Good grief, can you believe it has been a whole year since the JJ Abrams' (dumb and dumber) Star Trek remake movie? Where does the time go? (Answer: day job)

Last year I got really excited about a Trek game. Two months ago, Cryptic released their Star Trek MMO. I love sci-fi. I love Star Trek. I gave it a try.

Star Trek Online

Cryptic's previous MMO was City of Heroes. That was a traditional FPS MMO and I had a great time flying around and throwing fireballs with my alter ego, Ragin' Flamer. Based on that experience, I had high expectations for this new game.

STO is an ambitious project. I would say that it is actually two MMO's using two different engines. There is a traditional FPS "away team" game and a novels starship in space MMO.

Given Cryptic's experience with CoH, one would expect the away missions to be the strong part of the game but ironically I liked that part the least. You play yourself but you also have a team of 3 officers in your "away team" with which to battle nefarious NPC's. I never got to play with friends so my officers were always bots, which jumped and danced around like insects on meth. It was a passable FPS but did not grab me much as a solo experience. I also found the system for leveling up your team, the skills and the character development, to be pretty confusing. I could not tell if there was actual depth there or just clutter.

On the other hand, the space ships were a total blast! A very simple system with managing energy to shields, engines and weapons. Phasers, torpedoes. All the stuff one would expect. Even playing alone, I had a great time with the ships and they make it very easy to do team missions with total strangers so I got to do some big battles without actually knowing anyone.

The game was quite stable for me with few hiccups. The graphics were terrific (except for the animations in the FPS mode). They did a great job tying in space and planets with a Trek feel.

I played every day for about 2 weeks. I was curious. I got my money's worth but then I let it go and moved back to Dragon Age and Dawn of War.

This is a game that seems like a lot of fun with friends but all my game friends are too busy with work these days to invest in an MMO. Like all MMO's the game itself is not what keeps you there, it is the people and the human interaction with other players that gets you to come back. I considered making more effort to join a fleet but the truth is I dont have time for an MMO these days either; I just wanted a few hours of Trek a week.

I will add that I had hard time meeting new people in-game which I attribute in part to the game itself. It was odd to try to meet other "space ships"; looking for a group as an inanimate object was just kind of weird. Another factor is that the game is highly instanced so you just dont see that many people at any one time. This helps performance but is a strange experience. Admitedly I did not put a lot of effort into finding groups but in my brief play, I found no pickup groups outside of the ship encounter zones. The few people I did try to contact basically ignored Captain Kirkland.

I wish STO all the best and would gladly give it a try again in the future if another friend or two wanted to try it. They have a lot of potential here to build on. (Just writing this review has me itching to fly my ship some more.)

Let me close by saying that this game begs for a non-traditional revenue model. I would happily play this game a few days a month just to zoom around in the ships -- but not if I have to pay a fixed $15 monthly fee whether I play or not. This is a perfect "Casual MMO". If Cryptic switched to a free-to-play model like Dungeons and Dragons Online, I think this particular game would do better.