Redshirt Review

If you’d only heard cursory things about Redshirt, perhaps via the trailer, you might be shocked once you got into the game proper. While the premise is a fun lampooning of everything Star Trek (yes, it’s Galaxy Quest: The Game!) where you play as a character who starts out as a bottom-of-the-rung expendable crew member and works their way up through the ranks, the gameplay itself might give you a shock. Y’see, Redshirt isn’t just a Star Trek parody, it’s also riffing on Facebook, which is how the entire game plays – through the outer space version of Facebook. Now that’s a unique premise for a game, you’ve got to admit.

It’s also a rather difficult one to explain in more detail since a large part of the fun is in figuring out or realising things for yourself. I’ll try to be vague but informative... somehow. Anyway, you start out by customising a character and immediately you’ll get hit by two things: developer The Tiniest Shark’s (which is just a lady named Mitu Khandaker) sense of humour, and their attention to detail. Both of these are the best things about Redshirt. You get to choose from five races – Human, Asrion (combining Star Trek’s green lady Orions with Mass Effect’s Asari), Geldar (Ferengi), Emoid (uh, Twilight fans) and Xx’th’xx (the Space Mutants from The Simpsons, basically). Each one has cute quirks, like humans are “boring but everywhere” and Asrions are “apparently from a female-orientated society but are objectified by everyone else anyway”, and wonderful details, like the skin colour palette on the Asrions only allowing shades of green or blue. Little details and jokes are absolutely everywhere, whether it’s just a reference to Red Dwarf or a dig at the very nature of Facebook. You’ll either be charmed or you won’t like Redshirt.

Ahh, my Spacebook social map. At least 60% of these guys will be dead after a few Away Missions

The basic setup is that your character has been sent to the space station Megalodon-5 and that something is going to happen in 160 days, which takes the form of a countdown so is definitely not good. All your actions are done via the Facebook-alike “Spacebook” and you only have a few Action Points (events can take several, but just Liking a post cost 1 AP) allowed before you either have to go to sleep or go to work, so it’s up to you how you spend them. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that your ultimate goal is to get off the station before the countdown is up. Hints on how to do this pop up, but there are several ways you can succeed so it’s up to you what you’re going to go for. Do you stick in your dead-end job but concentrate on expanding your social tree or money pot, or do you work your way up the ranks and become someone important enough to survive?



Redshirt is an incredibly simple game to play but it’s amazingly addictive with all sorts of choice/consequence decisions going on all the time. Choose to go out for a meal with three friends and the ones you didn’t ask might get resentful, or worse the ones you did ask might not turn up and both your Happiness and Charisma ratings might take a knock. Your general stats incidentally are Happiness, Health, and Charismam but you also receive XP for your job as you improve at it, each friend has a bar representing how close you are to them, and there’s an absolute f***-ton of skills/interests/hobbies to upgrades through various means. If you’re going the career path you’ll need to keep on boosting your skill stats by attending relevant events (helpfully highlighted on the ‘Careers’ page for each job) as each job has particular qualifications, and woe betide you if you become friends with a potential boss and upset them – as I did, and suddenly the position of ‘Alert Systems Lightbulb Coordinator’ that I’d been training for over 20 days was unavailable to me. Cue some hardcore boss ass-licking, as also being really good friends with your potential boss can yield results (even if you’re unqualified!).

It’s almost like a Sims game where you’re only playing one person (in a Star Trek world). Aside from choosing things to do, like hang out with friends, cultivate relationships, improve skills by going on courses, buying various items of varying usefulness or just sit on your own staring into space, there are the mandatory events (sleeping, working, and eating, the only one you have a choice when to do) and surprise events. Friends can invite you to events, send you messages or relationship requests, something interesting could happen at work, but the biggest surprise is an Away Team mission. You have to go on these and things frequently go awry (you are a Redshirt after all), and you’ll be lucky if only one person dies. Occasionally you might even have to choose who’s left behind, and your Happiness level will absolutely plummet if a close friend dies on an Away mission. They add to the spice of the game, though.

Job Status Event pages are full of gags, with a little bit of useful information too. Expect to start clicking that ‘Skip Text’ button a lot

That’s pretty much Redshirt, and while there is a lot of detail in there to absorb and it’s extremely addictive it does get very, very repetitive. If you want to win (i.e. survive after 160 days) you have to be prepared to grind events, juggle friends, keep up your stats and your social ratings you’ll quickly find yourself doing the same things over and over again. That said the simplicity of it all is absolutely intentional, but while it never really gives you a chance to get bored you’ll also quickly work it out (which you’ll have to, since the game only tells you the basics). It’s funny, it’s addictive, but it’s a no-graphics Sims with a built-in time limit. It’s also got a few bugs, like a couple of times the ‘Continue’ button got stuck so I had to force quit the game (luckily it autosaves regularly), and one time I went from maximum Happiness (99) to maximum depression (-99) overnight seemingly for no reason.

If you spend time reading all the jokes or the endlessly repeating messages and leave your escape until the last minute Redshirt could last you up to 5 hours. Theoretically there’s replay value with several different ways of winning to try out, but it all gets so repetitive I can’t imagine I’d ever play it again, especially with the abrupt ending (whether you win or lose). It’s also the slightest bit pricey at £14.99/$19.99 for what it is. Redshirt is an entertaining experimental game with a good dose of humour, respect for all things sci-fi, and it’s undoubtedly a unique concept that’s been executed successfully by The Tiniest Shark. Unfortunately by setting a time limit and creating specific goals the fun of experimenting makes way to repetition and grinding, and while it had me assuredly hooked for the few hours I played it was mostly the speed everything happened at that kept me going rather than any particular enjoyment. Definitely worth a play if you like the idea of a Star Trek/Facebook parody game, but don’t expect any longevity from it. Now, make it online and fill the game with real people then you might just draw me back...