The Star Trek universe recently expanded with a new film that reset the original story and gives a whole new generation a chance to appreciate it. Now it’s going another place where people have gone before and exploring strange somewhat familiar places, seeking out...well, fun we hope.

But is it really? There are a lot of things I think are missing from the game. For example when you start, you can only be a member of Starfleet. Plus, you don’t even go through any type of training. I guess they thought that actually going to Starfleet Academy would have been boring and so you are, instead, thrust straight into the game’s story all willy nilly.

Borg are attacking, you’re just a cadet but somehow all the officers on the ship are targeted by the Borg and suddenly you’re in charge (how’s that for an extremely forced storyline?). On top of that, the Klingons are actively invading Federation space, oh and the Romulans, they’ve got all sorts of problems after their planets were destroyed. But still, they want to fight the Federation as well. It’s amazing that the Federation lasts as long as it does isn’t it? I hear the Dominion might be coming as well...one can hope.

Now on to the game. It’s Sunday and I was going to hop in and do some missions to get some material for the review and, the servers are down. Reading through the forums one finds that they have problems with load balancing at times, logins and now it seems server stability. Not exactly the type of launch we’ve come to expect from Cryptic. This was two weeks prior to publishing and things seem more stable.

Problems abound in the game as enemy ships can shoot through asteroids and even through other enemy ships (Borg spheres shooting through Borg Cubes). Unfortunately, you cannot also do that. It doesn’t happen all the time, maybe just with smaller asteroids. But it does happen a lot. Then again, I took on six enemies with my basic Bird of Prey and blasted them all to oblivion. So obviously I either have a perfectly set up ship, or there are some game balancing issues. They are also facing ’tens of thousands’ of bug reports at present and are simply swamped. So, many issues will be a long time in the fixing. But with a massive game and massive amounts of players, bugs are certainly to be expected. Of course, downtime on a weekend, that’s just inexcusable.

The graphics are nice, but they don’t compare to that other massive online space game and seem almost shoddy in comparison. You have a fantastic range of customization for your character and ship. I made my own alien for Starfleet and then a Borg-liberated Klingon. You can give certain body features more prominence than others. I made my Melfica (that’s the alien race I made) have longer than average arms and longer than average fingers. I based the idea on the standard ’gray’ aliens and then mixed in some Peter Lorre. So he’s sort of creepy looking to say the least. The Klingon I based on two ideas power and fear. So she’s about 2.2 meters tall (7.2 Feet) and big in a very physically fit way. Since she survived assimilation and liberation she’s got the infected looking skin and still sports a Borg implant.

The sounds are, well, Star Trek. All of the sounds are authentic from the phasers and photon torpedoes down to the transporter and computer voice. It’s all there exactly as it should be. I just wish they had Robert Picardo as an emergency medical hologram. That would have been perfect.