Review: STAR TREK: RESURGENCE has a great story weighed down by an imperfect presentation

Recently, developer Dramatic Labs and publisher Bruner House released Star Trek: Rebirth. This is a narrative adventure game that plays as you choose your own adventure story with interactive add-ons. The game is available to play now on PC (Epic Games Store), PS4 (PS5 due to backwards compatibility), and Xbox consoles (Affiliate Link) for around $40. Dramatic Labs was kind enough to send me a copy. Star Trek: Rebirth onto Xbox for review, but thoughts below are my own.

Star Trek: Resurgence is a narrative adventure game with dialogue choices, relationship building, and exploration. In addition to the dialogue-driven RPG and branching storylines, you’ll also engage in the Star Trek universe in a variety of other gameplay styles, including shuttle piloting, phaser combat, tricorder scanning , stealth and micro-game mechanics.

I’ll start with what I think is the best praise any licensed game can receive: Star Trek: Rebirth made me want to go and see Star Trek. If a licensed game can make you want to try more of that franchise, it’s done a good job in my opinion. The game takes place about 16 years after Will Riker met the Tkons in Star Trek: The Next Generation (“The Last Outpost”) and the Tkon Empire plays an important role. It just seemed like a story to watch The next generation in my opinion though it was stretched to about 9 hours. Congratulations to the team.

I think writing for Star Trek: Rebirth it’s good and the ideas are solid. The ways the team wants you to interact with the world around you work really well for the most part. The way you can seamlessly switch between two characters in each chapter is flawless at times and never a problem. The music and sounds were also great to listen to and full of Star Trek energy and vibes you would have hoped for. That said, there are some issues with the game.

First, a good chunk of the game looks great, but there were some areas of animation and graphical issues that were less than stellar. First, there were random graphical glitches for me where characters would appear for less than a second where they shouldn’t or it would just glitch randomly. Secondly, a fair amount of the walking animations felt very stiff and awkward. Thirdly, some of the faces, especially humans and adjacent human species, looked mediocre. Fourth, some of the visual cues didn’t appear to be completed. There was a section where I had to use my tricorder to scan things and it usually uses a contrast color to indicate the anomaly, but there were a few times where the contrast color didn’t appear adjusted properly which made me literally scouring the space and trying to scan every inch of the area until I succeeded. Lastly, the speaking animations were out of sync with the audio, which was distracting. This game is very much like a visual novel with the dialogue being a huge part of the game and having offline audio and video components can take you out of the experience.

Another problem I had with Star Trek: Rebirth was that some of the gameplay elements weren’t quite polished. One area that confused me was that some of the on-screen button icons didn’t look consistent. Sometimes you were shown a circle and asked to use the right trigger, other times it was more of a trapezoid that looked like a controller trigger, etc. This led to a few times where I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted it to do at the time. To make matters worse, there was a moment when I was playing near the end where I literally couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do with the controls and I tried it several times before telling the game to try again in story mode because tried nothing worked. I had to do this another time or two as well because the controls work for the most part, but feel a little clunky and clunky at times, particularly when trying to firefight with your phaser.

An issue with accessibility that I’ve noticed in The rebirth of Star Trek was that the subtitles didn’t always work. I would play with subs on and then there would just be random stretches where there was no subs. Also, the subtitles were sometimes different from what was being said, like the voice actors reading a line differently than it was in the script and never updating the script for the subtitles causing a little disconnect. Also, in some cases you are asked to choose dialogue options a little too early. These are timed events, but sometimes the characters speak for another 2-3 lines after they appear, which means you need to take the time to make sure you get the full context before making a choice.

That’s all my negativity for the game. I really liked how if you fail in one section the game would give you the option to try again in story mode and it would be for that section only. If an area gives you trouble, play it in story mode and then the next section will no longer be in story mode. That said, I don’t recall seeing any option to turn on Story Mode if you really want to go through things.

At the end of the day, Star Trek: Rebirth is a fun Star Trek game that I enjoyed. The $40 price tag makes it more affordable, but there are still a few issues that could be fixed. It gives me the urge to go back and look Star Trek in a good way and the story is well done. If you are great Star Trek fans, I’d recommend it, but keep in mind it’s not perfect.