Boldly Going Where Many Have Gone Before

It's not just abilities though. You must also effectively maneuver your ships through three-dimensional space in order to bring your weapons to bear on an enemy ship's damaged shields. The action-oriented approach has been seen in other Star Trek games, but it feels fresh and fun in an MMORPG, and appeals to fans who might not otherwise be interested in the genre.

Transporter Malfunction

Unfortunately, Star Trek Online stumbles badly when it's time to beam down and engage the bad guys on foot. In contrast to the smooth, attractive-looking space battles, the ground combat feels jerky and shallow. The difference is never more evident than in the tutorial, which features badly-animated Borg and oddly-proportioned environments. When you finally beam back to your ship and take command, you'll almost certainly breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

The shallow gameplay makes the various exotic locales you visit feel pretty much the same. Completing a ground mission invariably means slogging through waves of Klingons and Romulans and either beaming a container back to your ship, setting bombs, or accessing a computer. The repetition quickly becomes tiresome to the point that ground missions feel like an active nuisance.

The problem of repetition is exacerbated by the shallow mechanics. Star Trek Online has only Tactical, Engineering, and Science officer classes, which correspond to the Escort, Cruiser, and Science ship types. While they all get different abilities, group composition is not nearly as important as it is in other MMORPGs. Thus, as long as you don't try and engage a whole roomful of bad guys at once, you'll easily able to grind your way through the enemy hordes, especially considering the lack of a death penalty.

Ultimately, Star Trek Online's problem is that it doesn't put enough emphasis on its own ground combat abilities. The action feel much better in space, where properly combining a Tachyon Beam and a boost to auxiliary power can result in the swift annihilation of your enemy. There's little strategy to using the ground abilities, which overall makes the game feel like a point-and-click grind.

Boldly Going Nowhere

Star Trek Online's other problem is in its exploration. Cryptic has tried to satisfy the requirement that players be able to "boldly go where no one has gone before" by introducing areas with randomly generated planets. Accepting missions to explore areas like the Hromi Cluster will drop you into a grid of space, where entering an "unknown system" will generate a unique mission.

The system sounds interesting, but in practice the array of randomly generated missions are extremely limited. A mission in an unexplored system generally consists of flying around a planet and scanning anomalies, defending a station from a few packs of enemy ships, or beaming down and accessing computer consoles while battling random aliens. There are a couple more variations beyond that, but you'll encounter those missions on a shockingly regular basis.

This is not an isolated problem; Star Trek Online constantly teeters on the brink of feeling one-dimensional, as even the story missions tend to feature the same objectives. It's tempting to chalk it up to the fact that it's hard to replicate a true "Trek experience" in an MMO, but some of the missions are just infuriatingly lazy. Beaming down to a planet, speaking with some miners, and answering questions about how they feel does not count as negotiation. Some of the missions are excellent -- the battle with the Doomsday Machine immediately comes to mind -- but the bad tends to outweigh the good.

Unfortunately, there aren't a ton of alternatives to the exploration missions, story missions, and fleet actions. Apart from being able to trade items through an Exchange, the economy is essentially non-existent. Star Trek Online's answer to crafting requires you to gather dozens of ingredients from anomalies to build a few set weapons. Even the player-versus-player combat is limited to a few arenas hidden behind lengthy queues.

There's not precisely a lack of things to do, but it's all very rudimentary at the moment. For now, Star Trek Online is mostly a whole lot of space combat.