Star Trek: Voyager - Across The Unknown Review (Switch 2)

Following a handful of Star Trek games on Switch over the last few years, a couple of which have been rather good, Switch 2 now has its own entry in the Trek library courtesy of German devs GameXcite, and this is probably the best one yet - IF (big if) you've got the stones for a long, arduous journey.

It's worth emphasising up front that Star Trek: Voyager - Across The Unknown is punishing. If you want to explore strange new worlds stress-free, best warp on by; expect compromises, tough decisions, and permanent losses if you're to get Janeway and co. back to the Alpha Quadrant. Even on the lowest difficulty, you will have to restart a sector or two.

Survival strategy and resource management dovetail nicely with Voyager's plight, though: a Starfleet ship yanked across the galaxy, systems destroyed, crew in disarray, making their way homeward, repairing, researching, improvising as they go. You travel through 12 sectors, each with a handful of systems containing planets and points of interest to scan and warp between, collecting Deuterium (warp drive and system fuel), Duranium and Tritanium (for construction and crafting), food (for...well, you get the idea), and other resources as you meet aliens and try to cut a potential 70-year trek down by hook or by crook.

There are lingering Borg, Kazon, Vidiians, and assorted Delta Quadrant baddies to battle, ne'er-do-wells arriving at the perfect time to knock you down when you're just about on your feet. The devs do a decent job with pacing and balancing, ratcheting up the tension with nebulas that prevent you from scanning POIs, ambushes at trading posts, and a plunging Morale stat exacerbated by food and facility shortages.

Gameplay-wise, Across the Unknown blends FTL-style ship and numbers management with a Fallout Shelter-style side-on view of Voyager's decks. Senior officers and assorted 'Heroes' can be assigned to specific rooms, and you level them up on Away Missions. B'Elanna's engineering nous cuts crafting time down in the Workshop, for instance, and she's a dab hand with the warp core, naturally.

Once Life Support is restored on each deck, you clear debris to build new rooms dedicated to Engineering, Crew, Science, Combat, or (later) Borg-related operations. There's a tech tree for each, with nodes unlocked via Science Points and Lab research tied to cycles. The whole game runs on cycles, with every action tied to a specific number, and you'll need to ensure your crew isn't idling when they could be doing something productive like repairing the hull. The more rooms you have, the more energy they draw, so in a wider sense, upgrading your warp core and improving efficiency is the name of the survival game.

Story-wise, the framework follows the show's seven seasons closely, although specific scenarios can diverge from their canon conclusions depending on your choices. Some events may never happen if you don’t meet the criteria or make a detour. When arriving at a certain M-class planet, Tuvok was busy on another assignment and not part of my active crew. So, Neelix beamed down alone, returned to the ship without incident, and we went on our merry way, the Tuvix mission ‘complete’ without any ethical debates whatsoever. Later on, I lost my Vulcan security chief (my most levelled-up away teamer) in a black hole fighting the Hirogen. You win some, you lose some — or lots — in this game.

I played on the default 'Survival' difficulty ('Adventure' is easier, 'Years of Hell' harder), but you're locked in once you start one of the three available profiles. Death was frequent, although a fairly generous autosave stops things getting too grindy. You can autosave yourself into an impossible spot, though, in which case you can restart an entire sector.

And you will have to restart. A morale crisis in Sector 8 proved particularly tricky as I juggled the crew’s restlessness with the need to stock up on essentials; I had to prioritise defence over diversion.

Another time, having prevailed in an epic confrontation with the Borg, I was left with a damaged deflector dish and a hull stat so low I could barely move. I managed to limp across the system, juggling repair teams between the hull and a dozen damaged rooms, my structural integrity stat creeping up +1 per cycle until I could finally reengage the deflector and make it to a Deuterium deposit without blowing up. Restocked, I spent a couple of dozen cycles putting out fires before gingerly pressing on.

Combat presents its own challenges, including positioning the ship via orders that dictate Voyager's movements and target. Aft shields down, Captain! Click on the radial option and Tom Paris will turn the ship, moving the vulnerable stern out of enemy range. Strategically targeting your opponent's individual systems is key, and you can also hire allied ships to assist with skirmishes.

Up to three Hero officers bring specific skills with cooldowns, too, with system power balanced via a bar arrangement on the bottom left. Oh, and once you've crafted them, you'll have a complement of precious photon torpedoes to fire manually with 'ZL'. It's satisfying to pop them off, but you'll need to wait until enemy shields are down for maximum effectiveness.

Ship-to-ship battles are enjoyable once you've worked it all out. The tutorial is fairly comprehensive, although it wasn't until two-thirds through the game that I discovered, through sheer desperation at my predicament (hull disintegrating, torpedoes depleted, my phaser-firing Mr. Tuvok lost in the void), that fleeing or even surrender can be a viable option. I assumed I would lose my entire crew or something comparably calamitous, but many opponents are scavengers and often satisfied with some Deuterium. Surrender isn't heroic, but needs must. Then again, it's not an option with the Borg.

Your Number One problem is always having the materials and cycles necessary to complete tasks before the next disaster strikes, or your crew get shirty. It’s well-balanced, but brutal; one unlucky roll and all the spinning plates come crashing down as miserable, homesick crewmembers pile up in sickbay. I spent a good 10 hours learning the systems with a furrowed brow and getting knocked on my aft repeatedly, watching arrows roving back and forth over coloured meters, praying to the RNG gods that today isn't a good day to die. Which is as it should be.

Across the Unknown is an impressive effort overall, then, although it could do with some polish. Early doors, Tom Paris was away on the Caretaker's array but also somehow sitting at the conn on my bridge. One of my multiple Sector 10 restarts was down to a black-screen bug obscuring my ship, randomly indicating that nearby planets were 2.4 million cycles away, and hard-crashing the console a couple of times. Reloading the same autosave didn't help; a sector reset was my only recourse.

Elsewhere, UI elements are fairly small onscreen, especially when you're learning to parse the icons and numbers, but having more screen space to survey systems — stellar and starship alike — was ultimately more useful. Text was readable on a Switch 2 screen, but your mileage (and eyesight) may vary, and some UI scaling options would have been appreciated. Pleasingly, Deuteranope, Protanope, and Tritanope colour blind accessibility options are present.

Visually, the LCARS stylings capture the show's graphical style well, and Voyager herself looks lovely. Likewise, the systems and interstellar phenomena she passes are rendered nicely, with attractive lighting and details. The green wisps ignited in the ship's wake as you pass through nebulae (à la the show's intro) are a great touch. Character models are very simple, but do the job.

Performance-wise, scanning my centralised cursor across later sectors got a little juddery, especially in handheld, but this isn't the sort of game that requires silky smooth frame rates. Other platforms will handle it better, but it functioned just fine on Switch 2 and this was a great 'plane game'. The lack of Mouse Mode is surprising when it seems such a natural fit. In practice, however, I probably wouldn't have used it. Touchscreen functionality, also missing, might have been more useful, but that wasn't a dealbreaker, either.

Speaking of dealbreakers, if you played the demo and missed Jerry Goldsmith's rousing theme, don't worry - it's present and correct on the main menu and between sectors. Audio logs from Tim Russ (Tuvok) and Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris) give some great flavour, too, and the sound effects in general are spot-on. Overall, making good on the premise, the devs make great use of available resources.

By the time I'd made it home (after 16 years), I had over 20 hours on the in-game clock, although my Switch profile says "30 hours or more". It's a slow-burn game with some frustrations along the way, but I did come away satisfied. Tellingly, with dozens of other games to be playing, I want to dive right back in, knowing there were things I missed, knowing I could do a far better job with a do-over.

Part of the pleasure was down to it functioning almost as a rewatch. I wonder if the narrative threads here would be enough to engage anybody who hasn't watched Voyager, though. Half the fun was being reminded of plot points and characters, roleplaying as Janeway, and stepping — or being pushed — off the canon path into uncharted territory. Recognising characters and deceptions was a thrill that will be lost on non-fans. Same old story for a Trek game, perhaps.