Star Trek: Infinite Review

Oh, boy. It’s happening, folks. A little while back, I got to play a preview of Nimble Giant Entertainment and Paradox’s Star Trek: Infinite, but now? Now, I have the honour — nay, the privilege to review this hunk of a beast. Get ready and strap yourselves in like Major Kira is yelling at you to fly by the seat of your pants.

Star Trek: Infinite is a grand strategy game that needs a large emphasis on grand. This game is no joke when it comes to the scope, size, and replayability. With nearly every detail of this game being controllable and decided on by the player, you can truly be the overlord of the Milky Way. The premise is simple: it’s 2340. You are either in charge of the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, or the Cardassian Union. You have 300 years to outdo everyone else. The methods you use to accomplish this goal are up to you but don’t underestimate your enemies or your allies. Remember, it is best to be equally feared and loved, but if you can’t have both…

Since in my preview of the game I played as the Federation, I decided to shake it up and play as the Romulans this time around.

Now, a big part of this game is how much you really want to role-play. It’s part of what makes the replayability so stellar. I recommend going into each faction with a mindset prepared and sticking with it. It’s easy in grand strategy games to min/max everything to death, but Star Trek: Infinite thrives on leaning into the culture of your faction of choice.

As you go on, you'll be met with prompts for random events. Events go through stages, each stage having a different chance of success depending on your choice. For example, for the first contact event, I was tasked with deciding how much I was willing to risk my people to meet an unknown alien species. If the risk paid off, I’d reap all the rewards and a possible new ally that the clingy Federation hadn’t got their hands on yet. If my mission failed, not only would I have the blood of my fellow Romulans on my hands, but public perception of me could change.

Obviously, I decided to sneakily go all in. Pft, imagine having moderation? What am I, a Vulcan?

But guess what? I didn’t fail! Sure, I lost a whole science ship along the way somewhere, but what’s war if not for a little sacrifice? And since I had new friends who knew nothing about my reputation or that of my enemies, I decided to love-bomb them into being on the Romulan side. Keeping them isolated and docile helped keep them out of the Federation and could help down the line if I wanted to shove them into the Romulan Empire.

In a similar vein, another big element of this game is developing the planets and colonies you have while also discovering new ones. Based on your discoveries, you’ll get to choose which locations are prime real estate for growing your empire. On top of this, you’ll have to decide what type of resources you want each particular colony to create and pick certain developments to go along with this.

As time goes on, you’ll gain the ability to add traditions to your culture. Traditions will give you special actions, some needed to complete missions in your mission tree. They’re broken down from bulk categories to smaller details. Defence or Conquest? Research or development? Commerce or welfare?

The amount of unity (one of the many in-game resources) you gain per month will determine how frequently you can add a new perk. While perk selection is completely up to the player, certain ones are needed to complete branches in your mission tree. Each mission tree is different depending on the faction you choose. For example, one of the perks on offer for the Romulans is the ability to close borders with any of the other empires. One of the first objectives in the mission tree is to close down our own borders that we share with the other factions.

In this same line of thought: yes, you can go to war. Yes, you can steal territories from other factions. Much like Crusader Kings III, you will need a casus belli (a reason for provoking war) in order to do so, but those can be gained in a plethora of morally right and morally grey ways.

When you do decide you’ve had enough of playing diplomat, you can do more than swarm in and kill. You can, in a mass amount of detail, manage who in your fleet is going to kill what. This is fittingly called the “Fleet Manager”, where you can pick who is in charge of what ship, where they’ll go, and what they’ll do once they get there.

That said, if you want to go the nice and conciliatory route, you can. You can talk to other factions’ diplomats, open trade routes, attend peace conferences, and help defend your allies. It’s important to note that no matter how nice you are or how much blood wine you down with the Klingons, other factions can and will declare war on you. You’ll still need to defend yourself and your territories if you want to keep them. So building up a good, strong fleet cannot be overlooked, even for the most pacifist of players.

To my surprise, you can also design ships. And to my utter delight, the models for the ships are 3D. You can add different modules for different benefits, pick different classes, and truly live out your miniature model dreams. Or…you can let the game do it for you automatically. Totally up to you.

It’s significant to note that grand strategy games always come with a bit of a learning curve. There’s a lot to see and a lot to figure out as some mechanics aren’t as important as others. Half the joy for me is finding out the little tricks for the game. While Star Trek: Infinite also follows suit, the game implemented a feature that is so simple but so helpful: the AI button.

When you start a new playthrough, you're asked if you’d like a little AI guide to talk you through and give you tips. What I love about this is a few things: 1) It’s a wonderful way to keep tutorial talk canon. 2) It really is helpful as this game is massive and intricate. 3) The AI’s voice choice is phenomenal. Usually, I tend to mute grand strategy games and throw on a podcast in the background, but between the killer soundtrack and my nice AI assistant reading out prompts, I actually kept the volume on for my full game.

I’m always hesitant when it comes to new games for any IPs I love, as so often it can be a massive let-down. If anything, I’m a harsher critic of them than IPs I have no attachment to, but I could go on and on about the virtues and praises of Star Trek: Infinite. Truly, it’s one of those games that you can play for 400 hours and you’ll still find something new. The different factions and routes you can take them down allows you to reply to your heart’s content. All in all, it’s abundantly clear how much love and detail went into this game.

If you’re a Trekkie of any level, I’d highly recommend checking out Star Trek: Infinite.