Star Trek: Resurgence Review (Core)
I would heartily recommend this game to any Star Trek fan. I have some criticisms, but they're outweighed by the things I enjoyed about this game.
I very much enjoyed the story. It's not perfect, it's not groundbreaking, and it's got some pretty overused tropes and sections that feel a little less-than incredibly written, but that's okay. It's my honest opinion that compared to a lot of other Star Trek media that's out there today, this is a far cry above. (Looking at you, most new Star Trek TV/streaming series.) The story feels very true to the Star Trek format, and is clearly crafted with care and respect for the source material, even if it has its flaws. I'd put it at least on par with some of the movies: Not as good as the best, not nearly as bad as the worst.
The characters aren't anything to write home about, but I did find myself forming emotional attachments to some of them, and having my own list of favorites. Obviously the two characters you spend your time playing as are less defined, as you make their choices for them, but I still found myself liking both quite a bit. Especially Carter. The call back to some of the canon characters is well done, too. Spock and Riker both seem to be good portrayals of the characters, and another minor TNG character that shows up (I won't spoil it, if you don't already know who) quickly became one of my favorites.
The game is pretty decent in looks, if you couldn't guess from the screenshots. Animations are a little stiff at times, and sometimes it can be a bit immersion breaking, but the overall fidelity of the models and textures at least keeps it looking like Star Trek. Facial expressions aren't hard to read, and even without the tool-tip or menu that shows character's favor, I felt like there was pretty decent visual language to show how other characters feel about your decisions. Moreso, I think they nailed the Star Trek visual motif, at least better than some other games do.
The few complaints I have lie in some of the gameplay mechanics that certain parts of the game have. For example, any of the combat sections. The game is not meant to be a shooter by any means, and it's understandable that their focus was on storytelling, but I found the combat sections to be borderline insufferable. The controls don't lend themselves well to it, and the balancing of these areas is often frustrating and seems not too well thought out. That said, I feel the game would have suffered without the Star Trek-style of action they attempted to include, so if you're anything like me and looking for the story foremost: Fail first, then retry in Story Mode, without consequences. It's better.
There's also a bit of difficulty at times with the variability in mouse sensitivity (I don't know about controllers, if they face the same issues.) Understandably, they vary your mouse sensitivity as you go through certain quicktime events and mini-game-esque segments of the game, but at times it feels wildly too much or too little. There were times where I found myself dragging my mouse off of my mousepad and far across my desk just to do certain quicktime events, which wasn't a dealbreaker, but left some discomfort during longer play sessions.
Edit: One thing that I feel I should add after reading some of the other reviews posted, is that I do have one criticism with the characters: A good number of them don't fit Starfleet very well. I found myself wondering how some of them got to the ranks they're at, or how they even got through the Academy. So many of them have this cruel or petty streak and they don't align with the ideals you see Starfleet to uphold, at least during the classic TV series (TOS, TNG, DS9) and I found that a good number of them threw little baby tantrums if I did anything to slight them. Not all of the characters, but mostly the bridge crew, it seemed.
If I had to give it a rating out of 10, I'd say maybe a high 7 or a low 8, but understand that comes from a place as a fan who has felt pretty let down by a lot of modern Star Trek media, and understand that you're not getting a third-person shooter or anything of the sort. If you've played any of the old TaleTell games, you should have a good idea what this will be like.