New game on the way, Star Trek Timelines

Games developer Disruptor Beam have announced they are working on a new Star Trek game, coming at an as yet undetermined future time to Apple, Android, and web-browsers. Star Trek Timelines is set to pull elements from across the prime-timeline universe. At this stage there are few details about exactly what the game will involve, but they have indicated it will have some similarities with their existing Game of Thrones game, with an emphasis on dialogue driven story telling, and crafting, and for the new Star Trek game, an extra focus on exploration. They have laid out their plans for the game in a blog post, including a summary of how they intend to pull different aspects and time periods of Star Trek together:

Temporal anomalies, mirror universes and time travel have been recurring themes throughout all the Star Trek series and several of the films. This will form the basis of Star Trek Timelines, and gives us the opportunity to explore a lot of “what-if” scenarios: what if Spock and Jean-Luc Picard got to serve on the same ship? What would it be like to have members of the mirror universe’s Terran Empire on your crew? This game will allow you to join forces with your favorite characters from across the many eras and universes from Star Trek lore—and then make decisions that impact the future of civilizations, star systems and the galaxy itself.

They have also noted their aims for gameplay, making it clear they don't want to be just about running around and shooting stuff:

Let’s talk for a moment about what Star Trek Timelines won’t be: it isn’t a first-person shooter or a MMORPG-oriented environment where the action is about running around and blasting everyone with your phasers. There are already Star Trek games that feature first-person action—and we also feel that a combat-oriented game wouldn’t really capture the vision of Star Trek. Instead, we’re going to focus on giving you beautiful vistas of outer space, artistic renderings of your favorite characters, and a conflict mechanic where science and diplomacy are just as important as your ability to fire photon torpedoes. This means that some aspects of the game will be more “abstract” than you’d experience in a first-person perspective game – but we think it’s the right way to create the right experience for Star Trek.

You can read more about what they hope to achieve, on their blog. They've also released this tease trailer:



Continue after the jump for a look back at a couple of other recent Star Trek mobile games:

I've managed to completely ignore a lot of the mobile games in recent times, in large part because they keep releasing them only for Apple devices - Something I'm glad to see Timelines won't be constraining themselves with. But there have been a couple of quite interesting games in recent times, so I guess I should catch up!

Late last year the Trexels sub-brand came full circle, and turned from being a graphical interpretation of Star Trek based on old video game, into a new video game in the classic 8-bit style. The Trexels game blurs the lines between TOS and TNG, with a classic Enterprise setting, accessed through an LCARS interface, and with appearances from aliens from both series.

There are several different elements to the game, including space exploration, building your ship, and selecting your crew for a variety of missions. The game is also narrated by George Takei (aka Mr Sulu). Here's a trailer:

Also released last year, around the time Into Darkness came out, was a nuTrek game, Rivals. A digital trading card game, the biggest draw for me for this one is that is features cards with many of the new aliens and ships from the films, and tells us who they are! Here are a few examples:

Of course this one has a trailer too:



That trailer features ships built by The Light Works, who created the new ship images featured on the cards in the game too. The Light Works website posted several of those images, which are very pretty, so I'll leave you with those: