Star Trek: Online had something of a rocky development but has finally finished its beta and is out.

The game breaks down into two sections - space and away missions. Most of the game is you flying around in your ship and ships come in three flavours: escort - damage per second, cruiser - tanks and science - doing buffs/debuffs. In much the same way, classes break down into tactical, engineer and science... which equates to much the same.

Your ship itself breaks down into the the equipment you have on the ship and the bridge officers you use - as well as bonuses your character gets for various starship abilities. Bridge officers provide abilities in addition to the ones you have yourself, the number and type being dictated by the class of ship you have. The abilities can do everything from increase weapon damage to improving the shields of fellow fleet members.

The obvious comparison as regards space combat goes is EVE online, things are considerably more dynamic in Star Trek: Online and you don't need to spend hours working out what kind of weapons are best for your class of ship and so on, not to mention that while in EVE online the destruction of your ship results in its permanent loss, in STO you respawn after 15 seconds. While this might kill the tension somewhat it also means that one can focus on playing the game without developing an ulcer, for fear that your new ship that cost hours of play time to buy and outfit will get destroyed because your connection decided to fail at an inopportune moment. Weapons are straightforwardly divided into energy weapons and torpedoes/mines - energy weapons like phasers and disruptors are better at damaging shields, torpedoes and mines damage hulls.

To make combat more interesting than the usual fare, shields are split into 4 sections and weapons are mounted front or aft and different weapons have different arcs of fire - with arcs of fire tending to be traded off against the damage per second. So, combat tends to require a combination of balancing shields and manoeuvring to hit your enemy's weakest shields and also, changing your power management and using your special abilities to gain advantage - and naturally, different ships manoeuvre differently - meaning that the more nimble escort craft can get away with the more powerful weapons, while more ponderous cruisers require the generous arcs of fire to keep the pressure on their enemies... All of which means that you need to be actively guiding your ship to make the best use of your weapons in a fight.

The missions undertaken in your ship are generally along the lines of the following:

Defend a sector - which entails just slogging through a certain number of random instances by killing a certain number of enemies.

Patrol a sector - which is slightly different as you go to a number of different systems and you can just have to scan for anomalies or beam down to planets or see off some pirates.

Specific missions - these are longer and generally involve more than one part and might require travelling to more than one system and several sections of space and ground combat.

Fleet actions - BIG instances where you have to take on several large numbers of enemy ships in what can amount to pretty epic battles. They even show a leader board at the end.

The other side of game are the away missions, these are carried out in a more traditional MMO manner with a third person perspective, equipment, weapons and what pass for STO's version of potions and spells. The notable difference here is that you have your bridge officers with you - so you're controlling a squad. You get to assign points to their skills for both space AND ground combat - in much the same way as you yourself progress through the ranks and skills. As you'd expect of an MMO, twitch reflexes are now required here - point and click. In truth, most of the killing is uninspiring. You get bonuses for flanking enemies but it feels as if this aspect of the game was tacked on. Granted, it's nice to be able to walk around starbases, your own bridge, explore strange new planets - and not ALL away missions require you to shoot a horde of idiotic Klingons or Gorn... Some involve scanning stuff or talking to people!

Perhaps the problem with the game is that Star Trek was always envisioned as a peaceful utopian future where everyone just gets along and humans are all about lofty aspiration such as peaceful exploration and the like. There are some exploring missions - go out and scan some rocks... but the entire setting of the game - 30 years after Nemesis, tying into the new Star Trek film by having Romulus destroyed because Spock forgot to set his alarm clock and the Klingons running amok and at war with the Federation (again) and the Borg showing up (again) pretty much your standard MMO situation. Speaking of Spock, Nimoy offers some insight (as well as titbits on load screens) into the current situation of the galaxy, when you enter a new sector of space for the first time - which is a nice touch...

Beyond the fact it's the ol' galaxy in conflict type scenario, the game does spend quite a lot of time making sure to reference familiar characters or their progeny. You get to choose from the well known species of the Star Trek universe, familiar designs of starships and they've even got systems referenced from the shows. Naturally, that won't do anything for you if you're not a Trek fan but if you've watched the shows, it's good to see that some deference is shown and isn't just tacking a franchise name onto a game for the sake of it. It's a little vexatious that you can't decide at the start of the game whether you want to create a Klingon or Federation character but given the considerably greater emphasis on PvP in the Klingon game - that makes sense from a logistical stand point.

The game itself is somewhat unusual in that you don't choose a specific server to play on, rather everything in the game is instanced. Rather helpfully - especially when you're starting out - when you blunder into enemy contacts (aka the random instances you have to beat for defend sector missions) these instances add other people, so you don't need to take on a dozen ships at a time, so... there's a greatly diminished need to shout "LFG!", for at least some of the more casual mission... and that means in the big ol' fleet action missions, you can get a WHOLE mess of people with a big range of ability, which is in itself entertaining if nothing else...

But of course, this IS an MMO - and the variety of missions isn't huge and many are just variations on a theme but you NEED to do them, if you want to get the equipment, cash (sorry, ENERGY CREDITS) and XP to progress to better ranks and hence better ships and so on and so forth - so, the grind is there but then, that wasn't exactly going to shock anyone that has played an MMO before... it feels like something of a disservice to call this EVE lite, not to mention a gross oversimplification as EVE represents at higher levels of play a lot of stuff that Star Trek: Online isn't eve trying for but in the sense that it's a space based MMO where you cruise around the galaxy, blowing people up... it probably warrants the comparison at least fleetingly for being in the same ballpark... or at least, in its carpark while EVE bites someone's ear off inside it. It's really nothing exceptional - if you love Star Trek and are looking for a game that allows you to experience Trek with other people, this is definitely the game for you... as far as the average MMO player goes... Perhaps if you have tried EVE but found it an entirely too punishing experience that didn't have a learning curve, so much as a learning suicide cliff (they have actually addressed that issue - although, the game remains insanely complicated and punishing and not overly friendly as regards its interface for the uninitiated) but WANT some kind of space game where death just means a 15 second respawn and not potentially hundreds of hours of work down the drain and combat doesn't require you to spend some time understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of your race, class, ship and weapons... then this is probably your best bet for the near future... Something like an MMO Freelancer, perhaps?