Nefchast’s Gaming Blog

It’s in open beta now and I guess I can talk a bit about it — I will say that I played it for a few days, but never got that far into it. I played enough to form a basic opinion though.

First up is the tutorial — it does a pretty decent job of explaining everything needed. You start out on the ‘ground’ — more like a space station but either way it covers the ground combat and movement first. This stuff is pretty simple and if you’ve played an MMO before it should be largely familiar. The exceptions would come with your away team, which adds several NPCs to your ‘team’ — largely dumb NPC pets, which at the time I played were not the best of help nor seemed intelligent. Also of some difference, you can equip your away team members with items much like any other character, and you have ‘kits’ that give special skills and such. It’s to help differentiate the ‘classes’ (of which there are three).

Once past the ground bit you find yourself in space, yay! If you’re familiar with Pirates of the Burning Sea then you should fairly similar with how space combat works here. You have a throttle which you can set and your ship moves, change directions using arrow keys, line up enemies based on how you want to hit them (torpedoes from the bow, phasers on the sides/back/front, etc) — their position around your ship determines which attacks you get to use (like PotBS). For those not too familiar with the mechanics, you essentially float around and change speed till you can get them, and try to keep them, on the side that lets you deal the most damage. If one side of your shields gets too low — turn around and put a different side to them, divert energy from speed/weapons to defense and such. You also have three officer slots (they also join your away team if you want) that you equip officers to — they have special abilities that you can activate to boost your spaceship. After you learn what to do it’s basically fly around and blow crap up. Then land on a planet.

After the space section you’re back on a planet and doing more ground work. This is something you’ll swap between — space and ground. If you don’t like one or the other… tough.

It’s pretty easy to write off this game, it is going to be niche. If you’re a Star Trek fan and want something Trekkie flavored — you’ll probably enjoy it for a bit. If you’re a die-hard WoW fan — you’ll probably be heralding its death all over gaming forums (for no apparent reason). And, if you’re just an MMO fan in general — you might want to wait to try it out, either through this open beta or some free trial down the line. The plain customization in the game is fairly good and something I liked (items for yourself, your away team and your ship — lots items and lots of possible combinations) but the missions seemed pretty repetitive and bland. Even after only doing so many. I will say that this might be a personal opinion tainted by too many missions in general (as concerns MMOs).

My Bottom Line: It’s not a terrible game, but it doesn’t exactly stand out and shine either.