With every major movie franchise release we expect a slew of tie/cash-in games, McDonald’s happy meals and – perplexingly – novelisations. Why should Star Trek: Into The Darkness be any different? Enter Star Trek: Rivals, a two player card game featuring many pictures of Chris Pine making this face.

Gameplay

Rivals takes place on a 3×3 grid where players take it in turns to lay a card, tic-tac-toe style. The cards themselves are marked with numbers on each of the four sides and, when placed next to an enemy card, the card with the lowest orthogonally adjacent value is flipped over to the opponent colour scoring a point for them.

This may remind you of the Final Fantasy VIII mini-game, Triple Triad, which has clearly influenced the game’s designers. Unlike Triple Triad, Rivals only features one mode and riffs on the original’s ‘Combo’ rule set. Combo causes a chain reaction to occur when a card is flipped over, flipping over all the cards which it had previously dominated. This opens up some degree of strategic play as you will want to ensure that that every card you place has its weaker faces well guarded, while leaving a stronger face to resist enemy point scoring.

Implementation

Aesthetically, Rivals has a lot to offer fans of the modern Star Trek films, with over 100 characters, starships and locations from the JJ Abrams’ reboot. Unlike the spectacular Wizzkids’ Star Trek: Fleet Captains (a card based board game that draws from TOS, Generation, DS:9 and Voyager), Rivals doesn’t have a vast amount of canonical material to base its cards on. Hence, many of the cards are minor characters that even JJ Abrams has never heard off, just to pad out the paid-for content.

On first loading the app, it’d be soulless not to notice how well put together the user interface is, which ties into the reboot movies visual design stunningly. Everything is slickly animated and the sounds have a real Star Trek feel to them, but after the six or seventh time of watching transporter effect as a card is played, the form is noticeably interfering with function – slowing down the game while you’re forced to watch an animation.

Card games in general work wonderfully on iOS, as Summoner Wars and many others demonstrate. Rivals biggest mistake is that it doesn’t seem to understand its own payment model. Collectable card games – CCGs – are popular as physical objects beyond their mere ‘gameness’, because you can trade for ones you want, you can complete the sets, take part in the compulsive collecting of the game. In another iOS CCG, Assassin’s Creed Recollection, this was simulated by the addition of a trading market, allowing players some control of the cards they were getting. Sadly, to complete the collection of Rivals’ card you’ll have to just keep buying packs or grind playing the game with lousy cards until you get the ones you want. The upshot is that purchase is incentivised by access to the strongest cards. The scourge of pay-to-win is visited upon yet another multiplayer game, collapsing the balance and spoiling the gameplay experience.

And that’s a shame, because the game itself is fun, to a point. The skill is in your decision making, working out which risks you’re willing to take and hoping that any risky moves can be undone with a smart combo. It’s a smart little game, with a lot of potential for feeling like you’ve outsmarted your opponent and should be a popular game with families to play on their iPad. Unfortunately, that ‘should be’ is purely speculative. Once again we see a game that seems designed for pass-and-play, yet only offers online multiplayer. Personal theories about trying to force people to purchase extra card packs aside, it’s also a poor design decision because this is a game that should be about the same length as tic-tac-toe and the asynchronous game play takes too damn long to be fun.

Verdict

Rivals offers the possibility of being a fun, if shallow casual game, but fails to deliver where it counts. Younger, less demanding gamers may get more out of the app and enjoy the licensed Star Trek art, though parents may baulk at shelling out for the rather over priced and cynical expansion packs. To make matters worse, after every turn you play a full screen pop up ad urges you play another free-to-play pay-to-win game or Groupon.