[PC] Star Trek Online (STO)

In my umpteenth venture into finding a MMORPG that suits me, I found myself tripping into a space time continuum hyperdimensional vortex anomaly named Star Trek Online.

Perfect World Entertainment oversees this offering from Cryptic Studios.

Now the long dead Star Trek fan in me sort of lured me to this game...but after starting it, the variety of things to do intrigued me (at least for now).

It's a typical F2P game with PWE's typical cash shop attached to it. However, for the patient gamer, there is no real reason to use the store.

I enjoyed the fact that the quests mix ship based and ground combat. Space battles are a blast (pun intended) and are extremely well done from a graphics, sound and immersion perspective. Ground combat, as has been noted in some reviews of the game, is very meh and gets boring. But who cares, get me back to my ship to blow up a few more baddies! XD

Anyways, I'll be messing around on this game for a bit if any of you closet Trekkies or space/sci-fi theme junkies want to check it out.

It's a nice time sink for a few hours here and there. Nothing "omg I will play this forever and ever" but what MMO has had that feel lately anyway, right?

http://sto.perfectworld.com/

My character is Aki@mikumokamaki (at least I think that's how you can contact me XD) Let me know if that doesn't work lol.

Hmmm, I'm not much of a Trekkie, but it might be worth checking out if it has tactical aspects.

TBH, it's not very tactical at all.

The ground combat is annoying to me now after playing this game for several weeks. Concept is interesting and the environments can be beautiful, but game play can be buggy...especially with members of your away team (npc helper crew members) getting stuck in some of the terrain features. There are some maps that test your patience with how much you run back and forth as you complete mission objectives...especially on maps where enemy npc's respawn after a certain time. Meaning if you take too long to get 1 objective done, you'll end up having to re-clear an area to get to the next objective...annooooooying!! XD

Space combat falls into the traditional tank, dps and healer mode. You can setup and choose your ships based on the style of combat you prefer. Tactical ships are fast, damage dealers. Engineering ships are slow tanks. Science ships are a happy medium between the two, focusing on support.

The nice thing is that that game allows you to modify any of those three classes of ships to suit your needs. So, for example, I took an engineering ship and added mods to it that make it much more nimble in combat than normal.

There are gobs of customization things, but as a F2P game, many of those features are in the Zen store or for subs. It's mostly eye candy type of things anyway, so it's not a "requirement" to play...unless you want a fancy looking ship or want an off-duty suit or something.

One downside...it's extremely easy to level. I already hit the level cap (50) with my first toon after two weeks. For playing maybe 20hrs a week that's pretty fast...too fast.

So now I see the complaints about the end game for STO...there IS none. I can keep acquiring better ships, etc, etc, but there are no missions that can stand up to those OP things.

I've watched several veteran players, using capped ships that can solo things that should take 4-5 ships to destroy lol.

But, even as a free member, we get 3 character slots. I might roll another race to try out the other side of things.

But I doubt I'm going to stick with this game for too much longer.

It's another example of the sad trend in MMO's right now.