Resurgence tries to help you out by having the tricorder beep when you’re near something that can be scanned, but it doesn’t distinguish between something that can be scanned and something you already have scanned. What you need to scan isn’t always obvious, and there were times I spent a few minutes wandering around the same room looking for the last piece of information I needed. The only annoyance among them is the tricorder segments, which ask you to scan objects to solve puzzles. Best of all, these segments are never one-offs, so you’re building skills that can be used in more difficult, stressful scenarios later on. I particularly enjoyed the flying and shooting segments because they required me to make quick decisions. There’s a lot of variety here: you’ll fly shuttles, fire phasers, command the Resolute from the bridge, solve engineering puzzles, scan things with your tricorder, and sneak around hostile environments, and nearly all of it is engaging and feels like what we should be doing in a Star Trek game.

Of course, all of those dialogue options and moral dilemmas are broken up by Resurgence’s moment-to-moment action, which is respectable. But the lack of meaningful consequences made them feel like filler in hindsight. I don’t regret the choices I made they were set up extremely well and emotionally effective when I made them. Later on, the group’s leader thanked me for my choice – and then didn’t really appear again, even when it would have made sense for them to do so. The decision felt awful (in a good way) – there was no good choice – but I did what I thought was right and what the character I was playing would do. Ultimately, I had to choose between gravely injuring one of my crew members and potentially sacrificing that group. In one extreme example I was sent to rescue a group of people by beaming them away from impending disaster. That’s inevitable in a game like Resurgence – the story has to continue no matter what you do – but it never feels good when it happens. Sometimes, you’ll make what feels like an important decision only to realize later that it didn’t matter much. That said, I do wish the consequences of certain choices had more effect on the story. Better still, I felt I understood Jara and Carter more because I had just as much time to work through the issues as they did. The timer was fast enough to make me think on my feet but not so overwhelming that I felt paralyzed by indecision.

Sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slow, but you have to respond – or not, but choosing not to decide is a choice in and of itself.I never felt rushed during big moments, but I knew I had to be decisive – and so did the characters I was controlling. You’ll have to make these choices quickly, too, because you’re on a timer. How well you do as Carter affects what happens to the ship, but the decisions you make as Jara affect Carter if something goes wrong. In one early scene, Carter is out on the ship’s hull repairing a critical system, while Jara is on the bridge. Jara and Carter rarely directly interact with one another but both of them play important roles in the story, and Dramatic Labs does a good job showing how the decisions made by one of them can impact the other. It gives you a better idea of the stakes for everyone aboard – problems apply to more than the folks on the bridge, who knew! – and makes scenarios more exciting. Other times it means rerouting power to a critical system or taking a spacewalk to repair the Resolute. Sometimes, that means giving orders from the bridge or leading an away team. The perspective effectively bounces between Jara and Carter depending on the situation.

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