There are multiple minor powers in the vicinity who are easily persuaded to join your ranks, granting you developed worlds and additional starfleets upon their admission to the Federation. The Federation benefits from beginning with four stable founding worlds and a plentiful supply of Energy, which is the game’s primary currency. I began my adventure, as I imagine most players will, with the Federation campaign, which has the most faction-specific features and perks and the friendliest difficulty curve. The canonical path, however, offers the least resistance and the swiftest route to victory. Each faction has unique traits and capabilities that make it impossible to perfectly imitate the play style of another, but there’s plenty of wiggle room if you feel like creating new obstacles for yourself on repeat playthroughs. Each mission tree has a specifically divergent path you can follow, such as fast-tracking the peaceful reunification of the Romulan and Vulcan peoples or allowing the Federation to devolve into a fascist police state, but you can also ignore the tree completely and experiment with your own stories. Role-playing your faction to match their modus operandi from the TV shows will get you reliable results, but there’s nothing to stop you from veering from the canon. That’s not to say that Star Trek: Infinite keeps the player totally on rails. Completing challenges on the mission tree grants you bonuses that will keep you competitive as the other three major powers carve out their own corners of the map.īeyond their specific forms of conquest, each faction faces parallel challenges of exploring the final frontier In contrast, the Cardassian mission tree gives you a quota of how many forced labor camps you should build to meet your material demands, suggesting that you start building reeducation centers to keep the populace devoted to the state. The Federation’s biggest advantage is that its ability to provide nearly infinite creature comforts means rarely worrying about internal stability, so you can feel free to start exploring strange new worlds right away. Players are guided through the process by a faction-specific mission tree that encourages you to play to your empire’s strengths. Victory requires tempering your ambition and expanding your empire at a sustainable rate without allowing yourself to be outpaced by your opponents. Veterans of the 4X grand strategy genre (particularly Stellaris, this game’s direct ancestor) will be at home playing Infinite, dispatching starships across the 2D map to survey new star systems and colonize the habitable planets therein. Beyond their specific forms of conquest, each faction faces parallel challenges of exploring the final frontier, acquiring and managing resources, and balancing the myriad responsibilities of maintaining a massive galactic government. The Cardassian Union occupies and enslaves its neighbors for the benefit of its resource-poor homeworld. The enigmatic Romulan Empire uses espionage and political trickery to set up puppet states, while the Klingon Empire prefers the direct approach, overwhelming its enemies like a gleeful storm of war. The benevolent United Federation of Planets makes friends by sharing the bounty of its post-scarcity economy. The object of the game is to expand your empire and to absorb as many of the region’s smaller civilizations as possible over the course of three centuries, but each faction goes about this in their own unique mode. There, you take command of one of the four most prominent factions in the mythology and race the other three to become the dominant force in the cosmos. Star Trek: Infinite gives you access to the Alpha and Beta Quadrants of the Milky Way Galaxy, where most Star Trek stories are set. Developed by Nimble Giant Entertainment (the 2016 Masters of Orion remake) and published by Paradox Interactive ( Crusader Kings, Stellaris), Star Trek: Infinite is a 4X grand strategy game that shares a lot of qualities with a good Star Trek episode: It’s cerebral, accessible, occasionally a little clumsy, and overall a good time. While, in the past, game studios have attempted to apply the Star Trek brand to sexier game genres like first-person shooters or flight combat simulators, this often felt like a sweaty attempt to make Trek fit into a non-fan’s definition of “cool.” Thankfully, Trek’s fortunes seem to be changing, as for the second time this year, it’s been applied to a game that both fits the brand and can stand up next to other titles in its genre. Star Trek and strategy games seem like they should fit like a snug, spandex spacesuit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |