It's a strange sensation playing Star Trek Legends. It has all the hallmarks of the kind of scummy gacha games that exist purely to extract money from people. But because it's on Apple Arcade, it has no microtransactions, energy meters, or other 'freemium' features designed to encourage players to reach for their credit cards. This means you can enjoy the positive qualities of a gacha game without having to endure the manipulative, bank-draining negatives, which is just refreshing.
In Star Trek Legends you command the U.S.S. Artemis, a starship created to rescue people trapped in an extra-dimensional realm known as the Nexus. If you've seen the movie Star Trek Generations, which introduced the Nexus, you'll know that basically anything can happen inside it—making it the perfect place to set a gacha game stuffed with iconic Star Trek heroes and villains who otherwise would never cross paths. As you play, you meet and recruit characters from every era of the show.
Commanding the Artemis, it's your job to fly into the Nexus, recruit famous faces from the history of Star Trek, and battle various threats—including a rogue AI, the Cardassians, and the Gorn. The self-aware story chips along at a breezy pace, and it's clear the writers are enjoying throwing these familiar characters together and imagining how they might interact. Michael Burnham from Star Trek Discovery is understandably shocked to witness Worf, a Klingon, proudly wearing a Starfleet uniform.
There are around 40 characters, all beautifully rendered in an expressive, cartoony style that brilliantly captures the quirks and identifying traits of their TV counterparts. There are plenty of big marquee names to add to your crew, including Spock, Kirk, Picard, and Janeway, but also some deeper cuts, such as Voyager's beleaguered medical hologram, Picard's hard-boiled detective alter ego Dixon Hill, and Deep Space 9's shapeshifting security chief Odo. It's basically one big fanfic, but I love it.
The bulk of the game is made up of fun, lively turn-based battles that have the feel of a classic JRPG. Your party's abilities reflect the characters you've picked, so Worf favours melee strikes with his trusty bat'leth, Dr. McCoy heals injured allies, and Geordi La Forge can use his tech skills to buff their energy shields. The animation is fantastic, which really brings the battles to life and injects the game with heaps of personality—even if the essentially non-s🔯top fighting does occasionally get repetitive.
It's a simple combat system, but with some interesting systems to play with. If you manage to reduce an enemy's morale, their attacks do less damage and they'll even flee the battle if it gets too low. Having Worf unleash a fearsome Klingon battle cry and seeing his opponent run away in terror is highly satisfying. It works the other way too: Picard can use his rep as a Starfleet legend to increase allies' morale, giving them a nice damage boost and the chance to sneak in an extra attack.
The gacha element in Star Trek Legends lies in how you recruit people from the Nexus. As you play through the story, a currency called Summon Orbs is earned that can be used to power up a transporter and unlock a random character. There are plenty of junk pulls, like nameless redshirt security officers, but there's also that small, tantalising chance you'll summon someone exciting. Yeah, it's a slot machine—but the fact you can only earn orbs, and not buy them, makes it feel way less gross.
Star Trek Legends is weird. It's the archetypal freemium mobile game in almost every respect, but with no pop-ups or notificians trying to get you to spend money, and currency that can only be earned in-game. I get the feeling that one day it'll be released outside of Apple Arcade and become the game it was always designed to be. But until then, I'm enjoying playing one of these games without feeling guilty about it. It also helps that I'm a huge Star Trek nerd and it's laser-targeted at me.