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Halfway through my first delightful hour with Star Trek: Bridge Crew, I started to realise I had played it before.This was unlikely, of course. Bridge Crew is not a sequel. Instead, it's the kind of game idea that, written down, reminds you why Ubisoft remains the most whimsical and idiosyncratic of publishers. A game in which four friends get together - in virtual reality, right? - to engage in the enlightened forum that is the command center of a Federation starship. I was pretty sure, as I sat in the big chair, directing my tactical officer to engage with something or other, that I had probably not played anything like this before. And yet a persistent nagging at the back of my mind was telling me that I had.
Spaceteam? Spaceteam is close: a game about buttons and iPads and shouting at friends. Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator? Also close, although I'll admit I haven't experienced that one first-hand. Okay, so Bridge Crew has a clear lineage in other games that are about running spaceships, but there's something else here, a connection I hadn't made before but which now seemed obvious. I sensed that Ubisoft had done this before. Ubisoft had made another game that was just as weird and unlikely as this. Was it a quiet trend? For years, Ubisoft had quietly been trying to make a decent game about talking.
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