Star Trek Legends
Star Trek Legends is an action-adventure RPG developed by Emerald City Games and published by Tilting Point. It was released on PC on September 2, 2024, and will be released on gaming consoles on Christmas Day, 2024.
You are the Captain of the U.S.S. Artemis and are tasked with heading into the nexus that first appeared in Star Trek Generations. The Artemis has been specifically designed to travel into the Nexus. The Artemis crew is tasked with rescuing those lost in the Nexus, but once inside your crew disappears. You begin to assemble and rescue a crew of Star Trek’s famous and favorite characters to assist you while you navigate the Nexus and encounter enemies to defeat and overcome to rescue those trapped.
To accomplish your mission, you will travel from place to place encountering the different species and races that have been seen in the Star Trek universe. The game is more of a turn-style RPG where you attack your enemies, complete the tasks, and level up your characters. Once you collect certain items, they can be used for different things, from rescuing more crew members to join in your fight, or to upgrade your officers and crew to level them up as you continue your way into the Nexus.
The game itself feels like a mobile game in graphics and story and it is. The game was released as an Apple Arcade game on April 2, 2021, and while I am not personally familiar with the type of game, it reminds me of all the mobile-style games that you see every YouTuber telling you to download and play for free if you follow their link to get some bonuses. This makes the game feel not very innovative, it’s Raid: Shadow Legends, but with a Star Trek veneer and a cost of $19.99 instead of the free with microtransactions such as the before mentioned Raid.
The gameplay is very simple and I’m sure that using a controller makes selecting things a lot easier than, using your touchscreen on a phone, or using a keyboard as this was also released via Steam and once you get used to this game’s particular user interface, to select you will be good to go. Now, while simple another aspect of the gameplay and this one bothered me, unlike most RPGs I used to play growing up such as Chrono Trigger or even the Legend of Zelda, I didn’t find a way to heal my away team in between battle sessions. I don’t know if this is just a user error on my part or not something that is in the game, but it made it difficult to progress through the different combat sections without healing in between as an option. Something else that bothered me while playing was the choice system, now I am new to the mobile RPG and while I am not an RPG aficionado, I thought not being able to choose a certain path due to lack of skill was annoying, I get it is probably to add replayability (side note: This annoyed me in Robocop: Rogue City as well), but since the game is just a repetitive fight… upgrade… fight… I find the whole thing repetitive and boring.
The story aspect I don’t have any problems with and while I enjoy the Nexus being used as a device to allow the different timelines throughout Star Trek to merge for one epic story, I still find the game incredibly boring and it isn’t the story, it’s just the repetitiveness that drags the game down for me.
In conclusion, I don’t recommend this game, while I loved seeing the Star Trek characters interact with each other. McCoy, Burnham, and Worf at the beginning, and then, those characters interacting with Gul Dukat and then Sela was cool, but the game was a little boring and unless you are a massive fan of these styles of games, I can’t recommend it to you. Maybe, I’m being too harsh as a Trekkie, but again the repetitiveness just gets to me. I also, don’t think it’s worth the $19.99 retail or the $15.99 pre-order price as seen in the Xbox store when I downloaded it to play.
