Red Alert! There is a new Star Trek game out there. Star Trek Infinite from Paradox. Will this be a direct hit? Or will you end up feeling like you just squeegied the holodeck after Riker’s bachelor party? Break out the red shirts and reverse the polarity, we are warping out as soon as I figure out where Ensign Kubic hid the Jameson.

Developer: Nimble Giant Entertainment

Publisher: Paradox Interactive

Platform: Mac OS, Windows (reviewed)

Release date: October 12th 2023 (Steam)

Price: $29.99

Franchises are hard; developers end up trying to please several masters, fans, sponsors, and the folks upstairs in the boardroom all have their own expectations. There are also a fair number of writers on the loose that really should not work with established IP. They feel constrained by the franchise and want to take it in their own direction. This is on top of more mundane constraints like licensing. One might have the license to one show from a franchise but not to material from others that the fans expect. Likewise, there are parts of many franchises that the fans do not like and would prefer to ignore. Franchises can bring big numbers, but make a wrong move and you could find yourself in conflict with your customers. As anyone who does not work for Disney can tell you, this is bad on toast.

In this case, Paradox decided to take an existing game, rework it a bit and slap “Star Trek” on the side. Therefore, to understand this game, we need to look at another Paradox grand strategy game, Stelaris, which has been out and under constant development since its release in 2016. In Stelaris you control a configurable empire in a quest for galactic supremacy. This matches reasonably well with the Star Trek concept. What Trek fan would not want to run the Klingon Empire or the Federation? Sadly, this is as far as anyone at Paradox took the concept. To add insult to injury, there are mods out there that do this better.

Anyway, you know the drill. The Federation, Romulans, Klingons and Kardashians (sorry) are playable factions, there are familiar Trek events, and tropes like the Crystalline entity, the Khitomer Massacre, and the never-ending mission to get Wesley Crusher to shut the hell up. The problem is that as we saw with 1999’s Birth of the Federation, Star Trek does not really translate as well as you might think into a 4x strategy game. The presumed Good Guys, the Federation, are just not any fun. They are an inflexible, stagnant, sloganeering empire that makes it difficult to do things your way. The Federation player is almost forced to follow Federation dogma and the whole thing feels vaguely Soviet. The Klingons, Cardassians and Romulans do this to a lesser degree but are a tad more playable because they punish deviation from the script a bit more lightly. The Feds are just boring, preachy, and patronizing, to the point of including present day political slogans. If you want to play any other factions, apart from the big four, you are out of luck. This is understandable as it would deviate sharply from the established story, but the game would be a lot more fun if you had the option to play as one of the lesser powers or even the in-universe big bad guys, The Borg.

The Borg are back and you’re gonna be in trouble…

Another point of contention is the ship design process. I was hoping for a comprehensive system to geek out with and build starships of my own design. Sadly, you can only build ships from the franchise and not all of them by any means. As you grow in technology, they get better and yes, the later ships are better than the earlier ones, but it's not very flexable and if you are a Trekker™ geeking out over the ships is a big part of necessary fan service.

It's not beyond redemption, though. Paradox often keeps updating and tweaking their games, so it's possible we will see some updates that give us the best of both worlds. My recommendation is to look seriously at the shipyards and let players do their own ships, right down to the cosmetic level. I to dream up my own ships to match my play style. Let’s see my Diphtheria class cruiser will be painted black and yellow like a bee, have four engines and the computer will automatically fire on any content from Star Trek Discovery (STD) that comes into range. I also suggest a new mode, call it “sandbox” mode where you can play as any species from a standing start. I would love to play the Borg and come sweeping in from the Delta Quadrant or take over the galaxy as Gar-baj, the dread Grand Poobah of the Packled Ideocracy. There are infinite ways to get Wesley to shut up and I want to try them all. The problem with this is Stelaris already dose all that and Paradox might feel this would cannibalize the better established Stelaris audiance.

And that is the long and the short of it. It’s a Star Trek themed version of Stelaris. It gets the tone of the franchise more or less correct but does not bring much to the table besides the cosmetics. Hopefully development and expansion will continue, there’s a good game in here, somewhere, I just wonder if Paradox knows it’s there.

The Good:

Based on the excellent game Stelaris
Credible re-theming

The Bad

Game-play mismatched from story
Restrictive factions
Still no bathrooms in sight
Wesley Crusher

Star Trek Infinite Review (PC)