Take me away from this game, Warp 9
Star Trek Online is pretty bad. Competition for MMOs is stiff, and this game doesn't offer much. I'll confess I "only" spent 3 hours with it, but I decided I'd had enough of it.
When I loaded up the game, I hoped that the ship combat would be excellent (it was the most unique element of the game), and that the ground combat would be adequate. The ship controls were pretty abysmal, but the ground combat was actually not too bad.
Since the game has two major parts, it seems fair to discuss them separately. The ship combat was a huge let down -- it was the big thing I wanted to be fun because it was relatively unique. Ships move slow, are not very responsive, and controlling them was fidgety. We'll take one point in particular as an example, the shields. Every ship has shields, and you can redirect power to and from your shields, just like in the shows. What's not to like? The problem is that wherever you are being attacked from, that is where you are going to redirect your power until you have no shields at all. If you can let your power flow freely among your shields, why do you have the distinction at all? Weapons are no better, because they don't fire automatically. You can't even set them to fire automatically "whenever they can". Instead, you have the equivalent of removing auto-attack, forcing you to manually command every "Fire Phasers". Also, there are forward and rear phasers, and if you fly right you can use both but if you fly wrong you find yourself trying to fire the wrong phasers. If there was a way around that, it wasn't clear in the tutorial on ship command. The result of decisions like these is that you are constantly trying to press buttons as fast as possible to keep your ship running, instead of focusing on the upper level combat decisions that are the draw of ship combat.
The away missions are better, but still feel a little clunky. You get a fairly standard 3rd person view for most of the time, and have a 1st person view for firing your phaser, similar to an FPS but more forgiving if your aim is bad (like mine). The phaser automatically hits whatever you have your reticle over. There's party commands you can give, and they didn't feel too bad, but they didn't really flow either. Except for the way I was constantly diving for cover when just trying to walk, this part of the game was pretty adequate.
That is probably my biggest complaint: poor controls. I felt like I was fighting with the game to do what I wanted, and I didn't really enjoy anything about it. There seemed to be a story to the game, and I smiled when the game contrived reasons for an ensign to be put in command of a ship, but I ultimately didn't really like this game much at all. Unless you are a hardcore fan who must say you have played all the Star Trek games, stay away from this one. I spent 3 hours on it, and barely got through the tutorial. I'm not willing to put in more time for what seems to be a really bad game, and I recommend you don't do it either. It is just so sad, because I really wanted this game to be good.
