It may lack the Telltale Games badge (even though grouvee has them down as a developer – this studio may share a lot of ex-staffers however the game is developed by “Dramatic Labs”) however this is absolutely one of those games, for better or worse. How much you like this one probably depends on how much you sit within the overlap of a venn diagram of Trek and the Telltale template of games. As soon as you start the game one of the first credits any Telltale long-term fan will notice is [composer] shared Emerson-Johnson’s name and it’s the first sign that you are in comfortable hands as exactly what to expect. That is exactly the double-edged sword that it sounds…

What is interesting to me is that the original Telltale got a lot of heat for the technical issues that plagued their games and it was generally blamed upon their in-house engine the “Telltale Tool” which was very outdated very quickly and was continued to be used for way too long (from what I read the never ending schedule of games didn’t lend them enough time to pause production and jump onto another engine so they ploughed on tweaking what they had) but here Dramatic Labs are using Unreal engine and we have exactly the same issues as games of old; audio drop outs (turn the subtitles on – occasionally dialogue playback ends too soon), stuttering, visual errors, glitchy animation. As an added bonus Resurgence suffers from extreme frame rate drops, sometimes in its large, crowded places with water effects (there’s a section in a Palace that seemed to trigger it regularly for me) but it’s just as likely to be seen on deck of your ship with not much going on. Outside the technical the same issues, and praise, that would apply to Telltale of old transfers over here; restricted dialogue choices and poor decisions, check, excellent voice acting, check, an excellent script despite the technical issues, check, fantastic sound alike music by Emerson, check.

It feels like you could do dig out a review of The Walking Dead game and do a ctrl find + replace “The Walking Dead” with “Star Trek Resurgence” and job done. If you like classic Trek then it’s worth playing; I certainly enjoyed this more than watching Discovery but as a lot of Trekkies will tell you that’s a low bar.

I'm not usually a fan of the Telltale Games style; I'm more of a fan of traditional adventure games like the classic Star Trek 25th Anniversary. However, I thought this style of game was a better fit for Star Trek than it had been for Batman, The Guardians of the Galaxy or The Walking Dead.

I'm very glad I gave it a chance, because this was a delight. The new characters are great and the story is very true to Trek. By the end, I was wishing I could play a new one of these every year. Just give me a new story, new characters (with a few old ones mixed in), a new ship and a new location once each year and I'd be happy. It would be like a video game version of the Star Trek: Defiant novel series.

And I'd be fine with that even if they didn't fix the many glaring bugs. None of those bugs & jank kept me from enjoying the game, but they did take me out of it. I played on a PS4 and while there were no game breaking or crash bugs, the performance was just terrible for a game with such dated graphics. At times, the frame rate would drop to 5-10 frames per second. Sometimes whole audio bits would be cut out when the engine was shuddering under the weight of a transporter beam or a crowd of characters. And even when the frame rate was normal, there were always weird graphical errors and distortions. The worst was this "speckling" that would happen around edges. It looked like the edge of a texture was sticking off into space.

If they can improve the performance of the engine (or just go PS5 only sigh) and improve the controls a little bit, they really have a franchise on their hands.