izigame.me

"If you like X, you'll like this!" is perhaps the worst way to recommend something to anyone, but in the case of Resurgence, it's very true. I guess in Resurgence's case it's "There's a great game here, but you need to be a fan of the shows in order to look past the utter jank and see the gem within"

So whilst there are _many_ great games out there that bear the Star Trek franchise, the vast majority of those games often completely miss the mark when it comes to capturing the "feel" of a Star Trek episode, and instead often feel like a genre-game with Star Trek themeing slapped on or a mod of another more famous game. Very few of these games have managed to hit it just right and make it feel like an *actual* episode of Trek. The few that come to my mind are: 25th Anniversary, Judgement Rights, and TNG: Final Unit. And now we get to add Resurgence to that list!

First, the good: It's the exact kind of Space Romp you'd expect from TNG-era trek, with your character navigating various moral dilemmas whilst trying to bring space diplomacy to a bunch of one-dimensional stereotypes. You'll be faced with classic Trek moments such as "Should I commit genocide against an entire alien species, or leave them be and maybe make a new problem for the Federation in 20 years time which another show can pick up on?", all neatly sandwiched between the occasional ship battle or landing party phaser fight. You'll get to scan things with your tricorder. You'll go to the ready room and ask for technobabble solutions to technobabble problems. You'll speak to Godlike Entities and constantly hope they don't just teleport you into the sun or something. You'll do all the kinds of thing you expect to see Picard et al do. Admittedly, it leans more towards modern Trek than 90s Trek, because it's not just "dilemma of the week", it's more like a 4 part mini series with a universe ending threat. Frankly it's better than watching Discovery or Picard.


Plot wise it's solid. The pacing is done well, with the waxing and waning tension being delivered at exactly the right moments, just like on the telly. The dialogue is great too and all feels very natural.

In terms of "direction" it scores a pass too, as whoever scripted the cutscenes/cinematic camera did a pretty decent job. The art and environment design is also pretty great too, even when it strays outside of what they could crib from TV.

The gameplay itself is very "cinematic", with most of the action delivered in the form of quick time events. There's lots of "hold forward to advance the plot" stuff, but I felt like I could forgive it as it doesn't really pretend to do otherwise. (Also, you can't fail any of the quick time events or even run out of time in a conversation, everything just pauses! It took me a while to realise that as the game does well to keep the pace going).

The game often presents you with a handful of binary choices that have _some_ sway on the flow of the plot, but they're mostly there to challenge the player and tick some boxes on an post-game website, even showing you what % of players did which choice, which is very nice thing indeed. I like the overall conversation and choice system, including keeping a record of how the other characters think about you and your decisions, even if I am just a tad upset about how inconsequential and linear this is.


The bad is: everything to do with the actual running of the game. It's all a big derpy mess that feels very amateur. It's clear they spent all of their cash in the writer's room rather than on wrangling Unreal.

My primary gripe is that the game is plain ugly. The environment and ship meshes are 360/ps3 era, with you being able to see the angular vertexes most of the time. The facial mesh and textures are much better and actually look *good*, but you only see those in close-up conversations. Once those faces start emoting you'll quickly be repulsed as you're thrown down the uncanny valley by Source Filmmaker level facial contortions. The walking animations are hilariously bad I saw multiple instances of float-slidey-feet syndrome in plain view.

The lighting can only be described as "broken", as most of the time everything is just fullbright, with completely incorrect shadows and random speculars on shiny surfaces, including people's faces. The graphical flaws are most noticeable on the ship exteriors, as the complete lack of lighting makes the vast and empty universe look flat and like some kind of an obvious matte painting. It's worse than what you'll see on TV, even for TOS. Heck, it's worse than what you'd find the various sci-fi BBS/forums of the late 90s where everyone with a pirated copy of 3DSMax would make their own version of their favourite ship. LOWER DECKS, an actual 2d cartoon, looks better than this.

And yet despite looking 2 generations old all of this seems to warm my laptop up no end, with the framerate varying wildly from 120 to 15fps depending on which way you're looking and in which scene. I'm a bit upset that I'm spending this much electricity rendering this big pile of grey, poorly-lit nonsense.

Weirdly they're using Ue5, so they must have messed something up for it to perform and look this bad. They should have just rolled with the default settings or whatever?

There is *one* bright side to the poor graphics: There are various moments of comic relief when the utter po-faced seriousness of the cinematic director's choices meets head on with the hilariously poor graphics. I think within the first hour of the game you're presented with two, perhaps even three, TMP-style drydock flybys and shuttle rides. Now in the movie this was done so that people could oggle the new Enterprise refit on the big screen and look at the fancy new VFX. In Resurgence it's done because it's a cool Star Trek trope that almost every show and game has done since TMP, yet no-one appears to have told the cinematic director that the ship models look like complete ass and that no-one is going to be impressed by nor swoon over a slow pan of these blocking, poorly lit, completely flat ship models floating around in an empty, space-themed skybox. The audience would be impressed if this was 2005, but it's obviously not. The flybys themselves are well composed and would look great in a movie with an actual budget, but instead we get this. Still, I think they were brave to just run with it and make the most of what they had and commit to the Star Trek style, despite the medium they had to work with.


A short list of other (numerous but minor) flaws would be:

* The menu font is amateur
* They print a QR code and a textual link, you can't press a button or click something to launch your browser.
* The keyboard and mouse controls are disgusting. Mouse acceleration, ugh.
* The controller config is wild and matches no other third person game I've ever played, and the first-person action sequences have a constantly fluctuation level of stick sensitive. It's never correct, it's either warp speed or goopy.
* This stuff cannot be remapped!!
* Camera is frustratingly close to avatar
* Spatial sound isn't camera relative, only position relative (turning head doesn't alter sound).
* Lip sync sucks, very flappy, like a South Park ventriloquist
* Subtitles suck and often don't match
* Skip dialog is sorely needed
* The choices don't matter as much as I'd like
* The mandatory stealth sections are abysmal
* Why does the XO (player's character) talk more than the Important Ambassador or the Captain?
* Yet Another Riker / Titan cameo? Groan. Couldn't they have at least recorded Frakes in the same sound booth.
* The saving system is tedious and bad.
* Some of the intense drama is ruined by clunkily running about and derpy phaser fights.
* I was going to pick this game up on release, but it was an Epic Exclusive. Blergh.