By Jerry Maynard
Its Star Trek week here at Nerd Union and we’ve been spending all week covering one of the most beloved nerd franchises of all time, Star Trek! While I myself am not the most avid trekkie (sorry Zach) I did grow up watching some of it with my dad and can appreciate the Trek universe and have a vast amount of respect for what it entails. Today I am here to honor that respect by telling you about an upcoming entry into the Trek video game universe called “Star Trek: Timelines.”
Star Trek: Timelines is an upcoming mobile app/computer game being developed by the folks at Disruptor Beam that promises to be, if nothing else, one of the most visually appealing app games that I have ever seen, not to mention one of the most all encompassing Star Trek entries to date. The Storyline focuses not on any one particular entry into the series, but instead brings in all of them. The basic premise is that you are a fledgling captain out on a routine mission when all of a sudden a temporal anomaly occurs which affects basically everything except you, your ship and your current crew. This temporal anomaly causes all of the various timelines of Star Trek to blend and interact and even creates some new alternate universes along with it. These interactions cause some interesting effects that allow you to do things in game like have an away team that features Scotty, Locutius, and Archer all at the same time or even have alternate universe characters that have some of our favorite characters end up as villains (ex: Worf and Regent Worf.)
Your various missions in game will feature a more dungeons and dragons approach to completion rather than mass effect style space shooter, in which you basically will be given a series of choices depending on your away team members and your goal and then effectively “Roll the die” to see if your choice succeeds and then move on to the next choice should you succeed or fail. Overall in the mission your impact on the story and rewards are based not only out of a pass fail grade in the mission but also what decisions you decided to make in the process
It wouldn’t be a Star Trek game without the iconic ships of star trek and this to me seems to be where the game shines most. First of all the Ship models are GORGEOUS, especially in the context of this is being designed for app play as well as computer play, and the space battles are just as beautiful and much more visually stimulating than I originally had expected but lets just start with the ships themselves. In the ship you of course have your crew but the interesting part of this is depending on what rooms you place your various crew members in you will gain various other benefits in game (Ex: Putting Sulu in more or less of a green house gives you a science buff since he likes botany.) But mapping your crew around the ship till you get the perfect buffs isn’t the only aspect of the ship dynamic in game, there’s space battles! In space battles you put your various crew members into different battle stations, which then gives different effects in combat with the other ship such as Scotty being able to fix up your ship in battle due to his engineering skills or Picard more or less talking his opponents into lowering their defenses due to his high diplomacy skill. The exact mechanics of how the space battles work remains to be seen since the game is still in production and the demo of the game is currently due to be seen at the the Trek Khan in Vegas which our very own Zach Nichols is currently at this weekend!
The game is set to be released in the fall of 2015 currently so stay tuned for more info as the release date draws nearer!
Live Long and Prosper
Jerry Maynard
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