Boldly going where no one has gone before in video games has always felt more like a mild walk instead of a trek. Other Star Trek games have not been terrible, but they’ve not exactly set the world on fire either. Star Trek: Infinite looks to give Trekkies what they’ve always wanted – a true Star Trek video game, catering to all fans of the pre-2000s TV series.
Nimble Giant Entertainment has taken Paradox Interactive’s self-developed 4X game Stellaris and given it a coating of Star Trek goodness, with sterling results. Addressing the elephant in the room, yes, Star Trek: Infinite is in many ways a reskin on Stellaris, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Stellaris has built and grown from its own humble beginnings into something quite wonderful, and now that greatness is expanded upon in a different way in Infinite.
It’s not all the same, however. There’s no creating your species. Instead you can pick from four set factions, each with their own style of play which will be immediately recognisable to fans. Of course, you have the do-gooder The United Federation of Planets, their mission, to explore strange new worlds… to seek out new life; new civilisations… sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Then there’s the Klingon Empire, essentially a feudal race who love the glory of battle. The final two major powers are the sneaky and secretive Romulans and the cultured yet oppressive Cardassians.
The aim of the game is to either achieve victory by Galactic Hegemony or a Triumph of Diplomacy. Your economic strength, technology level, military power, number of systems, number of colonies and number of populations are all combined into a score and whoever has the highest score by the year 2646 is the winner by Galactic Hegemony. Pretty simple. If Diplomacy is more your thing, then you can look to assimilate minor powers into your empire.
Each major power does things slightly differently, with the Federation being all about peaceful expansion, while the Klingons happy to stage coups, occupy planets and eventually assimilate races that way. Each race added to your empire offers a unique Civic which buffs your empire in some way. Collect twelve of these civics, and you win through Triumph of Diplomacy.
Getting to one of these victories is going to take some time. Like most 4X games, you can sit down to play, blink, and hours have passed – the term ‘time vampire’ has never been truer.
The game is mostly managed from the galactic map view where you can see each major power’s borders, the star systems within them, and the undiscovered vastness beyond those borders. Switch to a specific star system and each inhabited planet has an ecosystem to manage as well an economic structure and population to keep in check. Different jobs produce different resources which are all required for building shiny new things such as districts, buildings, stardocks and of course ships, just to name a few.
On top of this, you’ll spend a lot of time managing your relationships with other empires, smaller powers and making sure you have the right policies and edicts in place to push your empire closer to victory.
One of the best parts of the game is its exploration which puts you in the shoes of a Trek captain. Sending your Science ships to unexplored areas of the Galaxy, uncovering potential new worlds, examining strange anomalies, and meeting new races for the first time is a Trek lover’s dream. It’s all built on a robust system, refined in Stellaris’ developed history, though it can be daunting at first.
There’s a tutorial which takes you through the basics and tool tips that explain every detail, but I kind of wish there was a reference guide like in Civilization as more often than not I’d want to check some information from the tutorial, only to find I didn’t have such a repository. Stellaris players will take to this game like ducks to water, and the common gameplay meant I could check Stellaris tutorial videos and that game’s wikia for how many things work – I’d hope an equivalent is set up for this game, which would address my main complaint.
Star Trek: Infinite also drops in an element from Paradox’s historical games, as each race has a story-led mission tree to follow. These don’t need to be completed, but do grant you some benefits that make your path to victory easier. These missions tend to follow the timeline of major plot points in the history of the TV shows, such as the creation of the Tal Shiar, the launch of the Enterprise-D, or getting involved with Section 31.
As a Trekkie, I really liked these nods toward the show, but they might not have much of an impact for those who haven’t seen TNG in particular. The mission trees are quite constrained, never really deviating from what happened on the telly, or what the other factions were trying to achieve. There is a ripple through to in-game events that can also follow the timeline – Federation players will want to keep an eye out for the Borg, that’s for sure!
Putting the fan service aside for a moment, as a 4X game, Infinite is pretty solid. For those that like to micromanage every tiny detail, well you’re in luck, though the game also has a decent level of automation if you don’t fancy pausing the timer every two seconds. It’s pretty versatile in that respect.
I do wish there were more different types of win conditions as even with the two, they kind of go hand in hand anyway. If you’re working towards a civic victory, you most likely have the most powerful military, and vice versa, if you’re going for power and points, you’ll naturally get more civics as you assimilate species. A victory condition that is just full of conquest would be great, but taking over just leads to the same kind of victory. For me, Civilization remains the best at this, and something similar here would make it all the better.
