Star Trek Online Preview

To Boldly Go Where You Cant! Star Trek Online Preview

Be a master of your own destiny, pioneer as a Starfleet commander, or a klingon warlord and expand the empire to the far reaches of the universe! From the creators of City of Heroes and City of Villains comes the much anticipated Star Trek Online.

As with any MMO a character creation is needed, you can chose between any of the races in the Star Trek saga be it human or Volkan it’s your choice. The character creation is quite a long one in STO yet far from boring, from choosing your race and gender to selecting racials and naming your ship! Threes a lot to chose from. After the character is made you are thrown straight into your ship and set on a large “starting Tutorial”. As the quest line continues your ships gets into trouble and the acting captain is killed, and you are made captain of your starship. You are then set on a longer course to find out why the Bourg are acting so strangely!

After the fun and excitement of the starters you are allowed to roam freely, choosing missions at your will and completing to increase currencies to buy more crew members, items for you, your crew or your ship. During the starting exercise you are allowed to hire one of 3 different types of Bridge officers, these are, Tactical officer, engineering officer, and Science officer. Each different bridge officer has unique traits, for example a Tactical officer can upgrade the damage from your ships attacks and grant new abilities while on ground combat.

After all the tactical parts of the game, you get the combat. STO is the first MMO to feature ground and air combat, and I find this amazing, the ground combat however seems a bit simple from what i have experienced stand, flank, and shoot, never the less though it’s still fun and very addictive. The air combat on the other hand is very much enjoyable, with trying to keep the energy to the right parts of the ship during fight, and keeping the “facing shield” up on maximum so is not to lose too much health and end up destroyed. As you start the game you have three types of weapon, two lasers and a harpoon, the lasers are best used against enemies facing shields and the harpoons are most useful against the hull breach.

As with most good MMO you have a chance of PvP and PvE with PvP battle you have different “modes” of fight including, Border Skirmish, Hostile Engagement and Hostile Takeover. Each mode has different objectives to complete and are immense fun. The PvE side has instances like other MMOs and the levelling and mission chances, so you’ll never be bored in game.

Along with the insanely fun gameplay, there’s the lush scenery inputted ingame, cryptic have really outdone themselves on this, while flying through sector space and looking through the 30, yes 30! Different systems and that’s just in the Volkan system (I rolled Volkan). The scenery is amazing, it’s not much during the sector, but once you enter a system it is truly awe-inspiring. Including a very easy to use UI which is fully customisable with an option under the esc menu.

In conclusion, Star Trek Online seems like a very addictive game, and hopefully very successful, it is truly a fun, imaginative, and interesting game, a tactic based MMO with ground AND air combat, fully customisable ships and characters, and amazing combat sections, Cryptic have surely outdone themselves with this game. I wish you all the luck on release.

Due to release 02.02.2010

Preview By: Jamie Gillett