Game: Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown
Genre: Adventure, Strategy
System: Nintendo Switch 2 (also on Steam (Windows), Xbox and PS5)
Developer|Publisher: Gamexcite | Daedalic Entertainment
Age Rating: EU 12+ | US E10+
Price: US $39.99 | UK £32.49 | EU € 39,99
Release Date: February 18th, 2026
No review code used; I bought the game myself.
For 55 years now, I’ve been a Star Trek fan, ever since The Original Series appeared on Dutch television and my dad and I avidly waited for new episodes weekly. You’d think I’d have ample experience with Star Trek video games as well, but I have found over the years that most of them are heavily geared towards combat in space. So I watched Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown with a critical eye, hoping for one that brought something new to the table. And I wasn’t disappointed!
Stranded in the Delta Quadrant
Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown is a story-driven survival strategy game where you follow the story of the iconic Star Trek: Voyager TV series. If you’ve already watched the series, you might remember how it all started. Voyager was hit by an unknown shockwave while searching in the Badlands for a lost Maquis ship. Well, they weren’t exactly keen to find their enemies, the Maquis, but they were intent to find Tuvok, the Vulcan science officer who had gone undercover on that same Maquis ship. After they recovered from the rough shockwave-ride, they found that they had travelled more than 70,000 light-years in the blink of an eye. Not only was the ship severely damaged, but it was also in the totally unknown Delta quadrant.
This is where the adventure begins: emergency repairs are needed, and meanwhile, they need to investigate the Array that pulled them over there. And the missing Maquis ship as well, as they see it docked there. Janeway is at the helm of Voyager, of course, but you are the one helping her and the crew to take back control of the ship and to investigate what is going on.
Find Resources to Start Repairing
In the game, you find that U.S.S. Voyager is in a bad shape, with major hull damage, life support failing, several crewmen dead, external sensors failing, and the warp core is in grey mode. The deuterium tanks are empty, and they are running on reserves. So the first thing to do is to restore Stellar Cartography, and after that’s done (by a mere click of a button to restore power), you really need to go and find resources.
You can now see the system you are in, with dots showing planets and asteroid fields. You can scan them from a distance to find what resources are to be found there. Setting course to the closest one that has deuterium, you are presented with choices: take a risk and perhaps get more reserves? Or play it safe and accept that you don’t get as much as you want. At least you’ll now be able to deactivate grey mode in the warp core, which costs more energy (=deuterium), but it’ll also allow you to start repairing other bits of the ship and focus on the Array.
At first, the gameplay of Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown might feel a lot like connecting the dots and colouring by numbers. The tutorial is good, telling you what you need to know at a certain moment in the game and providing a useful database for future reference. But still, it can feel like a lot. I have found that after a while, I wanted to restart my game as I felt I understood better what the best strategy would be. And it all made much more sense the second time around.
Away Missions and Consequences
Roughly, the gameplay is made up of exploring star systems to gather resources, away missions, combat in space and the strategic management of the ship.
Your first away mission is to the Array. It’s an interesting choice how they depicted those missions. After picking your away party, taking into account what abilities you need from your people, you see a scene from the series with actions below. The scene isn’t clear and looks like it’s made into a drawing that has a lot of images overlaying instead of the real series screenshot.
There are several options on how to proceed, and each shows the possible rewards, the abilities required and whether the members of your away party have what it takes. And depending on those factors, you’ll see what outcome to hope for. Because every action you take has a certain random chance element involved as well. At times, it seems it all comes together nicely, and then all of a sudden, nothing is going right. The away missions and the choices you make have consequences, and not just in how many rewards you get. It was after I lost B’Elana in the first play-through that I decided to start over: after all, she is so integral to my Voyager experience!
Still, that’s the beauty of Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown. Choices you make will influence how your journey proceeds. You can stick to what you remember from the series, or really forge your own path and see where it takes you. It also means no play-through is the same, and the replay value is high.
Combat in Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown
Lucky for me, there is a choice for one of three difficulty modes. You can go for Adventure, which lets you focus on the journey, the story and exploration. There’s Survival, where resources are more limited, and combat is more challenging. If you really want to go the hard way, the last mode is called Years of Hell, which seems to be the ultimate stress test. Needless to say, I went for the easiest one. Not really because the resources would be plenty and the away missions less challenging, but because combat is more manageable.
Still, combat is the element of the game I like least. Janeway gives the command on whether to use the offensive or defensive, and what to attack, the shields, weapons array and so on. Three chosen heroes can add extra evasive manoeuvres or attacks, and you can manually fire photon torpedoes. The Voyager turns and fires, and I had some extra volleys, but other than that, no idea really if I could do more. I’m fine with that, but if the combat is your main attraction, I can’t really tell you if it’s well implemented.
What’s nice, though, is that you can choose to auto-battle: just determine which heroes to use and how many photon torpedoes to spend, and the game shows you what the chance is for a successful fight.
Managing the Ship
This is where Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown shines, and why time flies by when I’m playing the game. I’m busy with clearing debris and making sure the crew is happy by providing sleeping quarters and food. Researching the tech tree in the science laboratory, so that innovations and improvements can be implemented. Fixing the Aeroshuttle bay so I can trade with others. Keeping an eye on resources, the hull integrity, the morale of my crew.
Scanning the system to see what resources I can find or other things to explore, answering distress calls, not sure what I’ll find. And meanwhile, fulfilling missions and extra requests, remembering that everything you do in the game needs a certain amount of cycles to finish. And for each cycle to ship uses energy, more energy if more parts of the ship are unlocked.
The heroes in the game, or the crew members I know so well from the series, can help when assigned to a certain department. Like having Neelix take care of the Mess Hall means an efficiency bonus for diplomacy, and +6 morale for every cycle. It’s all a fine balance, and with the chance elements, it can get challenging. I love it, and I can spend a lot of time making it just right.
Music, Graphics and More
The soundtrack for Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown isn’t very memorable. The intro has the title song for the tv-series which is nice, but I would have loved to hear more of the familiar tunes in the background.
There is no voice acting aside from a spoken text every time you enter a new sector. It’s a nice idea: the actor who played Tuvok voices his thoughts on the current status of the ship and its crew, and the actor who played Tom Paris does the same. As the two characters are so different, you get an entirely different viewpoint.
The graphics are great, flying through space is quite something, seeing the brilliant colours of nebulae and planets in the background. In the ship, you can magnify each room or workspace you created, and it’s like you’re looking into a diorama, seeing the crew busy at their stations or lounging on a bed. Or seeing them in the Holodeck, in one of the programs that are running.
There is a lot of text in the game, as every choice you have to make consists of text with choices. I was afraid it would be too small for my liking on the Switch 2 in handheld mode, but it’s not. Easily readable, they implemented that well.
Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown autosaves, but I think they are working to implement manual saves as well. Which would be welcome, as you might want to save when you go into a particularly difficult situation. There are several save slots, so your play-through stays safe if you want to start another one.
Conclusion
I’m loving my time with Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown and even writing about it, I find that I really just want to play it and see what’s next. The exploration is ace, the strategic management part is implemented well, and it is quite addictive to play. The away missions are interesting and tell a great storyline, endearing the character of that great tv show all over again. I could have done without the chance part of the choices that had to be made; it seemed so random. I think it would have been interesting enough to see what consequences the decisions had.
Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown is lovingly tailored for Star Trek fans, who already have an inkling of how a starship works and who love travelling with their favourite characters. It might be daunting at first when this is your first encounter with Star Trek, but I think it’s a great game for all fans of strategic management games. The different modes even give the possibility to play it in a more laid-back fashion, but be prepared that the random chance outcome might still cause you to see the Game Over screen.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot
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