I’ve been playing Stark Trek: Timelines for about a month now, and so I have more refined thoughts beyond my initial review. I’m not changing my review, but I just thought I would leave some of my thoughts out here:

• There are a ton of bugs, questionable design choices, unbalanced or unfinished features. The devs have been slowly addressing them, and you learn to live with it, but it still kind of sucks. That’s the price you pay for starting at the very beginning. It feels like we’re beta testing, but I hear there was an actual beta test
• At some point, you accumulate enough “free” currency (credits and merits) that it basically becomes infinite (unless you go crazy and spend on things you can’t use/store). There’s no way at all the get premium currency without paying $$ though, so it is very difficult to play more or play strategically to get premium currency items (like new ships/rare or higher crew)
• While you might have some sentimental attachment to one or two star crew (you might like the character or they might seem to have useful traits or you might have spent a lot of time levelling them), it is almost always better to just chuck them since you have limited crew quarters (with few exceptions that are needed for missions, like 2 star Data). You should concentrate on levelling rare or higher crew for later episodes (and epic/elite missions). Although I still carry around a few single-skill 2 star characters because their skill level is sufficiently high for the missions I’m working through (prior to Episode 4).
• There is too much stuff to craft and collect for your crew, that I think it’s impossible to play this game systematically without a spreadsheet. If you don’t use one, then you’re wasting a lot of time doing duplicate things.
• The gist of this game is that it is about collecting (with arbitrary resource limits). There is a “story” but after you’ve played a mission 50 times to farm an item, it doesn’t matter anymore (it’s not that compelling anyways). You craft items and upgrade your crew, in order to go on more missions. However the missions get too hard, so you have to craft items and upgrade your crew again. It’s an endless cycle/time sink.

I’m at a point where I’m getting diminishing returns from the game now. I’m trying to decide when a good stopping point is, should I just move to another game or should I wait until the end of the current bonus period and see whether the (next) rewards are worth it?

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: games, startrek