A hundred years into the future, the player leads a group of human colonists in a war for survival against hostile alien forces and untrustworthy allies.
This game provides examples of:
- 2-D Space: Averted. You can move your ships in the z-axis to some extent, although most of the action takes place in a kind of 2-D plane since most solar systems behave this way.
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Solar systems are massively downscaled in order for missions to take minutes, not years.
- All Planets Are Earthlike: Averted. Despite initial hopes that Vesta, a planet practically on Earth's doorstep in galactic terms, is colonizable, it turns out to have a toxic atmosphere. Furthermore, none of the other star systems in the game have any indication of having remotely habitable planets.
- Artistic License – Space: Ignoring the scale of the campaign maps (see Acceptable Breaks from Reality above), a handful of suns shown are green, which is not possible under the current understanding of stellar physics.
- While every star system shown in the game is a real-life star (excluding the Nue-Guyen "Mother"), several do not match their real-life spectral type, which is made more jarring when some stars are shown accurately (such as Proxima Centauri and Arcturus).
- Civil Warcraft: Any time you have to fight Kristoff's forces.
- Cool Gate: The titlular wormholes. Basically a combination of this and Swirly Energy Thingy with DNA-shaped pink and blue strands coming out from the middle.
- Disk-One Final Boss: Kristoff and his flagship, Mjolnir, taken down in the 9th mission out of 16.
- Dyson Sphere: The Nue-Guyen home system appears to be an organic variation on this.
- The Empire: The New Terran Dynasty is effectively this.
- Insane Admiral: Kristoff, full stop. Such is his reputation even at the start of the game, before he goes off the deep end and attacks the Proximan stations when the colonists refuse martial law.
- Keystone Army: The remainder of Kristoff's forces surrender or flee upon the destruction of the Mjolnir. It's implied the Entrodii are finished once their home base at Cygnus X-1 is destroyed.
- Non-Entity General: Effectively averted. The tutorial mission is Chancellor Corynn advising Jacob Viscero, implying you are the latter character.
- Organic Technology: Anything and everything Nue-Guyen. This is why they initially mistook the Terrans for the Entrodii.
- Portal Network: The titular gates, the means by which all factions are able to travel between star systems. With the first gate discovered by humans located in the Proxima system, it's implied Sol is "off the grid" until you find a back-door to Sol used in Mission 10.
- Standard Sci-Fi History: You've got your World War III, your Interstellar Exploration and Colonization at, appropriately enough, Proxima Centauri, and your First Contact scenario, all in that order.
- Space Whale: The Nue-Guyen are an entire faction of this, though they also have Space Squid, Space Eels, and more. Whether some or all of these are Nue-Guyen themselves or merely Organic Technology is unclear.
- Starfish Aliens: Both the Nue-Guyen, who are peaceful and eventually able to communicate with humans, and the Entrodii, who are hostile and entirely inscrutable.
- Trading Bars for Stripes: You, funny enough. Jacob Viscero used to be a pirate, and is effectively blackmailed into working for the Proximan Defense Corps or be turned over to Insane Admiral Kristoff, so it's a mix of this and Boxed Crook.
- Uriah Gambit: The entire colonization initiative is this; the real purpose was to exile anybody with the potential to become a threat to Prime Minister Drake's de-facto dictatorship.
- Uncertain Doom: Mission 10 pulls this on the ENTIRE SOL SYSTEM by ending with an Entrodii fleet entering as the Proximans flee. We never see or hear from Drake, the New Terran Dynasty, or Jacobs former pirate associates again.
- Worker Unit: Utility Pods for mining, and Tugs for towing Prefab Kits and any disabled ships.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Subverted twice. The captured Navy officers reveal a previously-unknown wormhole back to Earth in "The Reckoning," and the game ends with the terraforming of Vesta.
