As President T'Pragh of the United Federation of Planets, it's routine for me to hear from the USS Enterprise, the pride and joy of our fleet. It's another for the message sender to be tiresome prodigy Wesley Crusher, historical bearer of unwanted news. This time, Wesley isn't the problem. The problem is that the Federation doesn't even have the Enterprise yet - building the flagship is a milestone mission in the game, and at this current point in time, there is no possible Enterprise from which Ensign Crusher could be hailing me from. On an episode of The Next Generation, this could easily be a setup for a fun pocket dimension-themed episode or a time loop narrative, but it's not. This is the erratic world of Star Trek: Infinite, a grand strategy reskin of Stellaris that boldly goes to places that don't always make sense.
There are, in fact, two full-conversion Star Trek mods for Stellaris that have been around for years. This makes sense for a space strategy game largely defined by its intense mod scene, though Infinite is Paradox's first official Trek game. Grand strategy games and classic science fiction align beautifully for obvious reasons: both are full of bombastic moral posturing, self-righteous colonisation narratives, and big-picture civilisational themes that mostly end up being mindlessly subsumed into a desk marathon of bureaucratic reorganisation, unit micromanagement, and rote muscle memory. And while Paradox has done a much better job at engaging with its chosen source material than what Shiro Games did with the very forgettable Dune: Spice Wars 4X game (not to be confused with this now-defunct Dune Stellaris mod), the review version of Infinite still leaves much to be desired.
Featuring the Federation, Romulans, Klingons, or Cardassians as playable factions, Infinite kicks off around familiar Trek events, namely the immediate aftermath of the Khitomer Massacre and the impending explosion of the Romulan sun. There are more canonical milestones depending on your choices - if you play your cards right, you can even build everyone's favourite chaos zone, Deep Space Nine. The tutorial starts you off as the Federation, probably the most familiar way to navigate the byzantine crucible of playing Stellaris for the first time (or even the fifth time - it's a monster). But going the way of the Federation is the least imaginative way to live amongst the stars, spreading hyper-bureaucratic vibes and perfunctory diplomacy with fake hellos and soft handshakes; I had a much better time as Cardassians and Romulans, not just because I could play two wildly indulgent flavours of sociopathic asshole, but because there's a lot more room to have fun without the burden of being the galaxy's most self-important good guy.