First things first: I am in no way a “Trekkie,” and I can count on one finger how many Star Trek movies I’ve seen. Granted, that one movie was J.J. Abrams rendition of the classic franchise, but it was that movie that made me agree to even attempt to play this game. A really good friend of mine, we’ll call him “Bill” (since that’s his name), is the complete polar opposite of me when it comes to Star Trek. He knows episodes by number and can quote things in languages that I still believe he just makes up on the spot. Needless to say, Bill was instrumental in my review of this game. I also should make it known that I didn’t actually buy this game, nor do I have an active subscription. The game I used, was the 48 hour free trial from the Mucho cups that one purchases at DelTaco. Since you can have up to ten days of free play time, I figured that this would be the best (and cheapest) way to immerse myself into the game environment since just about anyone can buy a large pop and download the client.

Installation and setup: The Star Trek Online (STO) client is a petite 7.5 gig download, so this is something one does the night before actually wanting to install the game. Bill had participated in the STO Beta, so I borrowed his external hard drive that contained the installation files to set it up on my notebook, since my desktop doesn’t have a CPU on the “required” list. I have a feeling that if I were to install it on that machine it would work, but I wanted to make sure that I started with a machine that could run the higher resolution textures without any special configuration. Since I know that my laptop can play Warcraft without a problem, I chose that machine first. Installation of the program is fairly straightforward, as any Windows application typically runs. I then had to set up an account with Cryptic, since they use their old authentication system that was in place before with games like City of Heroes.

Starting Up and Training: Creating a character is something that I feel should have two options: simple and advanced. STO, however, uses the idea that people really loved the character customization from City of Heroes, so that’s what we have here. You can get down to what shade of blond you want the character to have and then some. My daughter, who is seven and typically loves the character creation system in just about every game made, spent over three hours making one toon. Granted, she ended up making a tattooed purple chick with ridges on her forehead which is a race I didn’t see in the options, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she made her own race of iCarly-watching clones. But, because the DelTaco trial only gives you the option for two Federation character slots, I chose a female Trill, specialized in Science and Engineering just to try things out, and kept everything else what the default options are. I can only assume as you go through the game and further down the story arc that these other options will mean something important, but from what I’ve played there is no difference what you do here.

The way the game starts off is by throwing you into an existing scenario storyline in which you are hand-held through the entire experience. I should also mention that I almost quit the game as this was happening since the hand-holding is so severe, you can’t go explore other areas or anything like that. The game also doesn’t tell you that this is the training area or how you learn the basics of game play. You’re kind of just “thrown to the wolves,” so to speak. After venting to Bill about how this isn’t a game, it was a story that you’re made to partake in, he informed me that it was the real training to get your own ship and go from there. After I calmed down and finished the training, everything made more sense.

Combat: STO has two main combat systems: Ground Combat and Ship Combat. Ground Combat is your typical “Knights of the Old Republic” style of third-person action. The story involves you beaming to an area, maneuvering down the corridor and killing all the baddies in the way to collect all the options or save the scientists. The interesting thing that I really enjoy about ground combat is that when you beam down to start the mission, (Missions are the same things as quests in other MMO’s), you select who you want to come down with you. Obviously you would select yourself as the captain, and then you could pick your first officer and then some security or change them up as you wish. Think of it as going into an instance in other games with your own personal team of players. My first officer has healing skills, so I can do more stupid things such as run into a room with 12 guys and somehow still survive. You can also double-tap the arrow keys on the keyboard to duck and spin out of harm’s way, so you have a basic defense mechanism that you can control (this is a skill that needs something other than trial accounts to master, by the way – there would be times where I would double-tap and spin my way into more bad guys).

Ship combat is the remarkable entry to this game with one big good side and one big bad side. The good side is the combat will make your hands hurt after a long battle. Button mashing is more than abundant here. Ship battles typically force your ship to constantly move, so you have to control your speed, your shields (since you can route energy to different sides) and where the weapons are firing since there is an “Arc” or basically a line-of-sight feature. The bad part is that flying to different areas can sometimes take a long time. I usually have a book sitting next to me to keep me busy during long wait times during Warcraft, but I’ve never finished a book in a week just while moving from system to system. That would have the biggest complaint about this game: moving from system to system takes a very long time to complete.

Conclusions: I can only imagine that if I knew more about the television shows and movies and such, that this game would be much more entertaining, however even with zero knowledge (other than Bill on speed dial, and then he would go into such great detail that I started to read while listening), I still enjoyed playing this every night. I would put off doing my Warcraft dailies in order to play STO. As I said in the combat section: the spaceship combat alone makes this game enjoyable. The ground control I could take or leave, but the ship combat is what makes me want to play more. I did wander around the Earth Space Dock and upgraded some weapons and battery shields and such and look forward to trying those out later, but the design of this game is well put together and organized. There are some problems though: the chat system is horrible, your friends list is deep within menus of other things, and gold sellers are in every space system in the game. I’m willing to forgive the server crashes and small annoyances with broken missions and things like that, since this is a new MMO. And as most people know, MMO’s are very dynamic and grow as they get older.

All MMOs grow in time. Some for the better (Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Wizard 101), and some for the worse (Everquest 2, Warhammer, too many others to count) but with Cryptic being the brains behind this behemoth, I do believe that STO will be enjoyed for many years to come. The problems from the launch will go away, they’re adding new servers as I write this, and they’ve already patched a handful of the missions that didn’t work. Other then some way to let the user know that they’re going into training, and what to do when to get out of training (hint: warp to different systems to accept missions,) then I can’t see anything else wrong.

While I haven’t physically purchased this game yet, this is one game that I’m seriously thinking about picking up. To put that in perspective, there has only been one other MMO that has drawn me in this much: World of Warcraft. This is more fun then I’ve had in space, well, ever (Sorry EVE)!

- Chris Tallant