Review: Star Trek Online

The USS Damocles in Stardock.

I’ve been spending time trying to figure out how to start this review. I suppose I could be all cliche and do a “Captain’s Log” monologue. Or perhaps even a “Space, the final frontier!” Perhaps i’ll go for “Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow, klingons on the starboard bow, wipe them out Jim! Star Trekking across the Universe, we keep going forwards we cannae find reverse!”

Star Trek is a part of all our lives. It gives us a dream of a future where we’re part of a big galaxy full of aliens, where money and corruption have been replaced by utopia and where our dreams can come true in the stars. You’d have to be living in the deepest darkest cave to not have heard of the USS Enterprise, or Kirk, or Picard (Kirk beats Picard) or any number of Star Trek stories. These are the voyages, and we are the viewers. There is no other sci-fi out there that has really ever been able to take our hearts as much as Star Trek.

Star Trek Online attempts to capture this magic by allowing the viewer to become the captain of his voyage. You begin your story with Leonard Nimoy telling you what’s been happening in the Universe (the primary Universe. Universe A. Whatever.) he left behind. Doom and destruction basically: the Klingons are at war with you again, the Romulans are rather miffed their homeworld has been destroyed, and the Federation is under attack on all sides. You start as a hapless Ensign on board a starship currently in the midst of a battle with the infamous Borg. The tutorial briefly gives you explanation as to how to move, jump and interact in your environment. It seems the Captain of your ship needs you to beam to another ship and save the crew from a borg attack. It’s all rather frantic and gives you a start to how the ground combat of Star Trek Online functions. Before you know it you become the captain of your own ship (the original captain seems to magically dissapear, and the chain of command seems to be totally wiped out leaving you in charge…oddly) and you’re racing across the stars to fight off the borg attack, where once again the tutorial gives you a brief introduction in how to fire phasers and move about in three dimensional space. Finish the mission then warp out!

Ground combat can be very pretty at times

Did that sound a bit to frantic to you? Well the problem is that it is. The tutorial is a heavy weakness on Star Trek Online. It’s overall designed to be exciting and to get you into Star Trek Online as fast as possible, but as tutorials go it falls flat on its face when it comes to providing information. You don’t find out for instance that you can control the amount of allocation you can give to particular parts of you ship, like shields or phasers. You don’t find out for instance that your ship has a particular firing arc, and how to use your ship most effectively when it comes to offense and defense. You don’t really find out alot of stuff that quickly becomes important and beneficial to know later on.

Despite this, STO can be a very fun game. Allowing you to both command your own vessel in space as well as beam down onto planets or spaceships is a great idea by Cryptic, and keeps the entertainment of Star Trek Online mixed. Funnily enough it only just works thanks to the transporter technology of the Star Trek world. Although there’s alot of loading, you don’t feel it so bad because your beaming down and up as you go. Quests in STO are performed in what is known as “Episodes.” These episodes mix and match the ground or space combat and the scenarios that take place; whether it’s dogfighting, beaming down to save hostages or planting a bomb on a research facility. Its entertaining enough that you won’t get bored while playing the episodes.

Space combat is where the real meat of the game comes from though. Movement is more like Freelancer than Eve Online, and the larger your ship is the more sluggish it becomes when it turning or in general movement. Rather than flooding you with numerous skills, upgrades and items for your ship, STO supplies you with only the choice of phasers, disruptors or torpedos, and your ships will have a specific limit to how many weapons you can equip. Your starter ship for instance has a forward and rear phaser array, and a forward torpedo, but your next ship may have a forward and rear torpedo.

This doesn't end well for me.

The choice of how you load out your ship is up to you, and allows for variation in tactics. Different phasers have different firing arcs; your laser based weapons that you commonly see in the series or movies have a wide phaser arc, but the damage is not as effective as a phaser cannon that has a narrow firing arc. This can lead to numerous weapon variations later on depending on what sort of fighting style you wish to have. Photon and quantum torpedoes make an appearance and are extremely deadly damage dealing missiles that pack a punch. The disasdvantage with them however is that in order to make a huge amount of damage you need to bring down the enemies shields.

You can see the tactics already. Sweep in with a wide firing arc to bring down one side of the enemies shields, turn in and fire a torpedo salvo, then sweep out and fire with rear phasers to make sure the torpedo hits home. Rinse, repeat. Despite this the action never gets boring and actually becomes fairly intense. Enemies can stack on top of you and shoot you from all angles, so it’s important to turn your ship as appopriate to make sure they hit shields rather than hull. If you’re not careful a torpedo volley can absolutely rip through your hull and in the worst case, destroy you.

As well as typical weapon arrays, you also have your own skills to choose from depending on what you choose as a class. Comparisons between STO’s classes and other MMO’s are actually quite difficult as by all intents whatever class you choose you’ll be able to tank in whatever ship you wish. Nevertheless the classes give specific skills that you can deploy in space and on the ground. Tactical officers for instance can fire multiple torpedoes or perform a fire at will attack on multiple targets. Engineers can deploy shield improvements or disrupt enemy sensors. Scientists can deploy tractor beams or even black holes to suck enemies into firing range while causing damage.

Space is big and beautiful.

Things then start to get a bit more complicated in the form of Bridge Officers. These NPC’s are alot like Guild War’s “Heroes” in that they fight for you and offer there own special set of skills. Your ship can use up to four bridge officers to offer different skills in offense and defense, while in ground combat your BO’s can fight and use skills quite actively, such as dropping shield generators or healing devices. Be warned though that when it comes to training up skills your bridge officers are limited to what they can use on the ship, another useful tidbit that’s omitted from the tutorial.

Where space combat is the meat, ground combat is a veg. At times it’s the yucky vegetable as well and you’re forced to eat it. Ground combat doesn’t feel nearly as sleek or as fun as space combat, but is still a worthwhile addition to the game. The problem I think with ground combat is that it almost throws you into an entirely different game with different rules. Here STO starts to mimic the more traditional MMO’s, with the unusual addition that instead of party members of your friends you have your bridge officers instead to fight along with you. At times it can be rather fun, particularly if you manage to set up your bridge officers really well, but other times it feels sluggish, slow and irritating.

Levelling and customisation is another aspect of Star Trek Online that’s not explained to well. Levelling works in a sort of pyramid system, in that you allocate skill points to particular skill areas that you are interested in – for instance points into improving warp core speed – with you gradually being more specific the further you level. Levels are dealt in 10 level spaces before your next ship, going up from Ensign, to Lieutenant, to Lieutenant Commander and so on. Once you get into the habit of it, it becomes easy enough to understand, but I can’t help but feel better explanation would solve its somewhat complex process to new comers.

I love my Constitution class. Best ship ever.

You can customise everything as you please; from your uniform, looks, bridge office uniforms, BO looks, ship colours, shape and design. This has led to rather wacky outcomes and some grumbling from fanatics of Star Trek who believe that colour schemes and customisation should be restricted to standard Yellow, Red and Blue. Despite this Cryptic have left the customisation reasonably open to the designs of what the user wants and are thankfully ignoring the rather extremist trekkie views, for now.

You can see throughout the review what the main complaint is lack of information. A lack of time has been spent trying to make sure that there’s enough information being conveyed to the new player of how to play the game. The tutorial is useless and somewhat ironic; it pits you against the might of the borg but the borg cube you fight at the end of the mission is extremely weak. These are supposed to be the end game bad guys, yet you’re destroying them easily enough at the very beginning, when you still have a wet nose and you’re just learning how to use the replicator. Cryptic try to excuse this by explaining within the story that the Borg you fight are “disconnected” from the rest of the Hive, but it feels less like a tutorial and more like an excuse to get the excitement rushing in immediately. A trip through starfleet academy, going through the ranks, would be a far better tutorial system.

Other complaints are that the game can be rather dull at times. Remove the episodes and there is very little to play with. Patrol missions are interesting enough, and sometimes become quite spectacular with friends and randoms helping in the same instance, but overall they can become rather tedious. PVP currently feels rather lacking in content, and there isn’t enough of a reward to play it constantly. Perhaps the best missions outside of the episodes are the group campaigns that occur in large instances. These involve such things as defending a station, or destroying an attack fleet, and can feature up to 200 players within the instance at a time. A full instance like this can be a sight to behold, and even if it doesn’t match the 600 man campaigns of Eve Online, it certainly matches it in excitement and beauty.

To boldly go where no man/woman/tribble has gone before!

Graphically Star Trek Online is beautiful, both in space and on the ground. I was extremely surprised and impressed by the knowledge that you could orbit the planets that exist in the system you’ve visited, and that planetary bodies feel well sized and aren’t the pea size shape of Freelancer, or the dust balls in the distance shapes of Eve Online. You can’t help but zoom into your ship, enjoying the fact it’s all yours and customized and named as you like (even if you like calling your ships USS Penisland).

In the end, Cryptic have alot running on this game. Not only is it the first online game for the Star Trek Universe, it’s also the first competitor against Eve Online. Those who are feeling jaded or confused by Eve’s extremely difficult learning curve may find themselves enjoying Star Trek Online alot. It presents a refreshing but somewhat rough new universe to play in. There is definitely room for expansion and improvement, and I would imagine Cryptic will be hot on their heels to iron out any shortcomings and make this an excellent addition to the MMO scene. Had it been released a bit more polished I would have awarded it a 9. I’m looking forward though to seeing what Cryptic does with the franchise, as it looks very promising. Overall if your looking for a refreshing different MMO to others, Star Trek Online is definitely worth a try.

Warp 8, Mr Sulu!

8/10

Posted by W Main
Categories: Gaming