WARNING THIS PRODUCT IS ABANDONED. WARNING THIS PRODUCT IS ABANDONED.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY LIKE US POOR FOOLS, SAVE YOURSELF. TRUST THE OTHER NEGATIVE REVIEWS. I WANT MY 60 BUCKS BACK PARADOX.

Stop it. What you need to know is very simple. NO ONE BOUGHT (or should have bought) THIS GAME TO PLAY STELLARIS! Stellaris is unnecessarily overly complicated AND if they want to play Star Trek in that format, THERE IS A STELLARIS MOD FOR STAR TREK (and it existed before this game came out).

I do agree that if you are going to buy this game, you should get it on sale. Make no mistake—there are community mods, but THIS IS ABANDONWARE.

Star Trek: Infinite is a simplified version of Stellaris that is designed to cater more towards Birth of the Federation (BoF) fans and people not looking to figure out the Stellaris learning curve or the endless DLCs that add new things and break or complicate others.

For the most part, it succeeds. If anything, it is too much like Stellaris at times and in ways that don't make sense for the lore. Modders have done a good job of creating patches to fix certain issues or Stellaris mechanics that don't quite make sense in the source material.

That said, the biggest shortcoming is that it's abandonware. I can't understate that. After an initial lukewarm reception and Stellaris stans complaining that there's already a Star Trek mod they like better for Stellaris, Paradox shut it down and the devs closed up shop on this one just months after its release. All the great potential for additional playable races and balancing tweaks and graphical improvements will now likely never happen.

So who is this for? People who are looking for an experience that's somewhere between Birth of the Federation and Stellaris. If you prefer the overly complicated micromanagement of a full-fledged Paradox game, just stick with Stellaris and download the mods for Star Trek or recreate the major races with the robust empire creation system and call it good. YOU DON'T NEED THIS GAME TO PLAY STAR TREK STELLARIS IF YOU ALREADY OWN STELLARIS.

As someone who owns both and BoF, I don't want to wade through endless DLCs and Stellaris mechanics to play a 4X Star Trek game. Or try to explain to my friends who haven't tried Stellaris yet how to play just to play a Star Trek 4X game with them. Infinite is easier to teach and jump right into things.

Plus, there are a slew of good mods that fix a lot of my issues with the base game. There are fixes for science ships, Data, a more or less accurate Star Trek canon starting map, canon event mods, lots of mods that tweak quality of life aspects and other things, and there are some tweaks to how wars work as well (one of the big underdeveloped flaws in this version versus Stellaris, BoF, and others).

The unfortunate mod that doesn't seem to exist (last I checked) is one that alters how time passes in the game. It is perhaps the one port from Stellaris that is the most jarring and unrealistic. Time passes way too fast for the Star Trek universe (especially with as long as it can take to build things at times) and you can quickly zip past the normal timeline without the proper technological advancements or a chance to feel like we really accomplished very much.

It's not a mechanics issue. That part of the game plays just fine. It's just an immersion issue. So in most ways, it is a more minor gripe. But it's annoying all the same. Especially if you want real events to trigger based on the stardate because that means that a lot of stuff will be clumped together within a narrow window.

But in the end, I'd wait till it's on sale. If you don't have the time or energy to learn Stellaris and invest in its many mods or subscription model, this might be a game worth picking up if you are a Star Trek fan and are looking to scratch your itch for a 4X strategy game that's a bit more digestible and easy to pick up.

id refund if possible, they just left it in a ♥♥♥♥ state