual part of the world itself as something that exists or something that happened, as opposed to just a blatant excuse for fan service that non-fans would have zero chance to understand. Even then, some of them work just fine as their own stand-alone part of the story if you have no idea what they're supposed to be referencing, but of course, if you do, then they become all the more enjoyable to witness. A couple of major established characters appear as special guest stars, with Spock being heavily featured in promotional material as a major selling point; that might be the closest thing to straight up fan-service in this game, since it does feel a little contrived for Spock of all people to be involved in this mission, but on the other hand it makes logical sense for someone like William T Riker (voiced by Jonathan Frakes himself) to show up given that there are references to something the Enterprise-D crew experienced, and so he would of course be the person to talk to about what happened on the planet surface in that one episode. Other things like ordering your choice of raktajino, tea, or coffee from the replicator, or channeling your inner Picard or Janeway from the bridge, or swiping up on the transporter controls, or giving the Live Long and Prosper to Spock might go unappreciated by someone less familiar with the franchise, but serve as fun little fanboy fantasy moments for someone who's always wanted to be in those sorts of positions on the show.

As a Star Trek video game, this might possibly be the best one ever created. Okay, well, I can't say that objectively because most of the other Star Trek games have just never appealed to me personally, because they were either gameplay genres that I just don't care for, or else they focused on aspects of the show that I don't really identify as being the core spirit of Star Trek. What's always drawn me into this setting is not the prospect for exciting combat or intra-galactic politicking, but rather it's the sense of adventure from exploring strange new worlds and learning about new alien cultures, the thought-provoking questions that come from wrestling with complex moral, ethical, or philosophical dilemmas, the thrill of solving bizarre mysteries stemming from weird scientific anomalies, and all that jazz. This is the kind of stuff that Resurgence really leans into, with the core premise being about figuring out how to make peace between two feuding species while discovering what's really going on with a mysterious ion storm that seems to be affecting the system in question. While the story does have its moments of epic spaceship battles and shooting dudes with phasers, you spend the bulk of your time just being a regular Starfleet officer having conversations with people, issuing difficult commands, scanning things with your tricorder, operating the ship's computers and machinery, and resolving diplomatic or scientific problems as they arise, all while trying to carry out the ideals of the Federation, for the betterment of all life in the galaxy. So for me, the real appeal of Resurgence is specifically about the immersive role-playing fantasy of living out an interactive story from the TV show, and it delivers on that premise extremely well.

So much of this game really does feel like a faithful one-to-one adaptation of the TV shows injected into a more interactive medium, including the cinematography, the way people talk, the story structure, the uniforms, the LCARS displays, the title card fonts, the sound effects, the set design, and so on. When landing on a planet surface, for instance, the low-res backgrounds wind up channeling the look of the matte paintings you'd see on the show, whether intentional or not, while certain environments feel strangely reminiscent of the typical "Star Trek cave" sets that you'd see reused for each new Strange Alien Planet of the Week. Starting the game up for the first time, I immediately felt right at home just walking around the ship's interior and seeing how everyone behaved and performed their duties because it was all just so much like what I've come to expect from these TV shows. Everything felt so familiar and so comfortable that it was like this ship and this crew had always been part of Star Trek ever since the late 90s or early 2000s, and I was just discovering it for the first time. And after there being 20 years of either no Trek or various forms of "Nu Trek" which have always felt slightly "off" to me, I just immediately fell in love with Resurgence, thinking "Yes, THIS is what I want my Star Trek to be." And of course, it's not just about the aesthetic look and feel of everything, but it's also about portraying that optimistic utopian future where humanity is all about bettering ourselves and helping others, and it was just so heart-warming getting to play as characters who really embody those higher aspirations.

In Resurgence, you play as two alternating characters: Jara Rydek (a half-Kobliad Commander who's just been assigned as the new first officer of the Resolute), and Carter Diaz (an enlisted Petty Officer who works in the ship's lower decks of engineering). As Rydek, you make a lot of the important command decisions about how to handle various situations, which includes stepping up during emergencies as well as navigating conference meetings and managing the crew's morale and expectations, while as Diaz you'll be carrying out a lot of the more hands-on operations that come about as a result of Rydek's decision-making. Although the two perspectives rarely intersect directly, they often weave back and forth in such a way that you really get to experience the full ramifications of things that would often only be seen from the bridge perspective of our main cast of characters on the TV shows, so it's kind of fun in that regard to experience what actually goes on elsewhere on the ship when the captain or the first officer issues a command. Episodes like "Lower Decks" on TNG, or "Good Shepherd" on Voyager are fun for the express reason that we actually get to see what goes on in the minds and everyday lives of the lower-ranking crew, so it's really nice in Resurgence to see literally half of the story told from that perspective just for the extra depth it adds to the equation. It also works in recreating some of the rhythmic feel of the TV shows usually having an "A" story and a "B" story, which allows the storytellers to control the pacing a little better by cutting away to the other perspective to allow time to pass off-screen or to create dramatic tension at certain cliffhangers.

Besides that, I find that the alternating perspectives helps a lot with gameplay variety, since Rydek and Diaz are often in different types of situations where you'll be expected to do different things, which can help with keeping everything a little fresh since it rarely gets bogged down with too much of the same thing all the time. With Rydek, the majority of the gameplay is just picking dialogue options during cutscenes, with occasional away missions where you get to investigate something, whether that be through stealth action or the requisite scanning of things with your tricorder, but then as Diaz you'll typically be involved with more mechanical mini-games and action shoot-outs as you operate the ship or end up on away missions of your own.

Now, it needs to be mentioned that the gameplay segments in Resurgence are really nothing all that special. In fact, most of them are rudimentary at best. Flying a shuttle to a set of coordinates while an ion storm is affecting your movement is not particularly demanding or exciting; the third-person cover-shooting is fairly straightforward and relatively restrictive; the stealth sequences are barebones approximations of what you'd see in more dedicated stealth games; the mini-game puzzles are usually pretty simple in both scope and complexity; the exploration is often just a simplistic matter of searching for the next glowing object to scan with your tricorder; and of course, the quick-time-events are obviously just a way to make cutscenes a little more interactive. While it would be easy to criticize all of these as being pretty lame and underwhelming when compared against what you'd expect from a more elaborately fleshed-out game, I don't really consider it a huge negative in this case because this is a story game first and foremost; these gameplay segments make up a relatively small portion of the total game, and they're serviceable enough to support the story that's being told, so I don't really mind them being somewhat crude.

There are times for instance when the game basically turns into a walking simulator where all you can do is just walk forward along a set path, but it didn't bother me whatsoever because I was so engaged by the story and immersed in the setting that I was happy to be along for the ride. Some of the quick-time-events may seem completely unnecessary, like they could've easily just done the cutscene without making you click a button to pick something up, but it does lend a little extra weight to certain moments on occasion, like when you have to take command of the Resolute. A simple thing like clicking on the captain's seat shouldn't really matter, but I feel like it works as a more practical symbol of you taking command to actually click on the seat, versus just showing your character sitting in the chair without your input. It also gives you a little moment to collect your thoughts or set your own pacing for the scene. So, I'm fine with them overall. I could likewise complain about times when the game restricts your movement with invisible walls or prevents you from running or bringing up your tricorder, but again, with this being a story-driven game I'm okay with restrictive elements that keep you more focused on the relevant parts of the story. Although it is a little contrived in some instances, like when you have to go through this elaborate process of hunting down DNA samples to fool a security terminal so that you can cross onto an elevator platform, all because your character lacks the basic ability to step over things, even though she had previously vaulted over a similar obstacle in a cutscene. I mean seriously, that tiny little railing would be no match for a well-placed Riker maneuver. Oh, uh, alright then, I guess DNA samples it is.

The gameplay is at its best when it has you exploring environments looking for hidden information or ways to progress, because this is when it gives you the most direct control over your character, in scenarios that play out the most like a typical Star Trek plot. After all, Star Trek is not really a property known for great action sequences -- it's really more about the characters and figuring out a way to solve problems, so to me, scanning things with a tricorder and trying to deduce what's going on in the area is what I want to be doing in a Star Trek game, more so than shooting dudes with phasers. These moments of calmer exploration are fun because they give you optional bits of exposition to uncover as you search around the environments, so you can build on the story in a more interactive way than just watching cutscenes, and they even throw in some basic puzzles to solve, like searching for hidden crystals that you can use to deactivate illusory walls or activate hidden paths, or melting ice formations with your phaser to clear a path forward, or trying to deduce the correct sequence of teleporter pads to advance to the other side of a chasm. As with the other gameplay elements, none of this stuff is particularly challenging or demanding, I suppose in the interest of easy accessibility for people who really just want to focus on the story, so I would probably like it better if they could've been a little more complicated, but I still enjoy them. In fact, I wish there were even more things to scan with the tricorder, and more opportunities to whip it out and start scanning, because I just enjoy all the sci-fi technobabble and learning more about how these fictional worlds work.

The biggest issue with the gameplay is that the segments sometimes feel a bit superfluous and can get in the way of the story. Piloting a shuttle is a nice way to give you more hands-on Things to Do™ in the early stages when you're listening to dialogue and getting meaningful bits of character development along the way, but then once they take the story stuff away and make it just about dodging lightning strikes as you move to your next set of coordinates, they immediately start to feel less fun even though the gameplay is technically more involved. And then when they make you fly to a second set of coordinates, and then a third, it gets to feel gratuitous, like "Okay, I get it, can we just get on with the story, please?" The stealth segments are likewise fine when they're first introduced because it's something new and different to do, but towards the end of the game they start making you sneak through multiple areas in a row, one after another, with each one feeling like more of a pointless distraction from what you really care about, which is getting back to the story itself. These feelings become exacerbated on repeat playthroughs, the whole point of which is typically to make different choices so you can see how they affect the story, and so going through these gameplay sequences all over again when they themselves have no real impact on the story makes them feel especially tedious to get through on replay.

The game does give you a "Story Mode" option if you fail any of them, thereby making them easier such as by removing the three-hit health limit during phaser fights, or by making it so enemies will never detect you during stealth sequences. This ensures that pretty much anyone, even extreme video game novices, will be able to get through the entire game and experience the complete story, which is important because I can see there being a lot of people who are big fans of Star Trek and would enjoy this story, but aren't fans of video games and might thus be deterred if they got stuck on a difficult phaser fight. What's weird is that there's no way to manually toggle Story Mode from the menu; it's turned off by default, and you can only enable it for each segment individually, and only after you fail it at least once. The segments are easy enough for most gamers that you shouldn't ever NEED to turn them on, so it's always worth giving them a solid try, but that could possibly be a nuisance for certain audiences who might prefer to just stay on Story Mode the whole time, and I did intentionally fail a few of them on my second playthrough just so I wouldn't have to mess with them again so much. Because again, you're not really here for the gameplay, but the story.

The story begins with a sort of preliminary setup in which you, as Commander Rydek, arrive at Starbase 128 to take your new position as first officer of the Resolute, and then with you as Diaz working to get the ship ready for its first mission after being refit. The cold intro picks up some time after the ship suffered a catastrophic malfunction during an experimental engine test that killed its first officer and 22 other crew, which you can actually read about in a prequel comic series if you're interested. Now, everyone is scrambling to get the Resolute back up and running again, while the senior staff have some reservations about the new first officer being assigned to them from another ship, instead of one being promoted from within. Tensions are a little high all-around, and so as Rydek, your first order of business is to ingratiate yourself with the crew and prove yourself as a capable XO, while as Diaz you have to step up to the extra pressure of crunch time as the ship nears the end of its refit schedule. Both Rydek and Diaz are promptly thrust into action when a bizarre ion storm suddenly intensifies and threatens the safety of the crew and the ship itself, requiring both of them to act cool under pressure to prevent yet another catastrophe, which Captain Solano is especially concerned about given that he was responsible for the failed engine test and feels like his career is now on the line with every subsequent success and failure.

While not having a lot of direct bearing on the main story of the game, this introduction does a great job of establishing all of the characters and getting you into the setting itself, while also putting you through a pretty exciting sequence of events to kick the game off with a fun bang. In fact, the free demo actually lets you play out this entire introduction, up until the ship survives the ion storm, which is roughly an hour long, and then lets you carry your save file into the full game if you choose to purchase it. So I would easily recommend that everyone give the demo a try if you're still on the fence, and then decide if you'd like to continue further.

From there, it gets into the actual story as you set out for your mission, which revolves around helping to negotiate peace between two non-Federation races, the Hotari and the Alydians, who are on the brink of war over the mining rights on the moon of Tau in the Hotari system.

In essence, the Hotari are a more primitive people who were discovered by the Alydians, a spacefaring society who wanted to mine dilithium on the Hotari moon and arranged to use the Hotari as labor in exchange for sharing their science and technology with them. However, after a century of this arrangement, the Hotari began to feel oppressed by the Alydians and forcibly retook control of the mines for themselves. This is where the Federation gets called in to mediate the dispute, except they rely on the Alydians for a portion of their dilithium supply, so the Federation has a vested interest in maintaining their own supply of dilithium in the process. Your job, at least initially, is to help negotiate a peaceful settlement and ensure the continued supply of dilithium to the Federation. But of course, in typical Star Trek fashion, it's never that simple as you soon begin to realize there are suspicious circumstances surrounding the Hotari rebellion, while the mysterious ion storm in the area seems to be having its own strange influence on both sides of the conflict. Thus, the rest of the story is about investigating what actually happened in the mines that led to the Hotari revolt, and what the true nature of the ion storm actually is. As you might safely predict, the ion storm will come to represent its own threat to everyone in the region, and you'll eventually have to work with and against different factions of both Hotari and Alydians as you try to stop the ultimate threat and save the day.

Unfortunately I can't really get into the story much more than that without starting to spoil things, and this is the kind of game where a lot of the enjoyment comes from experiencing the story for the first time, so you'll just have to trust me when I say that it's really good and worth experiencing if you're a fan of Star Trek or if you just want to go through a fun sci-fi adventure story. It's really impressive, actually, how Resurgence manages to tell its own original story that you don't really need to know anything about Trek to understand, while also tying into and expanding on so much established Trek lore that was barely touched on in the shows. The story itself builds the mystery and tension in a pretty compelling way, such that every chapter leaves you wanting to know more about where the story is going, which is further aided by several twists that take things in unexpected directions. It's not afraid to slow down for moments of calm exposition that give the story a chance to breathe so that you can really soak in the atmosphere and become emotionally attached to the characters, but it never feels "slow" in a way that makes you feel bored waiting for things to get interesting. And then it's also capable of ratcheting up the tempo for fast-paced exciting action sequences that really get your heart pounding. The pacing is pretty engaging in that way, with a good rhythmic flow between different types of scenarios that keep everything feeling fresh and interesting the whole way through, much like the thrilling ups and downs of a roller coaster. There's plenty of good camera work with dynamic angles and movements to make the storytelling visually appealing, and it does a good job with creating lots of cinematic moments that feel like they could've come directly from a high quality movie production. The characters are all extremely well-written and voice-acted, too, so even without all the plot details the dialogue alone can do a lot to make you invested in what's happening just because of all the great character interactions; even when they're just running warp field simulations in engineering, or sitting around the conference table talking about what to do next, it's always interesting to follow along with, especially considering the control you have over influencing the dialogue with your own responses.

The main story is of course fairly rigid about following a set path from beginning to end -- there's not a lot you can do to radically alter the course of the story by sending it into completely separate branches since there's ultimately one story that the game is trying to tell. In that sense, the game does sometimes fall victim to the tropes of these being more about the illusion of choice, with plenty of decisions coming down to just slightly different flavorings of the same thing, or else with you winding up at the same end result no matter what. There are a few characters in the game whom you'll always end up on either good or bad terms with, because they're hard-coded to have a certain outcome as per the story, in which case it doesn't matter if you were friendly to Joe Schmoe the entire game if they're inevitably going to end up disliking you anyway. A fair number of quick-time-events are just straight up false choices that will play the same outcome regardless of whether you press the correct input within the time limit or not, and even the timer for choosing dialogue options is completely meaningless because there's no consequence for not picking one in time, like there being a hidden fourth option or the game just picking one randomly -- the game will literally pause until you make your decision. And of course, some of your decisions that would seem to have a major impact on the story don't actually matter much in the grand scheme of things, because the consequences might just be a few different lines of dialogue here and there.

Despite these kinds of instances, I think the game does enough with having meaningful consequences to really sell the illusion in a convincing way. After all, it's usually difficult to tell in the moment when a specific decision is actually having a meaningful impact on the story or not, and it's not until you start replaying the game and making deliberately opposite choices that you can really see those differences play out. I know on my second playthrough, I went in cynically expecting to see the exact same thing again, just with characters having different reactions to things, but was pleasantly surprised by how many things did actually change with all-new cutscenes and story outcomes. They weren't completely different story branches, of course, but they were deviations along that main path nonetheless that I hadn't seen on my first playthrough. And regardless of whether the game is actually producing some kind of mechanical consequence for your choices, the narrative implications can still matter to you personally; if you make a bad decision that gets a dozen Red Shirts killed off-screen, it may not affect the story in a significant way but it can still weigh on your conscience and make you feel bad, and that's really what matters most of all, here -- your personal engagement in the story.

Either way, the decisions you make still influence how other characters respond to you and how certain scenes play out. When you detect suspicious activity in the computer core, for example, it matters whether you choose to call out for who you think MIGHT be on the upper levels, or keep quiet and approach them in secret, since you'll either catch them in the act if they didn't hear you coming, or after they've completed their business and are trying to escape if you alerted them to your presence, which naturally changes the nature of the confrontation in terms of both the dialogue and quick-time-events. Even though it'll ultimately end the same way no matter what, with help arriving in the nick of time, it still feels like you took a bit of a unique path to get there. Sometimes, the game does even create minor deviations where scenes will play out in completely different locations, or with completely different characters depending on your choices -- like, for example, if you choose to let your friend Edsilar escape into the hatch first, then Diaz will get hit with the ion storm and you'll get an extra scene with him recovering in sickbay, whereas if you let Diaz go first, then Edsilar will take the hit and you'll continue on with Diaz back working in the shuttle bay. And of course, whomever gets hit will end up permanently scarred for the rest of the game. Some decisions will even influence who lives or dies, which can affect who will be involved with certain cutscenes, how you have to solve problems, and how other characters treat you as well.

Most of the time, your decisions will impact your standing with the rest of the crew and associated allies. There's a bit of a quasi-social simulation going on where they'll come to respect or resent you over time, which you can keep track of with pop-ups that display when they like or dislike your decisions, and then you can reference your current standing with them from the pause screen. With this, future conversations will play out differently depending on how you've acted around certain people in the past, with them for instance remembering what you did and holding it against you or trusting you more implicitly because of the trust you put in them earlier. If you make enough of the right decisions, then certain characters will be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the mission, whereas they might instead choose to act selfishly or even betray you if you've acted in a way that deviates too much from their liking. Similarly, if you act really friendly with certain people then the nature of your relationship will change over the course of the game, affecting the context of later scenes. One decision made in the previous scene might completely change the timbre of your conversation with that same character in the next scene. The game actually keeps track of a surprising number of these choices and is sure the recall them later on at frequent enough intervals to make it clear that the game really is paying attention to what you say and do. Sometimes even a single conversation can follow multiple combinations of dialogue outcomes, where instead of just being a single direct causal outcome where A leads to X and B leads to Y, it might be A+B leads to X, and A+C leads to Y.

The decisions make up the bread and butter of Resurgence's narrative gameplay, and they're particularly interesting in this case because they're not your cliche good, bad, or neutral options -- in fact, a lot of the time they're all different types of good intentions, just with different connotations. That makes sense, of course, given that you're supposed to be playing as Starfleet officers who have certain standards and ideals to uphold, but the game manages to inject a lot of compelling nuance into the decisions while still keeping them within the realm of what would be thematically appropriate. For example, will you follow the chain of command, or do what you believe is right; will you be loyal to the captain, or to the ship and its crew; will you prioritize the success of the mission, or the safety of the crew; will you uphold Starfleet's ideals at your own expense, or embrace a more pragmatic solution; will you be completely diplomatic or speak the honest truth; will you trust in your friends or exercise caution when push comes to shove? These are interesting choices because there's rarely a true "right" or "wrong" answer, and so your decisions are largely about shaping the personality of each character while trying to hone in on the center of your own moral compass. As the character wearing a red command shirt with three solid rank pips on it, Rydek will naturally be placed in more of these difficult situations where you have more to consider than just your own personal feelings, which makes a lot of her decisions genuinely compelling and in some cases incredibly tense, whereas Diaz wearing a yellow operations shirt and a non-commissioned rank insignia will have a little more freedom to express his mind given than he's in less of an authority position, which can be interesting as well to be more casual around your fellow lower deckers, or else to face certain challenges on a more personal level without the extra burden of diplomacy.

Where the game falters a bit in this department is that a few decisions seem like they're forcing characters or situations into extreme opposition just for the sake of creating drama where there probably shouldn't be any. For instance, at one point in the game you have to choose one of the senior staff to promote, and whomever you don't choose will throw a temper tantrum in extreme disrespect to authority, almost to the point of straight up insubordination. I understand being disappointed and maybe even expressing your disapproval, but really, that kind of behavior is something I would expect from someone on the First Shap of Chula, not from a senior bridge officer. Then later you're presented with a few choices that fly in blatant defiance of the Starfleet way where the second choice really shouldn't even be an option, and yet the game really seems to be straining itself to make it seem justifiable just for the sake of giving you Choices and Consequences™, with a few characters who really shouldn't be in Starfleet at all if they're going to advocate for those drastic measures so passionately, to the point that they threaten to resign their post if you don't do what they want.

Meanwhile, the character reactions don't always make the most sense, where the pop-up summaries may claim that so-and-so will never forgive you for something, and then in the very next scene they're forgiving you for it, or they might give a description that sounds very positive but accompany it with a neutral alignment shift. I also found two instances where they spoil plot details by subtly revealing information that neither you as a player nor character should be aware of, which is a little disappointing. In a way, I actually kind of wish the game wouldn't give you such obvious notifications and summaries for these things, since it kind of encourages you to make decisions based on how other people will react as opposed to just what's right for any given situation, so I'm not overly thrilled about the way these alignment shifts implicitly "gameify" interesting narrative decisions. I was more than happy to make a few decisions that I knew other people wouldn't like just because I knew it was the right thing to do, but it did feel somewhat wrong to be supposedly "punished" for it. But of course, that system is the primary way the game communicates anything that's going on underneath the Hood, so to speak; without those popups and summaries, you might not realize half of what the game is doing, and thus the facade that is the Illusion of Choice might start to crack. So it is somewhat necessary for maintaining that illusion.

But the single biggest failing of the choice system is that there's no option for you to pursue a romantic relationship between Jara and Tylas. You get the choice to romance security officer Miranda Maris when playing as Carter, but that's not a very satisfying relationship since it's based on a prior history those two have together, so it's kind of hard to have any feelings for her yourself when you've barely met her and she's coming onto you asking if you want to try taking your friendship to the next level. Jara and Tylas, on the other hand, meet for the first time on Hotari Prime and so the player is along for the same emotional journey as those two characters, who go through some pretty harrowing adventures and wind up developing such a strong chemistry together, while speaking to and looking at each other with a lot of tender affection as if they both might be developing feelings for each other -- and yet there's never any opportunity to consummate those possible romantic feelings. I get that a proper relationship probably wouldn't be suitable for these two, but even just giving us the choice for a kiss or even a simple hug when they're saying goodbye would go a long way to satisfy the obvious romantic tension while still leaving things open for both characters. I mean seriously, is it too much to ask that I get a little bit of gay inter-species space-alien romance in my science fiction?

If I have one major criticism with the story, it's that the ending leaves a little something to be desired. It's hard to get into it without spoiling anything, so the spoiler-free summary of this point is that the game establishes a couple seemingly important plot threads early on and then kind of abandons them halfway through, while also leaving some major outcomes completely unresolved at the very end despite numerous characters repeatedly speculating about what might come of them. It therefore feels like there are multiple un-fired Chekov's guns, which is pretty unfulfilling and begs the question of why set up some of these plot details if you're not going to follow through with them? I also feel like there could've been a stronger Message or Moral to everything, since the ultimate lessons we're left with at the end are just basic platitudes that weren't really represented in the story and thus aren't really earned. And then it does feel cliche for the story to ramp up into a situation where the entire Federation is at stake, if not the entire galaxy, when a little smaller scope might've been better suited for this story. So the ending I feel didn't quite stick the landing, but it's by no means a deal-breaker because the story is still extremely engaging up until that point and the finale still delivers a fairly satisfying conclusion -- it's just that in retrospect, you might notice some things and wonder if it couldn't have been handled better, which does tarnish things a little bit in my book.

Finally, I have to note that the game does have some technical issues. Again, nothing really game-breaking in my opinion or my experience, but enough to affect the overall quality of the game. The graphics are obviously well behind what you would expect from a game released in 2023, but frankly I'm okay with that given that it's more of a low-budget indie game. I actually think they look perfectly fine for the most part. I especially like all of the character models, and think the facial animations are realistic enough most of the time to convey the emotional depth of the story appropriately. Sure, some of the animations are a bit weird (like who walks with their elbows out that far), the lighting is often pretty flat, textures don't always look great, and there's often some weird glitching going on in the background, but I don't care about graphics much personally, and I don't think they detract from the story in any way.

The bigger issue has more to do with the relatively high system requirements for a game that looks much older than it is, with such poor performance. Framerates can fluctuate wildly depending on what's happening in the scene, with one location in particular tanking it all the way down to single digits. I was able to get through the game with a computer that's somewhere between minimum and recommended, but it really seems like it should be optimized a lot better than it actually is. Apparently the game didn't even have graphics settings when it first launched, while also being capped at 1080p max, but these have since been rectified with updates, however I'm not sure how much of an impact they really have on performance. I tried playing on the Steam Deck, but found that it was too sketchy to play on high settings, but then found hair and carpet textures glitching out all weird on lower settings, so I had to resign myself to playing the whole thing on my desktop. Either way, the framerate is still capped at 30 by default, and there's still no support for non-standard aspect ratios. Although on this point, I can surmise that may have a purpose because they apparently designed a lot of the scenes with a specific viewing frame in mind, since adjusting the FOV to be a little wider for my playthroughs wound up showing a lot of weird stuff happening around the edges of the screen that you ordinarily wouldn't see, so that may be why they don't allow for ultra wide screen resolutions, for example. And considering this is such a cinematic experience, I think it's fair to respect the artists' vision by playing in the intended frame.

The controls are a little awkward, with mouse navigation feeling loose and floaty in a lot of the mini-games and quick-time-events, with variable sensitivity that can make it feel like you're dragging the cursor through molasses in some instances, so it doesn't always feel very natural, but you do get used to it. The game does support simultaneous input, however, so you can switch back and forth between a controller and mouse-and-keyboard fairly seamlessly, although there are a few weird differences. The controller, for example, gives you no ability to fly straight up or down when piloting the shuttle, apart from looking up or down and ascending or descending at an angle, and it doesn't allow you to look around to set your aim during cover-shooting before you pop up to fire, since it always resets back to center, whereas keyboard-and-mouse give you dedicated buttons to control vertical flight in a shuttle and allow you to freely move the camera from behind cover. But then you can't use WASD or the mouse to navigate to other tutorial windows -- you have to use the arrow keys, which extremely bizarre. And you cannot remap any of the controls, so you're stuck with the default layouts for everything.

Then we've got the checkpoint-only save system, which is hard to know exactly when you'll be able to stop playing the game safely without having to replay an entire chapter, especially since the auto-save notification is just a tiny icon that flashes for a brief moment in the corner of the screen, which can be easy to miss if you aren't specifically looking for it at that moment. You also can't skip cutscenes or dialogue to rapidly catch back up to where you were if something happens and you need to reset the game, although you can at least pause cutscenes at any time. And then there's a "Choices" window on the menu that I guess at one point allowed you to do a deep-dive into your various choices, which I presume would track decision points and their outcomes more directly, or compare your choices against other players or something, but as of January 2025 this function on the website has been down, and seemingly has been for months, and so I've had no opportunity to play around with this feature. I'm pretty sure at least two of the Steam Achievements are bugged as well, since I definitely accomplished both of them on my first playthrough and never got the credit for it. Having read forum posts and watched another person's playthrough from 2023, it would also seem that there used to be a much higher prevalence of random glitches, but I never experienced anything even remotely serious in my playthrough.

These technical issues I would guess are a good part of the reason that Resurgence had such mixed reviews when it first launched. Many of them don't matter to me personally and thus they don't affect my enjoyment of the game, but the issues and limitations still exist. Of course, the game has had a few rounds up updates since those initial reviews so things have gotten better than they were originally, in which case those early review scores aren't necessarily representative of the current product. And with the price having dropped from its original $40 at launch to a more reasonable $25 base price, now, the issues are easier to forgive at that price point, especially if you're getting it on sale for $15 or whatever.

Musically, I find Resurgence to be something of a mixed bag. There are times when it does a really great job of channeling that classic Star Trek energy and making it feel like a grand space epic, and I really like the title theme music that plays over the intro. Other tracks are pretty good in their own right for setting a unique and interesting sort of mood, but then other tracks feel odd and out of place, or else are kind of generic and forgettable. Most of it is at least "fine" and effective for what it needs to be, but it just rarely left a positive impression on me. The ending in particular I felt was really begging for some kind of officially licensed Star Trek music to really tie Resurgence into the whole franchise, whether by playing an established song or else just by quoting something familiar. I mean, Rydek even starts giving the iconic "Space: The Final Frontier" line before going into her final speech, which would've been a great moment to put that spacey prelude from The Original Series under it, or when the ship goes to warp at the very end, that would've been a great moment to play the Enterprise theme music. No not the show theme, the ship theme, like from the movies and the TNG credits. Yeah, that one. See, something like that would've ended the game on a more exciting climax that would've really validated this as a true piece of Star Trek canon. Considering that they had the official Star Trek license and so much of the game feels so faithful to the franchise aesthetic, it's so weird to me that they seemed to be consciously AVOIDING using any official music, to the point that it sometimes feels like just straight up "off brand Star Trek."

Overall, I really enjoyed Star Trek: Resurgence. It has its issues and shortcomings, of course, but the story is strong enough to carry it through any rough spots, and it's one of the most faithful adaptations of the Star Trek license that I've ever seen. In fact, this is easily my second-favorite piece of official Star Trek content to come out since the end of the "Golden Era" in 2005 when Enterprise went off the air. Lower Decks takes the top spot for me, with Resurgence and Strange New Worlds vying for that second spot. So that's high praise for this game if it's competing with and beating actual Star Trek shows in overall enjoyability. I for one grew really attached to some of these characters and this setting, and felt some bittersweet emptiness inside once the game was over and there was no more left to experience, because it was just such a rare gaming experience where I was genuinely happy the whole time. I would love to see a sequel with Rydek and company going on another adventure together, but unfortunately I'm not sure the game sold well enough that we'll ever see one, and frankly I'm not sure how they'd really handle a sequel at all given how many different variables can change in the story, short of just giving Rydek an all-new crew or retconning half of the choices from this game to set up a sequel. But I would love for the opportunity to play another game like this, and may even come back to this one years down the line just to experience it all over again. So Resurgence is an easy recommendation from me if you're a fan of Star Trek and like story-driven games, and if you're not really a fan of Star Trek but still like the idea of an optimistic sci-fi adventure story, then I'd heartily recommend checking out the free demo to see if it's something you might enjoy.