I played the demo for Across the Unknown back in November or December. I was not impressed. The demo felt like little more than a dumbed-down mobile game that breezes through Wikipedia summaries of Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The demo was pitifully easy to play through, and the decisions didn't seem very impactful. The fact that you can choose to use the Caretaker's Array to go back home and end the game before it even starts seemed like a silly novelty at the time. I doubted that the actual in-game decisions could prove to be as meaningful.

But the game released, and I'm a sucker for Star Trek games. So I went ahead and bought it (it was discounted on release!). And I'll be damned if I didn't end up being just a tiny bit impressed!

Being able to use the Caretaker to go home and end the game prematurely
is the only major deviation from the show's overarching plot.

The platonic ideal of a mobile game?

Now, when I say "impressed", that comes with some huge asterisks and qualifiers! Remember, based on pre-release marketing and the demo, I was going into this game expecting a PC port of a mobile game along the lines of Star Trek: Fleet Command or Trexels. That was the measuring stick by which I was judging this game. I wasn't expecting it to be Birth of the Federation or A Final Unity.

Yes, Across the Unknown is a mobile game that was released for consoles and PC. It's like a combination of Star Trek: Fleet Command and Fallout: Shelters, except that it isn't a mobile game. Mechanically, it's almost the same, but it completely lacks any of the time and money-wasting pay-to-play grind that mobile games are built around. Yes, you do collect resources and wait for rooms on Voyager to be built. But those rooms don't take real-life hours or days to build; they take just a few in-game "cycles" (it's unclear if a "cycle" represents hours or days in the game), and are done in a matter of seconds or minutes of real time. And there are no "premium currencies" that ask you to shell out a credit card number if you don't feel like waiting for days to grind. Dilithium definitely seems like it could have been a premium currency, as it acts as a gate for higher tier technologies and room upgrades. There's no daily login bonuses. No ads. No "limited time only" promotions. It's just the raw game, stripped of everything that makes mobile gaming so obnoxious and predatory.

The blend of resource-collection and base-building will be familiar to anyone who's played a mobile game.

This is kind of the best possible version of what mobile games were promised to be, before they were completely co-opted by greedy corporations. This is not thoughtless shovel-ware designed by soulless corporations to prey on people who will compulsively through money at it. The player is constantly engaged with things to do and decisions to make. And those decisions occasionally have weight and consequence. And it all comes together to tell the coherent story of the entire Star Trek: Voyager TV show! Yeah, the individual encounters are abridged Cliff's Notes summaries of Voyager episodes, but they come together to tell an overarching story that adds up to slightly more than the sum of its parts.

I don't know if Xbox 360 users have this problem, but some PS3 developers still feel that it is necessary to display the "This game saves data automatically" prompt every time the game is booted up.

PS3 auto-save prompt

So annoying. I like to put a game in and then get up and pour myself a glass of water or make a sandwich while I wait for the mandatory corporate splash screens and loading screen. I don't want to have to pick up the controller and press a button just to get that far into the gaming experience.

It's one thing to display the message the first time the game is booted up, but not every time. Check the HDD for a game save file, and if one is present, then you know the user has already played the game and should be aware that it has an auto-save.

And if you feel that it is absolutely necessary to display such a message every time the game is booted up (because you apparently think that all the players of your game are stupid and don't know how technology works), then make it a message during the initial load screen. Don't make it a prompt that stops the game and requires the user to push an "OK" button.