Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown Review

Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown Review was a bit of a surprise launch. The Trek has taken on a few forms in recent years, without much video game attention, so to have a release focused on a series that debuted in 1995, rather than a flagship modern title, is an interesting choice – but one I’m here for. Star Trek: Voyager got me through uni, watching reruns on the Sci-fi Channel at 2:00pm every weekday between assignments and study. It might not live in pop culture as much as The Next Generation. Or. The. William. Shatner. Helmed. Original Series! But if you’re partial to Captain Janeway and looking for a roguelite that scratches the Trek itch, I can’t recommend this game enough.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first. The setting of Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown mirrors the television series. The eponymous starship Voyager is flung far from home into the Delta Quadrant, and the crew is faced with a 75-year journey back to the Alpha Quadrant (where Earth is). 

It’s the perfect setting for a spacefaring roguelite, as the player is tasked with exploring this unfamiliar area of space, looking for food, fuel, and ways to shorten the trip home. As you learn the ropes, quests take you through plots from the TV show, with outcomes differing depending on your choices. 

Peak Trek ship design IMO

Outcomes have a DnD style dice roll feel to them. You can better your odds by having researched or stumbled across certain tech, but sometimes I was left floored that a 75% likely outcome failed and left me with a dead cast member. And staples from the show will die if you mess up badly enough, which ramps up the difficulty of an already challenging enough game. 

Each ‘episode’ progresses the game as you progress through procedurally generated sectors on your way home. If only getting home were as easy as going from mission to mission. There’s a lot of resource management to do, with the most common pressures being crew morale and fuel consumption (a 2026 vibe). Resource gathering plays out like a mini decision tree, with technology you’ve unlocked increasing your odds of a positive outcome. And you really do want to increase your positive chances as much as you can, as negative outcomes end up with dead crew members or result in enemy ambushes. After a few hours, you’ll notice that the scenarios do repeat themselves, which is a shame, and you’ll most likely end up skipping over the text, but the flavour of Trek still comes through in the fundamentals of the risk-reward mechanics. 

The gameplay loop is mostly bouncing from system to system, making sure your resource metres are balanced enough not to explode. To help you out, you can place your crew in certain sections on the ship for buffs, such as reduced sickbay times, increased engine repair time, higher morale from meals, and stronger weapons or shields. There are some base building aspects as you plan the layout of your ship and build new capabilities. These rooms can be used to gather rare resources or impact your meters. At times, there’s an overwhelming amount of variables to monitor, and the game doesn’t always do a great job at showing you how to manage them. But vibing it based on what was most broken and needed attention kind of adds to the experience. At its best, I found my time in the Delta Quadrant to be relaxing, and worst, I watched my ship explode on repeat because of a cascading series of failures that I couldn’t recover from.

One sun not enough for you?

Fortunately, the option is there to restart a section, so you don’t lose hours and hours of gameplay for your run if shit truly hits the fan.

On top of managing your ship and finding resources, you also have away missions and combat. Away missions are like a choose-your-own-adventure, with the heroes you select giving you different options and odds based on their strengths. If you roll badly, you better believe they can die. And ship combat similarly has heroes to choose from for buffs. Both make you feel like a captain, choosing the least shitty outcome for your crew. The ship combat could use a little polish when it comes to visuals and UI, but the raw experience is so strong I found I was overlooking what I would consider graver faults in a different game. Chalk it up to rose-tinted life-long Trek fan glasses, but honestly, I don’t know who else would be playing this game. 

The main downsides of Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown would all be navigable with more time in the oven. Voice acting from Tim Russ and Robert Duncan McNeill (reprising their roles from the show) break up the text-heavy gameplay, but they both feel a little rushed and deliver an inconsistent experience. I genuinely jumped out of my skin each time Tuvok started talking to me after hours of vibing in silence in my own galaxy. Similarly, the graphics aren’t a shining example of what the PS5 can do. The character models are blocky and as expressive as a Vulcan.

But really, this is nitpicking and not a deterrent. If you’re invested enough in Star Trek Voyager to want to put the 20-30 hours into a run that retreads familiar ground while keeping it exciting, you’re going to adore this game. It’s a love letter to fans, and it does everything that a fan would want.

A rousing speech doesn’t always cut it

Final Thoughts

If you’re a fan of Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown is pretty much the best case videogame. It takes a well-defined game genre and applies it to a setting that fits perfectly into the mould. I’m hoping it does well enough to give us more bets with the IP like this that pay off. While it could use a little more refining in certain aspects, the package and experience are so compelling that it’s more than enough to keep you hooked for a 20-30 hour run. 

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by the publisher.

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