Star Trek Online Review

Space combat consists of warping into a system and if you are lucky, seeing several targets highlighted in red in the distance. You have to maneuver within weapon range before you can launch your attack. Since this is space, combat is a 360 degree affair. You have forward and rear facing beam weapons and torpedo launchers which must be brought to bear on your target before you can fire. Couple these firing arcs with fore, aft, starboard and port shields and you have an exciting combat experience. As your shields stop incoming attacks, they reduce and eventually fail leaving your bare hull exposed. As one shield weakens, you try to rotate your ship to allow your ship time to recharge the weakened section of shield (or pump more energy into it), while still keeping the enemy in your firing arc. Your ship officers have special abilities that can aid in combat by debuffing the enemy, healing yourself or allies or boosting your attack. This part of the game is fun and challenging especially when fighting a large number of enemies and when playing with teammates.

Ground combat is a bit underwhelming. For these missions you beam down to a planet or space station with you team mates or with NPCs in the form of your bridge officers. You then move around the map encountering groups of enemies whom you engage with phasers, disrupters, deployable items such as turrets and when the enemy gets too close, melee attacks. While directional attacks something you have to worry about in space due to shield strength, you have to pay attention to getting flanked while on ground missions due to increased damage and the chance to be stunned for a period of time. Also similar to space battles, you can make use of items or special attacks to help take out the bad guys. Fallen enemies drop items that can range from weapons, armor, and consumables like food and hypos that will heal your character. The combat, in my opinion, does not do much to distinguish itself from other MMO games. While the different environments do provide for a suitable sci-fi setting and you will face all sort of aliens from the Star Trek universe, in the end the enemies don't provide much difference as they all fight pretty much the same, one to another. Some enemies use ranged attacks, some fight close up but overall, it does not matter if its Klingons or Gorn, ultimately they all die the same.

One of these doors is bound to lead to the toilette.

So ends Vince's sci-fi opera!

Completing these quests grants bridge officer points that you use to upgrade your character's skills and other rewards like items to improve your starship, your bridge officers or gives you tokens that can be traded in at star bases for special items. Running missions with teammates speeds up the process of gaining officer points and moving you to your next promotion (aka level). While you start with a Federation character, once you hit level 5 you can create a Klingon officer which has a much stronger emphasis on player versus player (PvP) combat, not to mention ships that can cloak in combat. You can also engage in Fleet Actions which are essentially public quests that everyone in the area can participate in and in some cases involve PvP combat. These are fun and offer a break from the other missions but suffer balancing issues if you don't have enough people from your side. You can quickly find yourself on the wrong side of a warp core breach but in the end that's not as bad as it sounds. More on that in a minute.

Graphically the game looks great. Space backdrops are colorful and are usually populated with interesting little bits of window dressing. Planet side missions are likewise (usually) attractive. The developers talked early on during the games' development about the game's ability to randomize the various features of a planet to makes things alien, exotic and most of the time, interesting. This is good because some of the non-combat ground missions are deathly boring. Running around looking for five kinds of rocks to scan gets real old, real quick. Space combat is also visually pleasing as ship's shields fail from repeated attacks and the hulls change from perfection to a charred, pitted exterior venting atmosphere and flames from different points before exploding in violent fireballs. Straying too close to these eruptions will damage your own ship, but getting a closer look at the fireworks is sometimes worth it.

Audio in the game is top-notch. All the usual sound effects from the series are in place here. The original sounds for weapons, scanners, alarm claxons and even messages from computer are present and have not gotten old in all the time I have been playing. Music is also made up of many of the original orchestrations from the movies and TV series which really add to the whole Star trek experience in game. This is one area where the game really shines.

Gameplay is where things don't gel as well as they should. While the idea of going out to fulfill missions in a universe where everything seems to be against the Federation and its lofty goals sounds like a good thing, in practice, some things just don't add up. After all this is an MMO and you must to allow the player some level of freedom but some of this really hurts the suspension of disbelief. First, there are dozens of other players running around the galaxy going about their missions as you chase down your tasks which is what you'd expect in any MMO. However, with so many Federation ships crawling around the sector, it's a bit like rush hour in Los Angeles. With this many ships, the Federation should be roll over any threat that comes its way.