Star Trek Online

As of 17th january 2012, The company that made this game have made it free to play and you don't even need the disks, just download the game from the star trek online website FREE!!!

About the game, it's very big and everything goes in depth with lots of missions and sectors to travel to. you can customize your clothing and ships and team up with friends online to battle other players if you wish although i would stick with the missions first. The game is so vast that there are quests that can be done while you are doing quests and them quests have quests (many are boring and not worth doing but you could spend an entire lifetime going everywhere and doing everything) Graphics aren't bad but probably better than World of Warcraft although Warcraft is bigger in fairness. Theres lots of players and the way you do battle if very interesting although after the first hour of gaming i came to the conclusion that the game gets quite boring and repetitive. There are other downsides, you might get a quest to go and take rock samples for example from the space station to a commander in another sector but it might not tell you how to get there or where it exactly is as a result at times you may get lost, also in a mission near the start of the game you have to scan 5 objects yet the objects are hard to find at first and heavily guarded but also on occasion when you get near them the it won't allow you to scan them....so the game can glitch at times, also the controls for steering your star-ship aren't the best.

PROS: IT's NOW TOTALLY FREE so don't buy just download it direct, Very star trek in the depth of it and the places to go which are all accurately portrayed including Starfleet academy. Big game with lots of endless stuff to do, chat and work with friends and engage in battles with other people, build your ship up, your own skills and those of your crew

CONS: Although i'm a huge star trek fan i found the game to me awkward in the way it plays and under-developed, which i thought made it hard to play and quite boring at times, many of the missions were similar and you go through a boring patch (the best bits are fighting the Borg), there are also over-complicated menus and sub-menus for changing skills and weapons and other items

VERDICT: Now it's free it's worth playing i think, so check it out, if after 5 hours of play you think it's worth sticking with then good for you and best of luck, as for me i just got bored with the same old stuff...and trying to find a particular person or officer is a ball ache, what with all the different planets and sectors!!

In a nutshell it's a good game BUT it lack refinement and polish which would have made it a great game! I certainly would not be recommending this game if you still had to pay each month as that would have been a rip off but now it's free try it and judge for yourself, i was just expecting more i have to be honest!!

Has a lot of potential but is bland and repetitive currently. At each "level", with each new ship you repeat the majority of the missions over and over. Occasional missions shine and are few and far between. All missions revolve around killing/shooting things. The pvp is a small component of the game, which is a shame. Graphics are ok however. Give it 6-12 months and hopefully they'll ahve improved a lot of things.

Argh! Such a missed opportunity. I've been playing Star Trek online since the release date, and sadly I have to concur with many of the reviews about the game. The graphics are passable - nothing special, but functional and clear. The interface feels like trek. But after that the similarities between this game and the series & films, I regret to say are lacking. The game centres around two big elements - space and land combat. I'll start with the weaker of the two first. When you find some new world to explore (or Klingon listening post, or similar) you take your away team into battle. Sounds exciting? Well, maybe, until you realise that essentially the only tactic in the game is to get round the back of an opponent, distract them and let your bridge crew rip into your opponents rear. Tactically sound? Perhaps. But dull as dishwater is more like it. The game rapidly degenerates into a button mash to press every fire button you have repeatedly as soon as they are available, and that's it.

Moving on, what about space combat? It's slightly more tactical than on the ground, I agree. You maneuver your ship such that you have as many beam weapons firing as possible at a single target, then when the shields drop, swap to torpedoes to punch their hull apart. But that's it. There's almost nothing more to it that that - a few special abilities try to spice things up but they really don't add anything to the fundamentals of maneuver and FIRE!

After that, the only other distinction to make in the game is PVP and PVE based gameplay. PVP is 90% of the time decided by weight of numbers, and therefore is somewhat irrelevant in terms of gameplay. As for PVE, well, if repeating the content of the first two paragraphs over and over sounds like fun you will like this game. I would suggest when the game hits 30 days old will be the real teller for this game - i.e. 30 days after the release date people actually have to start paying for their subscriptions to continue playing. Given that there are far superior MMO's out there I think you might find the servers will go the same way Tabula Rasa ended.

All I can say again is damn, "Could have been good. Could have been.".

Peace