Nearly a year after launch, Star Trek: Bridge Crew

see deal Star Trek Bridge Crew - PlayStation 4 $49.96 on Walmart

While using this iconic new ship, the usual Engineer role gets swapped out for Operations. You still have similar responsibilities to the Engineer - charging warp coils and allocating power - but Operations is also given a side-view map of the Enterprise and a hand full of generic crew to move around it. Moving them to certain systems will provide different bonuses to your ship, and is basically a little mini-game in itself.

Loading

Those bonuses can be simple, like decreasing the time it takes to charge your warp coils or reducing damage from anomalies, but they can also sometimes influence other players. For example, having someone at the Phasers station will add an active reload-style bar to the Tactical role’s attacks, rewarding good timing with extra damage. Operations also has to move crew to damaged systems to repair them, giving them a lot more to juggle than their Engineer counterparts.

“ There’s just something so wonderfully 80’s about blasting Romulans from a woodgrain control panel.

The interior of the Enterprise-D has also been painstakingly recreated here, and it looks great. Ubisoft tells me they spoke with the original designers of the ship and its interfaces to make sure the in-game displays you use match the style of both the show and the era. That care definitely shines through, and there’s just something so wonderfully 80’s about blasting Romulans from a woodgrain control panel.

And, oh yeah, there are Romulans now. The Next Generation DLC doesn’t just bring a new ship; it brings new enemies, including cloaking Romulans and the oppressively powerful Borg cube. Fighting the Borg is actually a whole new mission in itself, and I’m not overstating their strength. There’s no way to kill the Borg cube when you first face it, forcing you to jump away in search of three different pieces of a prototype weapon before you can even hope to turn and fight.

Loading

The Borg chase is a tense mission, with the cube constantly chasing you down. Every time you jump to a new location in search of a prototype piece, you only have a few minutes before the Borg jump in behind you and open fire. Once you get all three pieces, you can finally disable their otherwise endless regeneration and start doing some real damage. Then it turns into a still relatively lopsided slugfest, but one where resistance isn’t quite so futile.

The Next Generation is something fans have been clamoring for since launch, and this update is certainly faithful to the source material. On top of that, Ubisoft seems to be using this DLC as an opportunity to address some of the criticism initially thrown at Bridge Crew, which is encouraging to see. The Operations role adds some welcome nuance to combat (even if it doesn’t drastically change things) and I doubt people will want to go back to the older ships once it’s out.

The Next Generation DLC will be available on PS4 first (playable with or without VR) on May 22, followed by PC on July 21.

Tom Marks is IGN's PC Editor and pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter