Star Trek Online (STO) made it's "head start" debut this past weekend, and I got a chance to really dive into the non-beta game.
Before I start, some opening comments:
First, yes..I'm a Star Trek geek. TNG is really my favorite Star Trek, but I have pretty much seen them all and loved them.
Second, STO is not WoW.
I hesitate to give any review on this to my friends because my 'gamer' friends are (mostly) folks I met playing WoW, and it is honestly a VERY different game. It is really a different genre altogether, so whether or not you like WoW has very little bearing on whether you will like this game.
LOTRO, Warhammer, and Aion are "wow-clones". I'm sure they would all balk at that particular classification (and in fact, it might be said that WoW is merely an EQ clone), but they all have a whole host of similarities. It is easy to compare the two: "LOTRO has an innovative questing system" or "The instanced dungeons in Warhammer leave a lot to be desired".
Those comparisons work because there is a hidden "as compared to WoW" in each of those sentences.
STO is it's own animal. It is primarily a space game. It isn't "WoW in space" either. It is it's own thing.
Anyway, you start off life in Star Trek Online creating your character. You have a plethora of options: You can be human (BORING), Vulcan (Nerd!), or a whole bunch of other 'premade' races. Or, if you are creative, you can make your own race.
I'm not particularly creative, but I wanted a dude with crazy bug eyes and a yellow scar on his cheek. And by damn I got it.
After creating your dude, you start out life as a lowly ensign while Leonard Nimoy does a quick narration to explain wtf is happening. All I got from it was "blah blah blah, I'm Leonard effing Nimoy, and I >AM< Star Trek." Anywho, the story takes place after the destruction of the Romulan Homeworld and after Spock did something with red matter that saved the world (universe?) so he could go back in time and reboot the franchise with Sylar and that chick from Avatar.
Meanwhile, you are hanging around in the bar of your ship, thinking about hitting on that cute blue chick with the weird forehead, when THE BORG ATTACK.
This is just the tutorial, so luckily these are the sucky Borg. *whew*
I probably should mention that Sylar is giving you the rest of the tutorial (after Leonard Nimoy quit talking). Actually, there was probably a better place to mention it, but I don't feel like editing just to make this post make sense. Just run with it.
Anyway, catastrophe strikes and your Captain (and apparently every other person on the ship) dies, leaving it all up to you to command your ship to victory over the sucky Borg!
Doing so, you impress Star Fleet and they promote you to Lieutenant, and make your command permanent. Or something. I dunno, I was busy shooting LASERS at stuff.
So anyway, gameplay: You basically do a bunch of missions. These impress Star Fleet. Impressing Star Fleet gets you promoted. Promotions mean cooler ships, access to better weapons, and more points to spend on your character build.
Each mission is either a space mission, away mission, or some combination of the two. For space missions, you find somebody in space doing something bad, and you fire your lasers until they blow up. There are also annoying ones that make you fly around and scan stuff. I hate those.
For away missions, you have to beam down to a planet and stop some bad guys from doing something. Usually by shooting them.
Combo missions are just that. Space shoot-em-up followed by ground shoot-em-up.
Since they are really two very different gameplay methods, I'll talk about each seperately:
Away Missions:
This is your fairly standard squad based 3rd person shooter with a few neat devices: First, you gain additional damage by shooting people in the back. Apparently this game was not designed with peaceful Starfleet doctrine in mind, because the tactics basically incentivise you to sneak around and behind people, shooting them in the back.
Second, there is an expose/exploit system in play. If you or your team hit somebody, it has a chance to trigger an 'expose'. If you use a special attack on them defined as an 'exploit' attack, it explodes for massive damage (one shots most things).
These two elements make the combat on the ground interesting, but thus far it has all been fairly easy. My strategy is usually to run in guns blazing and hope for the best. And I haven't actually died yet, so I guess I'm doing something right.
Space missions:
This is both the selling point of the game, and the most frustrating part of the game for me. I like space battle games, I really do. That said, THE CAMERA IN THIS GAME IS DRIVING ME INSANE. If I steer the ship with the mouse, the camera isn't a problem. But I >hate< 'flying' with a mouse. So I use the keyboard. But then I'm never 'looking' where I want to look. So I'm constantly going back and forth between keyboard and mouse, which is driving me nuts.
Beyond that annoyance, the space battle are pretty fun. There is a lot of depth to the system and once you start getting some bridge officers (who bring their own skills to the table), you start to use a lot of strategy. The firing arcs of your various weapons make positioning the key part of every battle, which makes it less of a 'twitch gaming' sort of Wing Commander-esque thing and more of a...well, Star Trek game. It feels more like a naval battle actually, just played out in 3 dimensions.
There are some downsides to the game that I've found so far though. First, it is pretty repetitive. I can't really play it for long stretches of time without getting bored out of my mind.
Second, 'open teaming' is a concept that I HATE WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING, and it is on by default. If you have never heard of 'open teaming' (or 'open groups' or 'public groups'), the game will just randomly put you in groups with people that are on the same quest as you are on.
And...here is a scary truth: People generally suck at video games. At least the people who I get stuck pugging with. Granted, the game is two days old, so nobody expects anybody to be experts in it, but the tutorial tells you "photon torpedos are good to use against unshielded targets". So lets see....if a target has their shields up, maybe you should think about using a different weapon!
But no. People are dumb.
Beyond the open groups and somewhat repetitive gameplay, there are some pretty glaring bugs that make the game look clunky and unfinished. I'm sure they will sort those out, but it lacks...polish.
That said, there is some fun to be had playing the game. I spent my 40 bucks on it, and I'll give it the full (free) month before I make a final decision. But so far the only fair review I can give is that: I played it. I liked it. I plan to play it again.
As I'm only in my very early levels as a character, its difficult to render a more long term decision on the game. But the game is good enough that I want to see what is in store for me in later levels.
