![]() 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of a franchise that has had thousands of creative people making thousands of movies, shows and books about trekking around the stars. I really wish I could tell you that this is when the game turned around, but the only change I noticed was that I was taking on more powerful opponents.īy now I hope that I’ve gotten across the point that Star Trek Online isn’t a bad game, but that it’s merely boring. Eventually all these minor issues caused me to stop exploring, and instead I would just focus on finishing a mission so I could move on.Īfter about ten hours of gameplay I traded in my starting vessel, a Miranda class ship I named the USS Kevin Sorbo, for a Constitution 2 class heavy cruiser (the same as the USS Enterprise-A in the movies) that I named the USS Toronto. Ground levels are also surprisingly small and often filled with invisible walls that pop up when you don’t expect them to. That’s not impossible to work around, but it becomes very annoying since battles often become close range melees. To make matters worse, the auto-locking will often switch to friendly A.I. ![]() Sometimes those things are digital consoles and sometimes those things are enemy A.I., but you are still just pressing buttons and watching progress/health bars. I will acknowledge that the missions are a lot more streamlined when compared to my time on the PC version Star Trek Online however, missions still consist of walking up to things and pressing buttons. Space combat is the majority of what you’ll do in this MMORPG, but on occasion you will also lead a group of your officers on various land based away missions sadly, this part of the game is even less interesting. If you role-play as a science officer or engineer you will have a few more tricks up your sleeve, but it is still not enough to make things engaging. The fact that Star Trek Online is not that difficult also allows you to turn fights into simple slugging matches. In terms of tactics, all you have to worry about is keeping any drained shields pointed away from whoever you are attacking. You don’t even have to worry about accuracy since the game will auto-lock on opponents. You would think that captaining a spaceship would be exciting, but the majority of what you do is turn in circles while holding down the firing button. Star Trek Online on the other hand, is mostly about shooting things and that’s about it. ![]() The underlying concept of Star Trekis a grand adventure where almost anything is possible. Whatever label you apply, one major issue still exists with this game. You could even say that the major problem with Star Trek Online is pacing. You could call it a lack of variety or a blind adherence to conventional MMO game-play. Six years later I was surprised to find that not much has changed when it comes to the gameplay of Star Trek Online. When the game was launched on PCs about six years ago there was a round of applause for the depth that Cryptic Studios went to create a universe to play in, but like a 2-star amusement park there really wasn’t much to do in it. Unfortunately, once I got past the shiny new wax coating of Star Trek Online, I realized that some of the worst rust spots remained. Regardless of that it is easy to notice that while we were all looking at Overwatch, Destiny and a few other games the men and women of Cryptic Studios were doing a serious amount of overhauling. The reasons and method of your field promotion are a little better planned out now, but you still go from cadet to captain so fast that even Christopher Pine would try to drag you back a few feet. ![]() The plot of the game hasn’t changed much with a Federation-Klingon war still acting as a backdrop for your rapid ascent to the captain’s chair. However, the console port of Star Trek Online offers players a new interface, tutorials, locations, and a good amount of voice acting throughout the game. When I was captaining the USS Million Voices (an even deeper Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda reference) in the PC version of this game, I found the whole thing rather boilerplate when compared to other MMORPGs. Unlike the opening paragraph of this review, I have to say I was actually surprised when I started up the console version of Star Trek Online. Its lifetime subscriber’s mission: to explore new story points, to seek out new graphics and gameplay innovations, and to boldly go where blah blah blah… These are the voyages of the starship Kevin Sorbo. Space: an often-traveled videogame frontier.
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