The official Star Trek: Lower Decks idle game! Finally, after yet another tedious duty roster, the Lower Decks crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos is ready to party at a Zebulon Sisters concert! Tendi's even more excited, as this’ll be her first Chu Chu Dance! But first, they need to get through routine training exercises on the holodeck, which Boimler has been entrusted to organize. Boimler? With power? When has that ever been good? Impatient to get to the dance, the crew try to end the simulation only to find the Cerritos' computer has been hijacked by rogue AI Badgey. He's locked them in the holodeck and deactivated all safety protocols – so now Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford and Mariner must work through Star Trek stories, both familiar and new, so they can return to the real world. But be careful – if they don’t succeed, they'll die for real. And even worse: they'll miss the party!
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The game itself is quite simple. Icons charge up, when they’re ready you tap on it to get merit points. You spend these merit points to upgrade the icons and unlock new ones, which lead to more merit points. You can add a member of the Ceritos crew to a task to collect the merit points automatically. On top of merit points, you can get latinum (which is spent to skip requirements for buying/upgrading new things, or dilithium which is spent on upgrading characters and simulations.
What makes the game work are the little story segments you get as you hit milestones. The dialogue is extremely charming and it’s great seeing the Lower Deckers take on these missions. It’s great seeing them talk about the Kelpians and Saru, and to chase the artic explorer from the Enterprise episode “Regeneration” and realise that these unknown aliens the NX-01 faced were the Borg.
Getting in the way of this game is the adverts. If you don’t watch the adverts, your merit points are effectively halved. If the adverts were harmless, I wouldn’t mind, but I was served adverts for fake apps, apps aimed at taking advantage of gambling addicts and even adverts for games about sexually assaulting women. It massively sours the experience and it desperately needs some moderation.
I got to episode 16 before I hit the inevitable “wall” where progression turned from a few hours to weeks. At this point, the chore of playing wasn’t worth it to see more snippets of the story. I would much prefer this game in the form of a digital comic.