Recruit, train and mold a crew into an elite force for exploration and combat.
By comparison, the ground combat is a little uninspiring, possibly because it feels so much easier and lacks the visual drama of the space combat. It's basic point and click interface feels clunky and despite the addition of mechanics like flanking damage and the ability to improve your weapon accuracy by crouching it gets old pretty quickly. Your chosen character class doesn't seem to have a huge effect over their capabilities in combat either and getting the right classes together in your party is nowhere near as essential as it is to success in other MMORPG's. As a result ground missions get repetitive very quickly as you wade through wave after wave of Borg, Orions, Romulans or Klingons with your away team to complete your objective. It doesn't help that the objectives are usually based around accessing computers or planting explosives either, the latter of the two feeling especially pointless as you've just beamed down from a ship stocked to the gills with Photon Torpedo's. When you've got a party of real players making up your away team rather than the vaugely controllable AI puppets it goes a long way towards alleviating some of the negativity, but ultimately it's because you've got someone to talk to as you grind more than anything else.Speaking of grinding, character progression occurs in exactly the style you'd expect of an MMORPG, by using experience points attained from victory in combat or the completion of quests (which are referred to in Star Trek Online as "episodes") to upgrade your various abilities and level up. Every ten levels you achieve a new rank and with it a brand new ship to cruise around in giving Star Trek Online one of the best incentives to level up in a long time because while you may be happy with your craft to begin with, as you see others fly past in much more recognisable Constitution and Ambassador class ships you'll definitely yearn for something a little grander.
The quests, or episodes if you'd rather, in which you'll have to take part cover everything from simple patrol missions against Orion pirates to unraveling the mysteries of time travel and Trek fans will all be sure to notice nods to various storylines from the T.V series and movies along with a few returning characters at various points. They vary in length from ten minutes to up to an hour but despite the fairly trivial sounding nature of some of them it never feels as if you've been sent on a mission for fifty space rat tails or something equally ludicrous. Even simple missions like escorting a wounded freighter to the nearest docking area are in keeping with the universe in which the game's set and more importantly, unlike being a mythic warrior destined for greatness being given pest control duty, they don't feel like nothing but a waste of time until you can level up again.
For those that want to explore new and uncharted worlds there are also certain sectors in which unique planets are randomly generated. Unfortunately these still seem to be on Cryptics "to do" list because there are only really three ways that discovering a new world plays out. Either you arrive to discover there's a space station under attack that needs defending, that there's a colony that needs it's computers fixing or that there's nothing but a handful of mineral deposits to scan. It's very reminiscent of Mass Effect in that way, it promises the opportunity to explore strange new worlds but all it really delivers are a few templates with colour schemes that change every so often. For a game that takes so much from Star Trek it's disappointing that the space exploration boils down to such repetitive missions but hopefully it's an aspect of the game that will receive more of Cryptic's attention over the coming months.
Continued overleaf...