Star Trek: Resurgence Review (Xbox One)

STAFF REVIEW of Star Trek: Resurgence (Xbox One)

Wednesday, May 31, 2023.
by Adam Dileva

I feel I need to admit first and foremost I’m not a Trekkie by any means. My Star Trek knowledge comes from growing up and watching it during dinner time with the family, and while I know the basics, I couldn’t hold my own if I was to converse with a true fan. That said, I’m a super fan of narrative games, which is why Telltale used to be one of my favorite developers before their messy demise and recent pseudo comeback.

At their peak, they were master storytellers, and I still rank their Season One of The Walking Dead game one of the best narrative games of all time. So when I found out that Star Trek: Resurgence was developed by Dramatic Labs, a new studio but a culmination of over twenty former Telltale writers, designers, artists, developers and producers, I was instantly interested, even if only know some very basic Star Trek knowledge.

With a narrative focus first and foremost, you’ll be making choices that will shape and affect your individual storyline. Not only a dialogue choosing adventure though, will you engage in a variety of different Star Trek activities, like using your Tricorder, Phasers, piloting a shuttle and more. You’ll be engrossed into a unique Star Trek adventure that even non Trekkie’s can enjoy, like myself.

Set within The Next Generation universe, Resurgence has you playing as two different characters, Commander Jara Rydek and Engineer Carter Diaz, usually alternating between the two between chapters. Your main mission is to help solve a dispute between two alien races, the Hotari and the Alydian’s, as a neutral party since the Federation has no authority in their reaches of space. The races have some unique backstories and were quite different from one another, of course putting you right in the middle to try and solve their disputes.

Jara Rydek is the brand new XO on the USS Resolute due to the previous XO passing away. The current Captain, Zachary Solano, had a mission go wrong where a bunch of crew didn’t survive, so now the Resolute is being repaired before they leave on their latest mission. Being the new XO, the ship’s crew have heard about your accolades, but some aren’t pleased with promotions not coming from within, so there’s some initial conflict right away as an outsider. Most interestingly, Jara is a Kobliad, an obscure Star Trek race but requires a regular dose of Deuridium to survive, which of course will play into some decisions later on.

The other protagonist you’ll play is Engineer Carter Diaz, a mechanical genius, both of which are very unique and have fantastic stories. Of course their paths will intertwine in certain ways, but he’s a fantastic secondary character that I was quite fond of. You’ll see some familiar faces and names along the way, of which I’ll only mention what has been shown in trailers and previews. Ambassador Spock plays a large part of your journey and mission, and he looks exactly like the true Spock. Of course your simple mission will not be so easy, unearthing something much larger that will take you on a journey across the galaxy.

Being a narrative heavy adventure, like any good Telltale game, you’ll primarily be making dialogue choices, unsure of the ramifications of said decisions until later. You’ll build relationships with both characters, and while there’s not always a simple ‘good’ or ‘bad’ choice, it’s usually more of a grey area. I always play ‘good’ as I can my first playthrough, but I’m looking forward to playing again with all opposite choices to see the differences. There will also be no shortage of quicktime events where you need to press a designated button on the screen at a specific time to succeed.

One of the coolest choices you get to make early on is what your catchphrase for “Engage” is when getting your mission underway. Some choices are small and won’t affect much overall, but of course other decisions will weigh heavily on not only your journey, but your crew as well. Do you choose to save many crew over a single person? Do you risk your ship to try and save an individual? These are just some of the choices you’ll make without much time to think, you simply need to react. Given that a portion of the developers are formerly from Telltale Games, you can expect many of the same drama and morally grey area decisions.

As you meet and interact with new characters, any which are ‘main’ characters will show within the Pause menu and give a brief description of their current attitude towards you and your last interactions with them. Some will like you, some will hate you, sometimes their feeling will ebb and flow depending if you take their advice or not. Relationships are difficult to upkeep and you can’t always make everyone happy, just like in real life. Do you back Captain Solano because he chose you to be his XO, or not have a blind allegiance and question what went wrong in his previous mission? Not every decision is as trivial as you might first expect, and by the final few chapters you can expect full drama and heartbreaking outcomes. Just because you made someone angry with one decision doesn’t mean you’re always locked into a specific outcome, though maybe some choices will leaving a lasting impression, so it’s difficult to weigh your options in the heat of the moment.

While Resurgence isn’t open world, each scene you get to explore does have some optional objects you can interact with and people, to speak to, though it is primarily a very linear adventure which I honestly prefer. There’s not only an abundance of quicktime events, like holding Left Stick up to move forward in scenes or tapping Right Trigger to grab onto a ledge, but there’s a good amount of minigames and puzzle-like elements along the way as well.

For example, beaming up people in the teleporter requires you to find the right frequency on the computer where you plot a specific course. These aren’t challenging to solve, but certainly add some authenticity to the whole Star Trek experience as you interact with the systems you normally don’t see much detail of on the shows. Using your Tricorder will be common as well, as you’ll need to scan a variety of items in certain situations, seemingly authentic to the source material with the corresponding beeps and boops.

There’s a few times where you’ll be piloting a small passenger vessel in space, getting from one point to another. It’s simple enough, having you avoid asteroids and floating space debris, later adding some additional challenges, though I don’t want to spoil what that could be. There’s a few times where Jara and Carter will have to avoid combat, using stealth to bypass enemies and avoid detection. While this is simple as crouching with pressing the Right Stick and avoiding line of sight, it’s quite basic of a mechanic overall.

Then there’s the phaser combat sections, easily the worst part of the whole experience. There will be times where you’ll have to defend yourself with your phaser, though it’s clear that Resurgence wasn’t designed to be a third person shooter. The controls are loose, aiming is terrible and it’s truly an awful experience. These sections were actually the only times I ‘failed’ a Chapter. Thankfully you can instantly retry, also giving you the option to replay in Story Mode, essentially a No-Fail mode to get passed that particular section instead of having to deal with repeated frustration. It’s not that the combat is hard, but you’ll have to shoot particular enemies before they hit you or your team, but the aiming is just terrible to try and do so.

If you’ve played a narrative Telltale game before, you can expect very similar visuals. Characters are easily distinguishable from one another, you can instantly recognize certain races and it looks decent overall. There are some quirks with weird eyebrow movements and clunky lip syncing, but nothing that really detracted from the overall experience.

Given that Resurgence is a dialogue heavy game, the voice acting had to be on point if it wanted to be believable and be a seamless Star Trek experience. Thankfully Krizia Bajos (Jara) and Josh Keaton (Carter) were up for the task and did a brilliant job doing most of the heavy lifting. The cast overall was fantastic but the two main protagonists really stood out and made the whole mission a believable one, as if it was a long lost episode from TV. The score is done wonderfully as well, as if it was taken straight from the show. Sure there were a few small issues like one section not having random sounds and subtitles not always exactly matching the spoken dialogue perfectly, but that’s the critic in me looking for imperfections, not that it took away from the overall game.

I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical about playing Star Trek: Resurgence given that I’m not much of a Trekkie at all. None of that mattered though, as even though I didn’t know much of the previous context or background lore outside of main concepts and characters, I still quite enjoyed my narrative focused mission with Commander Jara Rydek and Engineer Carter Diaz. While it hasn’t converted me into a full Trekkie, it certainly had me going down a Star Trek wiki rabbit hole, wanting to learn more about certain races, characters and factions. Live long, and prosper.

**Star Trek: Resurgence was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 7.7 / 10
Gameplay: 7.0 / 10
Visuals: 7.0 / 10
Sound: 9.0 / 10

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