Parents' Guide to Star Trek: Legends

This role-playing game lets Star Trek fans live out their dream scenarios of sending out the perfect away team, completing missions, and saving the universe. Star Trek: Legends puts players in the captain's chair, letting them direct missions to planets and destroyed colonies in an attempt to figure out what's happening inside the mysterious portion of space known as the Nexus. But instead of sending faceless characters or redshirts on missions to possibly be captured or killed, you can send some of your favorites from the seven TV shows and the franchise movies. That means that you could put Picard on a team with a Borg maintenance drone, or Captain Kirk with The Gorn, letting players establish their own dream team squad scenarios. Each character has unique abilities, so you can make a fight easier or harder based on the strengths and weaknesses of your squad. While combat is a large focus, there are occasional branching paths in missions where you'll need to make a decision about how you want your team to proceed, using their individual skills. Successful completion of missions provides extra shards of characters that you can collect to eventually recruit them to your ship, and gives you the option to send shuttle teams back to these areas to mine additional resources and experience. Players can also take these teams and pit them against other players' squads, although this is a limited "multiplayer" experience without any player interaction.

It's great that a lot of attention is paid to the combat, and that it's so solid, because the story is largely forgettable. It's more of a way to introduce new characters and scenarios to fight through, although the difficulty will spike sharply at moments, forcing you to grind past previously defeated levels to earn enough items and experience to strengthen your squad. This would be where a free-to-play game's microtransactions would force players to spend money to bypass these hurdles, but since Legends is part of Apple Arcade, you're spared this headache. The result is that you actually enjoy replaying missions, collecting characters, and testing new squads. By keeping the focus on gameplay instead of microtransactions, Star Trek: Legends provides an entertaining adventure with beloved characters that should keep new fans and dedicated Trekkers entertained for a while.