Star Trek Legends review

This is the first of potentially many reviews of Apple Arcade games. After picking up a $200 iPhone on Black Friday, I also found myself the new owner of a 3-month trial for the service. I waited a bit for more games to come out (especially Fantasian… look forward to that review), and now it’s off to the races.

Star Trek Legacy caught my eye not just because of the license, but also because it is developed by Tilting Point, the same company as Star Trek: Timelines, a mobile gatcha game I know a little too well for my own good. I would spend a not inconsiderable amount of time on my old train commute tapping away at that one.

Because of this, I’m viewing Legends through the lens of Timelines. But this has a secondary use of illustrating the differences between Appel Arcade games and the general app store population. And that’s also why this review is going first.

Do you have what it takes to captain the U.S.S. Artemis? @applearcade #answerthecall #ad pic.twitter.com/NNRTXz5dmc

— Michael Dorn (@akaWorf) April 23, 2021

First and foremost, gameplay isn’t gated behind time-based mechanics. There are still daily bonuses and things of that nature, but playing the game itself isn’t braced on building up energy points every 6 minutes. You can play for as long as you like in one go. But perhaps you shouldn’t; the gameplay doesn’t have enough variety to keep a long session as interesting as, say, a console game would be. Perhaps mobile designers time-gating their games wasn’t just to try to sell you time skips.

The core gameplay loop takes you through a slowly developing story that mostly serves to move you from spot to spot to briefly interact with and occasionally recruit various characters from the various Star Trek shows after they all somehow get dragged into the Nexus. Granted, there’s only a narrow selection of crew available at launch — infamously, most of the characters depicted in graphics describing the game’s different classes aren’t yet implemented — but we expect continuing updates over time. Well, however long the contract with Apple stipulates, at least.

For now, you get a solid selection of characters to build away teams with. The game quickly starts you with Michael Burnham, Worf and Dr. McCoy, with William Riker soon to follow as you complete your first set of missions.

As for those missions, they have you linearly jumping from point to point on a map where you will either have a RPG-style fight, find loot, or watch a cutscene. Occasionally, a node will give you a choice of how to proceed (usually gated behind a skill check) which forks progression until the end of the chain of nodes.

The turn-based RPG battles are the meat of the game, and they aren’t terribly interesting. Crew members have up to four options that must be unlocked (and powered up) through grinding for resources. Depending on the skill, it can be available at the start of battle or after a set number of turns, and when used cool down for a bit. There are the standard assortment of buffs, debuffs and status ailments. Both your away team members and the enemy have morale, which can cause them to run away if it is lowered enough, or allow for combo attacks if it is boosted enough. Sometimes enemy reinforcements will beam in. Each battle map can spawn with destroyable cover, but that’s about the limit of the wrinkles the combat system throws at you. The difficulty curve is such that you can play straight through if you’re careful, but attempting cleared missions on higher difficulty levels will require a bit of extra work building up even master tactician William Riker.

What kept me going long enough to be able to write a review are the shot conversations your recruited stars have amongst themselves. Burnham shocked that Worf is a Kligon in Starfleet. McCoy complaining about his least favorite Vulcan without knowing he’s related to Burnham through adoption. Everyone being confused about species or technologies that aren’t prominent or even known in their time periods. The shtick hasn’t worn itself out after a few hours, at least.

The game complains plenty of gatcha features, but per Apple Arcadia fiat, there are no microtransactions. Waifu Character summons are done via one of the many in-game currencies that you can earn an unlimited amount of if you’re willing to play. Each week has a limited-time event with bonus rewards and sometimes an otherwise unsummonable character.

The game is still too young to get a good understanding of its content release cycle. There also don’t appear to be any official forums for it. So it’ll be up to the fans to form a community and start thinking through all the mechanics.

As the game’s still pretty close to launch, there are a few sticking points. Some of the camera angles are very much unintended. The PvP doesn’t load the stats of your opponent, so you always fight their team at level 1. Equipping anything on Scotty (if you have him) crashes the game. There’s no keyboard support.

Overall, it’s a fun momentary distraction and an interesting experiment in doing a moneyless gatcha game. It’ll be interesting to see how the game changes over the course of its development cycle to better optimize its design for that concept.