Star Trek Online – Official Launch
Star Trek is now an MMO
Any Star Trek fan that sits in front of a Playstation, XBox, PC or any other kind of gaming system for that matter, has been waiting for this to happen for many, many years. Well it’s finally here.
Hey, hang on… Star Trek Online isn’t Star Trek at all… Yes, it has the name. Yes, the ships are there. Some characters you’ll probably be familiar with. But that’s it!
You can choose to play as either a Federation character, or a Klingon one. However the Klingon faction has nearly zero content, while the Federation has very little. Making this game virtually unplayable.
The game is essentially split in to two parts, space combat and ground combat.
Space Combat
Space combat is by far the most entertaining thing the game has to offer. But it’s incredibly limited, you can’t barrel roll your ship for example, you can’t do a loop the loop, you can’t even fly straight up or down! This result in having to do circles to line your weapons up and sometimes, depending on your ship choice, these circles can be enormous.
Ground Combat
Ground combat is utterly ridiculous, it’s just a hack and slash with pew pew weapons. You’re protected by a personal shield, something I never saw in the series. All you do is kill, kill and kill some more. This is dull and extremely repetitive to say the least. In no way does this emulates the true nature or feeling of Star Trek.
The Universe
It’s official, well according to Star Trek Online anyway, the universe is tiny. It’s a patchwork of little uninspired instances and never ending loading screens,. You’ll be rubberbanding from 1 star system to another as the servers lag endlessly under the strain of what seems like no more than 100 people playing.
Fleets
Guilds in Star Trek Online are called ‘fleets’. Unfortunately these fleets are broken and buggy. You simply can’t place things in the fleet vaults, due to bugs that allow other fleet members to take everything out, including all the Energy Credits (the currency in the game) you deposit. Permissions don’t work, so you can’t restrict access or even limit the access to the fleet vaults. You can’t even set a fleet uniform because of the bugs.
Crafting
Crafting takes the form of flying around one of very few areas of space called an exploration area. You scan and then collect anomalies. These are essentially crafting mats. Once you have the required amount you can then fly to a special space station and craft your items. The problem with this is there are only a few areas of space to gather these anomalies. You spend most of your time racing other people to them. If you win this race, expect to be verbally abused through the games chat system.
Player v Player
PvP is about the only thing that redeems this travesty, but again, this is rather limited. There are no open PvP areas to mention, just a queue system you join for a small 4v4 PvP match.
Conclusions
The utter level of laziness by the games developers (Cryptic Studios) is beyond reasonable. The game is awash with spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes and bugs are 10 a penny. This game is doomed unless it’s revamped quickly and smartly. Unfortunately the official forums for the game are just as bad, threads are censored. Cryptic allow the forum ‘brown nose fanboy regulars’ to flame and troll unhindered, while disciplining those that ask for change.
We will keep looking in on Star Trek Online in the hopes things do change.
