At the end of next month Star Trek will break into a new area with the release of Star Trek: Bridge Crew, the first virtual reality game for the franchise. The Ubisoft game allows up to four players to work together as a crew to complete missions. Each player takes on a familiar Star Trek role: Captain, Helm, Engineering or Tactical. Ubisoft has released a video (below) that outlines how each of these work.
Back in September TrekMovie’s Brian Drew had a chance to to play in the Engineer position in an earlier version of the game; go check out his report here.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is set in the Kelvin Timeline and allows players to take command of the USS Aegis (NX-1787), a prototype vessel tasked with finding a suitable planet for the Vulcans to colonize after the loss of their homeworld in Star Trek (2009). There is also bonus content where you can play on board the original USS Enterprise. The new video below shows off more gameplay from Bridge Crew, featuring both ships.
New Screenshots
This week Ubisoft also released some new screenshots of Bridge Crew. Click to expand the photos if you want a closer look.
USS Aegis
USS Enterprise
Bridge Crew with just two players
Star Trek: Bridge Crew allows you to play together with up to three other players in co-op either in the same location or over the internet. But if you can’t get four together the game can fill positions with AI players. In our last update we featured a video with the team from UploadVR trying out the game, with four players. This week they released a new video showing how the game works with just two real players controlling two NPC players, showing how the human players can move from station to station and take over from the NPCs.
The game warps in next month
Star Trek: Bridge Crew will be released May 30th on the Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and HTC Vive platforms for $49.99. The game will be playable cross-platform, so if you and your friends all have different VR gear, you can still play together. For more information, surf on over to their official website.
Check back regularly for more news about what appears to be the most promising Star Trek game in many years.
You can pre-order it at at Amazon.
The price of the game recently dropped to $49.99 MSRP. Outlets like Amazon and Best Buy offer discounts for pre-orders or belonging to their gamer club so the actual cost for a lot of players will be $40, pretty cheap for a game today.
I own a Playstation VR so I’ll definitely be getting this when it is released at the end of may.
This game looks dope, I’m really excited about it. I hope I can get the equipment to play it soon!
Just as an FYI, VR with a Sony Playstation is probably the most inexpensive option while also the easiest to set up.
The PS4 Pro console retails for $400 (you can also go with a standard PS4 which retails for between $250-$300 but the Pro will give you a better VR image with most games) and the PSVR Bundle which includes the headset, camera and PS Move controllers (games like Bridge Crew typically work better with the Moves) retails for $500. So the whole setup would run you between $850 and $900. You’d probably need to spend at least that much or close to it just for a PC capable of doing VR and you’d still need to get the headset and controllers.
PSVR setup is pretty straightforward as well: plug the headset and PS4 into the included breakout box; plug the breakout box in to the TV, plug the camera into the PS4, pair the controllers and you are pretty much good to go. The console will download all updates automatically and there’s no fiddling with config files, incompatible hardware, etc.
Once you’ve experienced a few games in VR you’ll have a hard time going back to conventional 2D.
You’re talking about 2016 VR. This year, the HMDs, from other companies, will be better AND less expensive.
Really looking forward to when microsoft drops the Scorpio and this gets released on it. I’ve got an xb1 but I guess they’re doing VR with the Scorpio instead.
Scorpio is on my radar as well, though the chatter I’ve been hearing and reading is that MS won’t have anything substantial to announce on the VR front for it until 2018. Maybe they’ll release some concrete info at E3.
For fun, they should showcase an astronaut crew playing this came.
Can you play single player as well, or is it a minimum of two human players?