A peaceful mix of exploration and strategy, Outposts Unknown lets you build, manage, and bond with your crew—while hinting at greater depth still to come.
If you are looking for a cozy, relaxing, low-stress game to occupy your free time, Star Trek: Outposts Unknown is a good contender. Based on what we played in the demo, which dropped on Steam on June 7, those who enjoy the city building genre could find a lot to like here.
The game begins with a positive first impression, as a lovely beauty shot of the hero ship, the U.S.S. Resonant, at warp as it heads to the X’Lehari System. Upon starting a new game, a familiar face from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds introduces you to your mission.
Your team is the first from Starfleet to touch down on Daegus, and there’s plenty of work to do to get a base up and running. The game features a day/night cycle; during the day, your team works collecting resources, exploring the environment, and standing up buildings. During the night, everybody goes back to the ship to rest — or, if they didn’t make it back to the shuttle in time, sleep on the ground, protected by a nifty forcefield. It’s a nice little attention to detail.
If you’ve played games in the city building genre, you know there are many interweaving systems that judge how well your base is doing and if you are succeeding in your mission. The demo for Outposts Unknown contains what appears to be most of the buildings you will be able to build, but there are a few menus’ worth of material missing from the demo — a perfectly understandable drawback of playing the game in this early state, and something the devs acknowledge in their welcome message on the main menu.
Beyond base building, you need to manage your team, too. You can keep track of their assignments, health, skillset, fatigue level, and much more. You also need to keep them out of danger, something easier said than done when predatory plants pop up out of nowhere. At one point, one of our crewmembers died, and we don’t know why. We presume he was engaged with a deadly plant, but there was no pop-up message we saw to help us reconcile why our away team was suddenly down a man. We’ll chalk this up to a bug and we’ll forever mourn Ensign Redshirt.
We appreciate how Outposts Unknown gives you ownership over your team. It starts from the beginning of the game, when you select either Alpha or Beta team to land on the planet. Each person in your team is named, has their own character portrait, and their own particular skillset. We only wish the character portraits were more lifelike — as is, they look rough, like mobile game-quality graphics. Besides this graphical drawback, we think players will naturally start to care about what happens to their team as they build out their base.
Some miscellaneous thoughts from our time with Outposts Unknown:
- The game can be relaxing, a feeling encouraged by the lovely ambient music, which contains hints of the TOS and SNW main title themes.
- We imagine some people will find Outposts Unknown a pleasant experience while consuming content on a second screen. You don’t need to have eyes glued to this game at all times to enjoy it and manage your base.
- The ability to speed up time is welcome, but we wish we could speed it up more. Or maybe we just need to be better at mining resources required for buildings.
- The game’s weather effects, such as storms, provide some variety to the environment — and some risks to your team and buildings.
- There’s a lot to learn, even in this demo, and we wish the codex of tutorials was searchable. There was one point where we wanted to learn what a particular resource was, and we had to cycle through a few menus to find it.
Ultimately, our time with the Outposts Unknown demo showed that Star Trek can legitimately work in the popular city building sub-genre of games. The game may lack some graphical polish in its current state, but there are certainly plenty of gameplay systems to keep track of as the crew of the Resonant work in the X’Lehari System. We look forward to seeing how the full game expands on what we’ve seen.
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