Star Trek: Legends Review (Switch eShop)

As a mischievous omnipotent being once said, Star Trek isn't about mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence. The voyages of the starships Enterprise et al. are journeys of self-discovery. It's about the people we meet on those strange new worlds and what they teach us about ourselves. It's not about taking turns to phaser each other in the face. Despite issues elsewhere, that's where Star Trek: Legends really fails.

It's not all bad, though. Emerald City Games' turn-based trawl, published here by Qubic Games, debuted on Apple Arcade back in 2021 and though some may baulk at its mobile-first design, it translates fairly well to Switch. The UI is well-proportioned and the touchscreen integration functions as you'd hope.

A grand total of 95 characters from across the franchise are represented, from vintage Trek to the latest live-action shows (nobody from Prodigy or Lower Decks, though). In fact, with so many characters lovingly rendered, some of them in multiple forms, it's the missing ones that stand out. The major captains are present, except Archer - we need 100% more Bakula up in here. And where's Ensign Crusher when you need someone to take the helm? Several fan favourites are locked in DLC packs, too.

Props to Emerald City's artists for capturing the actors' and characters' essence in their animations and movesets, though. Mr. Data's idle animation has him examining his tricorder, and seeing him disintegrate some poor enemy before emotionlessly resuming his work made us grin. The Fortnite-style caricatures might be divisive, but real effort has gone into these renderings. The basic mobile structure — with timers, currencies, daily tasks, resource harvesting, numbers going up — is extremely familiar, especially to anyone who's played Tilting Point's Star Trek Timelines, but the animated characters add personality beyond static card collection. Assigning them stations on the idle main menu's bridge is a nice touch and gives minor stat boosts, too.

There's no getting away from those mobile elements, though, even if microtransactions are pleasingly absent. The story uses the Nexus (the temporal time-juggling energy ribbon from Star Trek: Generations) to explain away the accumulation of Starfleet heroes from across time, plus the 'shadow' versions you encounter. Michael Burnham, Worf, and Leonard McCoy find themselves aboard the USS Artemis assembling a crew to battle an unknown enemy and save the day. Those three officers stick with you through the narrative, driving things forward with dialogue whether they're still in your growing away team or not.

Fans may get a smile from the fairly entertaining writing and the story's themes are sufficiently existential and weighty. Given the endless parade of clones you'll encounter, however, you'll find it hard to care about your Beverly Crusher or Will Riker much more than the one you just vaporised. There's no voice acting beyond a handful of battle yelps and comments, and nothing from the original actors. Audio across the board is acceptable, but you'll be disappointed if you're expecting familiar themes and sound effects.

Likewise, the battles themselves — the meat and potatoes here — don't do enough to engage you early on. Your team of up to four (which can include non-Starfleet characters and generic officers) spawn into the environment and face off against opponents by taking turns to blast or bosh each other in the typical tactical manner. Shields or other natural cover may spawn at the start of the round and levelling up your officers eventually unlocks and enhances their four bespoke moves.

Most characters have a standard phaser attack plus cooldown moves related to their discipline (Command, Engineering, Science, etc.) or character. Data's Android Backhand has a chance to inflict Stun, preventing enemies from initiating any action. Alternatively, Soong's finest can reduce the opposing side's Attack and Morale stats by distracting them with a Logical Paradox. Picard's eponymous Maneuver buffs your entire team, Bones' Tri-Ox Hypospray boosts one ally's Morale, increasing the chance they'll jump in with an extra hit every turn, and so on.

It's simple stuff and it's executed well enough — the blasts and blows hit with gusto — but it's extremely one-note. As you go through the motions, skipping from node to node and beaming down for each round, the absurdity of these characters calmly and patiently exchanging phaser beams to the chest is tough to ignore when the battles, especially early on, just aren't varied or interesting enough.

The moment Commander Riker joined our team, our winning tactics for the rest of the game were set: immediately boost him with Bones' hypospray, lay down Covering Fire with Riker (a super effective, multi-target attack which takes out all shields and multiple enemies), and then pick away at the rest of them, healing as necessary until the battle is won. Rank-up, rinse, repeat.

You could argue it's on us to switch in new characters and build them up, but when a strategy just works there's little incentive to change; by the time you unlock Advanced or Expert difficulties, your enthusiasm will have warped away. Occasional branching paths are locked behind character disciplines (eg. you'll need an appropriately levelled engineer to open a door or something), but it's not enough to be worth the grind, especially given the long load times.

Generally, loads between individual battles aren't too bad inside story missions. But going into missions from the main menu, returning to the main menu, firing up Arena (ranked matches with rewards) or Ops encounters (limited-time events with specific character unlocks) sends you to a loading screen you'll be seeing an awful lot.

Going into the first mission to test at the time of writing, the initial load is 26 seconds, and the same again when we back out to the main menu. Add in smaller interstitial loading screens between menus and all the tooltips and Darmok gags in the galaxy can't stop interminable loads from dragging down the entire enterprise. Our Switch profile puts our play time at "30 hours or more" and that's with x4 animation speed turned on for most of it; we'd estimate a quarter of that was spent staring at the Artemis' stern on the static load screen.

Performance-wise, the v1.1.1 launch day patch seemed to soften the presentation of the backgrounds significantly, yet with no real change to the load times. We didn't note any difference between docked and handheld performance, though we experienced several hard crashes, including upon completing the final mission in the game. Frequent autosaves meant not having to replay more than a single battle, but suboptimal is the word.

Despite the evident work that's gone into this, the repetitiveness and excruciating loads give you too much time to dwell on the soulessness of the framework here. You could plug any property into this template with more or less the same result, or you could switch out characters for starship strategy, but ultimately it would be the same unengaging war of attrition - and with less personality. For your 12 bucks or regional equivalent, you get loads of characters to unlock, at least. Paying roughly the same again will get you all the DLC ones, but you'll still be pulling the majority of your crew randomly via the in-game gacha mechanic. The journey to build a complete crew is exhausting.

Maybe we expect too much. The co-op puzzle-solving mechanics of Star Trek Prodigy - Supernova were equally tried-and-true — unremarkable, even — but they felt like a better fit for Trek. Tessera Studios was able to tap into the core values of the series in a way that just isn't possible given the template here; Legends' battles simply aren't satisfying enough to distract you from the dissonance.