izigame.me

5/10, threadbare Star Trek skin for Stellaris.
The warning signs were obvious when they sent out dev diaries that did their utmost to avoid discussing gameplay mechanics (particularly the last one, 4) and then told everyone 'we have given it to streamers, if you like to watch fat lads who can't play games anyway' instead of pointing to some nice reviews. (Newsflash; Reviews are more or less negative.)
There's so many issues with this game, never mind that a lot of people are having launcher issues, and the game fails to recognise DLC (lol, already) being owned.
Let's just get into it;
Firstly, it is Stellaris with a Star Trek skin, so if you come from that game you'll be fine here. But there's only 4 factions to take control of, each with their own 'gameplay', or core mechanic. So, the Federation is diplomacy, Klingon's are war, Romulans do spycraft and the Cardassians bring the slave trade.
To mould your experience, you're given a flimsy mission tree, and it is flimsy, it's literally just minor text blurb, a goal to aim for and when you reach it, you click it for a buff, happy days. For the Feds, the first mission is pretty much getting your science ships up and running, to boldly go and all that, whilst the Klingons want their warships up and running instead. Little things like that.
The mission tree is supposed to be a guiding principle for the factions, but it fails on the basis of simply not being a tree, but rather a stick, with maybe a knobbly bit on the end of it. You have at most, one or two mutually exclusive branches to go down, that's it. Riveting! (Guess who has the most complex tree? The Federation, so no doubt they'll flesh out the rest in true Paradox fashion of 'continued development' or *cough* DLC *cough*)
Anyway, gameplay... The game takes place after the Khitomer incident (from the shows), and that means we're early in the Star Trek timeline, so a few years before TNG starts. Everyone has the same starting positions, but to keep things spicy there's an element of RNG for planets and spawns.
For example, in my first game as the Federation, the Naucissan pirates spawned an empire literally next door to me, whilst in my second game they were nowhere near me.
In my first game, Vulcan (an Arid world...) was a farming paradise, but in my second it was just a vanilla planet.
It just... sucks? Why aren't there exclusive planetary wonders for each planet? For Vulcan, for Andoria etc? These are recognisable places, with deep lore and history for Trekkies, and yet they're victim to the RNG. As a bonus for Feds, every species 'originally' hails from Earth, meaning you get none of the diversity options for colonising planets ~ Vulcans come from Vulcan, an Arid world, but their habitability is considered a Temperate world as their origin is 'Earth'.
It is little things like this that completely mar the experience, it's like the project lead snoozed on the editing pass, these are details you should be picking up on after your first playtest, not completely missing beyond launch day.
On top of this, you start as an established faction, but with zero infrastructure. Where Stellaris had you with one planet and a plan to expand and exploit, Infinite dumps you with FOUR, and they're all randomly good/bad at anything, and none of them are developed to any standard. So you're starting way behind the curve, having to build an economy for a four strong Empire right out of the gate.
And even though you're in an established Empire, you'll be placed in control of areas devoid of life where there should be life (Feds + Rigelia for example), or missing core systems. Look, this game has the Borg as the final big bad, and that's great, but guess what the Federation doesn't start with (and has to rush to get)? That's right, they don't even own Wolf 359! You have to race vs the Romulans to grab it. Who the hell missed that? Wolf should be with the Fed from the start and they should be using it as a centrepiece when the Borg arrive on the scene, I mean, that's a complete open goal for fan service, how do you mess up so badly?
Traditions are similar to Stellaris, but quite disappointing overall. Each faction has one unique tradition, be it Honour, Progress, whatever, but all the rest? Effectively similar (Defence vs Conquest, Welfare Vs Capitalism etc) with minor changes within the selections itself.
The issues don't stop there. Voice acting, sound effects, phaser colours, everything is relatively poor. There's set ships for each faction, so almost zero diversity in what you will set out to create, you'll always start with Miranda classes for the Federation, and each hull type you can research is set in stone, so there's a ton of ships that are missing out.
I want to like the game, but it is just amateur in its design mechanics, shallow in its mission trees and plotlines, the project was clearly mismanaged and greenlit by nodding heads that thought 'yeah, this is great.' Except, it isn't great, it's lukewarm mediocre servings that needed more spice, flavour, depth and a longer cooking time.
Star Trek has long languished because of crap writers and poor game developers, and this has done nothing to swerve course. (Please, Owlcat, do a Star Trek CRPG, the franchise needs some love).
Overall; Not recommended unless you're an absolute diehard Trekkie, and even then, nope. Maybe after the deluge of DLC and fixes it'll be up to scratch, but games should be smashing it on launch (bugs be damned) and this simply isn't it.