Kevin C. Wong

iOS - Star Trek Fleet Command (2018) [+]

Star Trek Fleet Command is a free-to-play 4X game set in the Star Trek Universe, more or less in the post Next Generation movies + Kelvin universe timelines.You start with a base and a ship. Explore star systems. Complete missions you pick up (and some missions affect your faction status: help the Klingons and they like you more but other factions may like you less). Generate and mine resources. Research technology (there are six categories with simple but deep trees). Upgrade your crew, ships and starbase.

There is a whole lot to do in this game and you can pretty much spend your time constantly in the game, at least for the first few days (it can slow down once your build and research queues get stuck with long jobs). You start out as an independent in neutral space with the Federation, Romulan and Klingons a week or two of solid playing away (you have a player level and each system has a level so you can tell how tough it is). The missions are varied and have plot lines with the same characters continuing to ask you to do missions.

On the downside there is a fairly advantageous PvP aspect. Killing ships can get you loot boxes and that includes killing player ships. But also killing player ships captures most of their cargo, if they had any (which means mining ships become targets). You can also attack starbases for experience and probably loot. I leveled up to the PvP part and got attacked a few times when I left my ship idle too long. Once I level up to where people can attack my base I can see sleepless nights and because of that I'm quitting the game after three or four days of play.

The game is almost good enough as a standalone solo game of 4X plus exploration, that's how much effort they put into it. Still, the freemium model and PvP aspects means this is not a game for me.