STO Review

Okay so this is by far not LOTRO related, but recently I had some time to sit down with the newest MMO that is coming up: Star Trek Online.

Here is my review from a brief time in Beta:

STO takes place in the Star Trek universe.  You can play the federation to start, and is is unknown if you will be able to play as the Romulans or Klingons at launch.

Character creation allows you to choose from your favorite aliens for each faction or you can customize your character into an entirely new alien race.  All of the major changes are there to make for appearance so there is a likelyhood that your toon will not look like many others as far as features is concerned.

From there you will do a short tutorial on ground and space combat.  This was beta, so the ground part of the game seemed still, dull, way to easy, and buggy to me.

The space combat is where this game really takes off, however; giving you some very fun gameplay.

Character advancement:

As you level up your toon you will be required to level up several things via skill points, weapons, ship systems, etc.

You start with your own basic career:  Engineer, Science Officer, or

You can then start customzing your crew by adding additional characters of these ranks as well to give you greater customization of your skills.

So now the confusing part.

You will level up and as you level you spend skills on yourself and your crew.  As you level up you will be promoted to a different rank:

Ensign, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, Captain, and finally Admiral.  Now when you level up enough to go up a rank you also get access to new tiers of ships and weapons.

Once you are high enough, you can also promote your bridge members to the rank underneath you, so at LT Commander you can level and promote your officers to LT and so on.  Each type of bridge officer can also have a ton of skills bought for them, or you can get new members with different skills.  This basically adds new skills for you depending on the customizations you want.  For instance high yield torpedos, or torpedo firing arrays alpha, delta, zeta, or perhaps spread phasers, fire all weapons, increased shield strenght, or even ground mechanics such as healing, personal shield increase, regen, resistances etc.  On and on and on.

Okay so now you know how to level, good.  On to the game:

IMHO the ground missions (at least in beta) sucked monkey balls!  It was way to easy.  Basically if you are not grouped up with someone then your team is all AI, and they do an okay job.  I did not die once in beta as the away team members (remember those bridge officers) kept me going.  The quests were very linear, although the graphics were decent, you would still hit invisible objects and the whole character aspect on the away missions seemed incomplete to me.  Playable, yes, but not polished, not like the space combat anyways.

The space combat is the jewel of this game I think.  Although, after playing for awhile it did seem very repetitive.  This game would be great for short play durations, but after awhile, the space combat does get boring.

What I like about the space combat:

You are flying in 3D space so enemies are above, below, in front, and behind you.  You have to maneuver yourself to continually weaken a side of their shields while watching your own power and keeping your shields up and watch out for adds.  The combat buttons are okay once you get used to them and realize your phaser fires for a long time and you dont have to continually click it.  Torpedo shots are just plain cool as well as upgrading your ship weapons and the graphics are top notch.  There are also repeatable group missions for anyone in the area that are called fleet missions.  Think of warhammers public quests and you get the idea here.  There is also a pvp element against your own and other factions you can do as well.

What I do not like is that one on one space combat takes forever.  A good 5+ minutes to kill one enemy sometimes.  Also you cannot use thrusters to turn so all of your turns in space are wide arcs.  You cannot escape from combat either as your warp and full impulse drives are turned off.  So if you stumble on a group of two or three ships that are a higher tier, like destroyers, your pretty much screwed.  Dying does respawn you at the start location or new spawn point, but you should be able to flee sometimes.

All in all, I would give this game a 3.5/5 with some improvements needed.  Its not bad, but its not great either.  It is something new for those space fans out there.  Here is a video of actual gameplay with no added music.

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