The story is pretty good for the most part and the characters are mostly likeable with few exceptions. However the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired - at best it's okay and at worst it's just annoying and tedious to play.
The technical issues are just all over the place.
The fact that I had to install a mod just to be able to set a resolution higher than 1080p, disable motion blur, increase FOV and have cutscenes run at more than 30FPS is just inexcusable in a 36 Euro game in 2023.
Not only that but there are literally zero graphics options to choose from except for a choice of resolution which by default only goes up to 1920x1440 anyway. Ultrawide is also unsupported without a mod.
But the technical issues don't end there - the QTE mouse controls are absolutely awful because the mouse sensitivity is all over the place - in some minigames it's incredibly high and sensitive, while others require you to whip your mouse several times across half your desk to get your cursor to the destination. It boggles the mind how a game focused on QTE can not get the controls for them right.
The aiming in the combat sections is absolutely atrocious - it's floaty, delayed and unresponsive. Which is really weird since in UE4 you literally get default starter projects that come right with the engine that already have PERFECT 3rd person aiming already implemented so the devs must've just thrown all that away and made their own, inferior version.
Finally there's lots of smaller issues, often involving poor QA - there's clipping animations, background characters walking into walls, inconsistent voice line loudness (some characters are literally twice as loud as everyone else when they talk), subtitles missing lines or using wrong words and of course the graphics - while this is certainly not the worst looking game, it's also not the best and the graphics can be pretty inconsistent, especially when it comes to lighting - some of the scenes look pretty poor while some actually look surprisingly nice - and sadly the nice graphics are mostly in the second half of the game as if the devs were slowly learning UE4 lighting throughout the development process and never went back to fix the earlier areas.
However despite the issues the game hasn't crashed once and I have not experienced a single game-breaking bug so I guess that's something to celebrate nowadays.
QTE for the most part were just tedious and uninteresting - often making something that should've been a quick one button action and stretching it into a long series of boring QTEs that add nothing to the story.
The combat sections were especially bad - they tried to do a cover shooter style combat but failed horribly - waves of enemies coming out of nowhere, awful aim controls, sometimes very poor visibility and limited range of motion as well as unskippable cutscenes every few seconds (in one instance in the mines it was like 2s of shooting, interrupted by a cutscene, followed by another 2s of shooting, another cutscene and finally 10s of shooting). It was pretty reminiscent of on the rails shooters - though not very good ones.
They took something which should've been the most fun part of the gameplay and executed it so badly that it became it's worst aspect - an absolute slog to play.
And finally the dialogue choices - most of the time they weren't terrible, but sadly some of them, and especially the more important ones, were often not clear enough and would lead to some very unpredictable results and the characters would react in very illogical, unreasonable and unprofessional ways - I think it's actually something pretty common in telltalle style games.
Oh and a minor criticism - the game just never gave you time to breathe - it would've been so fun to just walk around the ship - maybe interact with a few members of the team, see some different areas, maybe help around with some tasks here and there or just have any time off - but no, we're just completely on the rails at all times and there's no freedom to do anything. And the few times you could explore it was always pretty discouraged by some characters waiting for you and literally telling you that you need to hurry up despite there being highlited areas to interact with.
Despite all that I liked the game because it does feel like Star Trek, but it's certainly not worth 36 Euro, especially with it's poor technical state. You're better off watching a gameplay on youtube.
The technical issues are just all over the place.
The fact that I had to install a mod just to be able to set a resolution higher than 1080p, disable motion blur, increase FOV and have cutscenes run at more than 30FPS is just inexcusable in a 36 Euro game in 2023.
Not only that but there are literally zero graphics options to choose from except for a choice of resolution which by default only goes up to 1920x1440 anyway. Ultrawide is also unsupported without a mod.
But the technical issues don't end there - the QTE mouse controls are absolutely awful because the mouse sensitivity is all over the place - in some minigames it's incredibly high and sensitive, while others require you to whip your mouse several times across half your desk to get your cursor to the destination. It boggles the mind how a game focused on QTE can not get the controls for them right.
The aiming in the combat sections is absolutely atrocious - it's floaty, delayed and unresponsive. Which is really weird since in UE4 you literally get default starter projects that come right with the engine that already have PERFECT 3rd person aiming already implemented so the devs must've just thrown all that away and made their own, inferior version.
Finally there's lots of smaller issues, often involving poor QA - there's clipping animations, background characters walking into walls, inconsistent voice line loudness (some characters are literally twice as loud as everyone else when they talk), subtitles missing lines or using wrong words and of course the graphics - while this is certainly not the worst looking game, it's also not the best and the graphics can be pretty inconsistent, especially when it comes to lighting - some of the scenes look pretty poor while some actually look surprisingly nice - and sadly the nice graphics are mostly in the second half of the game as if the devs were slowly learning UE4 lighting throughout the development process and never went back to fix the earlier areas.
However despite the issues the game hasn't crashed once and I have not experienced a single game-breaking bug so I guess that's something to celebrate nowadays.
QTE for the most part were just tedious and uninteresting - often making something that should've been a quick one button action and stretching it into a long series of boring QTEs that add nothing to the story.
The combat sections were especially bad - they tried to do a cover shooter style combat but failed horribly - waves of enemies coming out of nowhere, awful aim controls, sometimes very poor visibility and limited range of motion as well as unskippable cutscenes every few seconds (in one instance in the mines it was like 2s of shooting, interrupted by a cutscene, followed by another 2s of shooting, another cutscene and finally 10s of shooting). It was pretty reminiscent of on the rails shooters - though not very good ones.
They took something which should've been the most fun part of the gameplay and executed it so badly that it became it's worst aspect - an absolute slog to play.
And finally the dialogue choices - most of the time they weren't terrible, but sadly some of them, and especially the more important ones, were often not clear enough and would lead to some very unpredictable results and the characters would react in very illogical, unreasonable and unprofessional ways - I think it's actually something pretty common in telltalle style games.
Oh and a minor criticism - the game just never gave you time to breathe - it would've been so fun to just walk around the ship - maybe interact with a few members of the team, see some different areas, maybe help around with some tasks here and there or just have any time off - but no, we're just completely on the rails at all times and there's no freedom to do anything. And the few times you could explore it was always pretty discouraged by some characters waiting for you and literally telling you that you need to hurry up despite there being highlited areas to interact with.
Despite all that I liked the game because it does feel like Star Trek, but it's certainly not worth 36 Euro, especially with it's poor technical state. You're better off watching a gameplay on youtube.