Star Trek Online Review
Cryptic is at it again, but does Star Trek Online boldly go where no other MMO has gone before or is it just more of the same old stuff?
Unfortunately, it seems that most of the good ideas were spent on the space combat as the ground combat is boring, repetitive, and an absolute grindfest (with only a few notable exceptions). Your character and his or her away team beam down to the planet and, nine times out of ten, are forced to fight through corridor after corridor filled with identical squads of identical Klingons. Despite the complexity possible with the four different characters capable of being controlled by the player, the ground combat is nothing but boring. Most characters used ranged weapons primarily and as such, you’ll find yourself staring at two or more characters standing in an empty field or hallway pointing guns at one another every few seconds and pew-pewing until someone dies. It makes the typical MMO auto-attack melee fighting look exciting.
Ground environments like this aren’t the norm, but rather unfortunately, the visually-interesting exception.
One of the most unusual issues I found in my time with Star Trek Online is that there is almost no desire, need, or even focus on playing in groups and by that I simply mean actual multiplayer. There is an open instance system that will allow players participating in the same quest to enter your instance and be placed on your group automatically, but this happened rarely and required little, if any actual player interaction. The fact that Cryptic has decided to take on the single server with hundreds of instances for its recent MMOs is a problematic one.
Much like in Champions Online, most environments feel extremely empty, players seem distant, and there’s a huge chance that, particularly at times of low server population, players may not run into anyone at all except at a space station. One of the coolest aspects of MMOs is that feeling of being one of so many, like playing music in the Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings Online or going someplace with a lot of people in WoW (I’ve never played the game beyond the few first levels, so I apologize for my lack of a proper analogy and now damaged nerd cred). The instanced nature of Star Trek Online and the fact that players are accompanied on ground missions by a team of NPCs make playing solo not only doable, but in many ways, preferable to grouping with other actual players which damages not only the gameplay of STO but the community as well.
Space stations can be found at a few points throughout space, but you’ll find yourself mainly sticking to one or two.
After fully facing my disappointment over the ground combat and solo-player focus, I started to think about whether or not Star Trek was really the ideal franchise for an MMO or even a video game for that matter. If the ground combat strayed too far from the set-phasers-to-kill style it currently has, it wouldn’t really be Star Trek would it? Star Trek, at its core, is more about talking, diplomacy, and intriguing social commentaries than it is about combat and epic struggles between good and evil. Occasionally, I would stumble upon a diplomatic or exploratory mission that actually felt like a proper episode of Star Trek, but they were anything but exciting. Not a lot of cinematic glory can be gleaned from voice-acting-free text boxes and lackluster character models.
Simply put, Star Trek Online’s biggest problem may be that it is aiming to be a Star Trek game, something perhaps more fit for the Mass Effect treatment than the WoW one.
Our ratings for Star Trek Online on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
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