Game Review: Star Trek Online

Another Ruined Franchise

In discussion with other reviewers and gamers of big franchises that go into game form, I often get the "well they can't do that." This is always in response to my saying that they have watered down and turned a completely story driven franchise into a flash, point and click game. If they can't translate a story driven franchise even 50% of the way, why bother even naming it after the franchise.

Yes I am talking about the Cyptic's Star Trek Online game. If you are even remotely a Star Trek fan, this game fails. You will be completely disappointed at the horror of this god awful game. One idiot tried to excuse it by saying "oh it's in the future and they are at war, that's why there's all the shooting." Hogwash! The developers fail at life and have zero brain activity going on. They ruined a perfectly good name that had a ridiculous amount of spin offs and lore.



Star Trek at its core is a preachy, social commentary franchise. Whether you like it or not, Star Trek has had some very ground breaking storylines. It has tackled issues that no one else dared touch. It broke racial barriers, along with that other ground breaking show "batman" and the Eartha Kit kiss. Who could forget the Lieutenant Uhuru kiss.

On to the game review:

Star Trek Online Review

Graphics: The graphics overall are actually pretty bad. You cannot go back in graphics, especially when you are trying to present a photorealistic view of the characters and world. In fact it is as if the design teams on graphics did not get together to decide and overall quality of graphics level. [more later]

- landscape: this is the worst part of the graphics. Where a game like Eve Online made you gasp at the panoramic views of space, this makes you gag. Not only are thew space views badly drawn, they are completely unrealistic. They have clouds in space? Really? They are just awful. There is not even a sense of 3 dimensions to it. You look like you're on a cheesy star trek 1950 t.v. set. It is just ridiculous

- character: the characters are drawn photorealistically. There is nothing cartoon about them. However, you don't see much of the character, that you spend 30 minutes playing barbie dress up. There are space stations you can walk around and landing party missions where you can see your character, but for the most part you are in your ship. A vast majority of all missions are in the ship. You are either fighting in the ship or exploring in the ship. In fact after the beginning of the character development unfolds you can just phone in your missions from the ship, no need to return to the space station.

Just a side note. There were so many horrible graphical bugs in the beta that after awhile I turned off all the graphical goodies, so everyone looked like water color paintings. It didn't help by the way.

- hardware capability: Does this game test your hardware graphically. This is a catch 22. If I say yes, it might just be due to the tremendous amount of bugs. If I say no, that the graphics are so bad they shouldn't strain anyone's hardware, again it might just be due to the bad programing.

Gameplay: this is simply to cover how fun and easy the game is actually to play from the start and from day to day.

- chargen: character generation is the same as Champions Online or Heroes Online. It doesn't have near the depth of the Heroes Online chargen though. There is really nothing to it. It is just barbie dress up. People were completely upset, however, when they found that their first piece of armor completely covered up their character. So, probably those that spent and hour matching the glove seems to the coat seem color, went over the top angry when they bought a +1 shirt that covered everything on the character. LOL! They were screaming in chat about it for some time.

- controls: awful. Simply awful. It is not even a case of a learning curve. They are just awful. Remember you are in a ship. The camera swivels in every direction but the direction you want it. This would be great if you were filming the game, but this is not what a gamer wants. By default, they have a chase-target-fixed camera. This would normally be a good thing, like if you were pvping in WOW. But, in a space battle with you controlling a ship and trying to maneuver your highest percentage shield to stay between you and the enemy, it is maddening. And, I bet you think taking off that stupid camera control would fix it? No. It then follows your ship and completely ignores the target.

Also, the controls to keep you targeted, maneuverable and alive are just god awful. It is as if the developer literally sat down and said, I want to show the grace and beauty of my ship, let the player be damned. That is exactly what we get.

Also, the controls and space flight is not 3d. There are no barrel rolls. There are no 90 degree dives. There are no loop de loops. Remember, you're in a space ship with a gravity pull to the floor of the ship so that there is no outside reference of gravity. There should be no reason why the ship shouldn't be able to barrel roll. Ok, forget barrel roll, it doesn't point straight down into a dive position. Another, "my ship is gracefully descending," moment.

- ui: what ui? You literally have to go into game options and open up a skills panel to retrieve skills to put on your bar. The bar is so tiny you have to expand it 3 times so you have enough room to put the orders to land the ship on the space station. I am all for a designer trying to be unique in his design, but this UI works against the player at every possible turn.

- story: ok this is where the story and "plot" of the game is supposed to go. I am not kidding. There is nothing to put here. Everyone who argued with me about the other points of the game all agreed there was no plot or story to the game. Wait! No plot to a Star Trek spinoff? How could that be? This must have literally just been made by game designers, and not a developer, i.e. someone with ideas. Oooooh ideas are dangerous.

- lore: meh, they throw around Star Trek like words. They have lore pop up in between loading zones on the splash screen. But as far as lore being part of a big picture and story... [see above]

Advancement: this is where the great telling feature of character progression goes. While in other games even minute progression is noticeable, in Star Trek online it is invisible.
- rpg: I guess I could say you get better clothes, armor, ships and officers, but it seems nearly pointless when it doesn't really matter. The enemies get harder and so do you sorta. Honestly, I find the 3 round of public server counter strike more progressive than this game. Can you get into the story? What story? They fail at the entire RPG of this game.

- hacknslash: they definitely get the hack n slash aspect going in this game. If endlessly shooting a ship from your ship is your idea of fun, then this is the game for you. Half the time, you are so far away from your ship and the enemy ship is so far away that you barely see them. You can see the laser beam pew pew pew more than anything else on screen.

Overall: this is an excellent game, for someone that is brain dead and wants to spend money on this instead of 5 other games that blow this away.

- immersion: are you immersed in "star trek"ness in the game? No. And, I am being very honest. If you removed the name Star Trek from anything appearing in the game and sat 100 people in front of it and had them play for 4 hours, I bet 80 of them would never guess this was Star Trek. Given that scenario I bet 40 of them would think it was a new starship troopers game.

- must have: is this a must have just on the basis of it having the name Star Trek Online on it? No. Will this be a gamer nerd library must have? No. The gamer nerd is always a connoisseur of fine games. There is no way he would attach his good name to this trash.

Whoever owns the licensing for Star Trek were probably paid a lot of money to let their name go out on this. This is the only reason I could think of them attaching their name to this. Shame on Cryptic for doing this. And, before you start thinking I'm some crazed Treky, I am not. I have never been nor even heard of a Star Trek convention. LOL!

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Game Review: Champions Online - Another City of Heroes?

Champions Online Game Review

If you missed it, this past weekend there was an open beta for the soon to be released game Champions Online. Yes, if you recognize the name it is based off of the old table top, pen and paper game of the same name. Cryptic Studios bought the licensing rights and made an MMO [massive multi-player online] out of it. So at its core is it a super-heor online game.

I got a chance to take a peak at it and played it for the entire weekend. I first didn't remember the game, but seeing a couple of videos about it, I do recall it at E3. Low and behold it was the same game. I recall at E3 I wasn't that impressed by it, but it was still developing at that stage.

On to the review. Since this is my first review on my blog, unlike my YouTube reviews at Shakaama Live, I'll make this as factual as possible and list the criteria for the review.

Graphics
- Overall style (4 out of 10): The overall style of the look of the game is very unpolished. In city of heroes, your heroes were very larger than life and you really got the sense that you were playing a super-hero. Although the graphics were in fact realistic and the cityscape was modern, it just did not give you a sense of anything unique and exciting. It was not impressive

- landscape (3 out of 10): The environment was well executed, but everything was just so tiny and the levels were so compact that you never got the sense you were in an actual city, an actual forest, an actual tundra. The zones made it clear that you were playing a game with snow, dirt, trees and not that you were in some actual area.

- character (4 out of 10): The graphics of the NPC's and the PC's were not impressive at all. Again they were not polished. The animation of the characters were all stiff as well. There was no sense of fluid real life motions, nor super-hero life motions as well.

- hardware capability (6 out of 10): This category is for if the game really tests your hardware. As you can see by the previous graphics categories, it isn't a graphically impressive game. As such, I found no problem installing it and getting it to play smoothly. So for smoothness of playability graphic wise it gets a complete pass, but the lack of challenging hardware with impressive graphics it fails.


Gameplay
- chargen (2 our of 10): Character generation was a sticking point in City of Heroes. They constantly redeveloped the chargen. Champions Online completely just copied them. Chargen involves nothing more than making the rudimentary powers of your hero and overabundance of looks for your character. I say overabundance, because unless you are playing zoomed all the way into your character you will never see all the minor things you or anyone else did to their character. In the end chargen boils down to basic heights, colors and costuming. The hundreds of facial expressions you can put on your character or whether he has a cleft chin is unnecessary. Chargen therefore was not innovative at all. I've yet to see a super-hero chargen where you can plan out or plot out the path of powers he's to go on or even remove the powers altogether and do an actual back story in game of developing the powers. Both City of Heroes and Champions missed the point of this. They both just lazily put a text editor on your character and let you write some mumbo jumbo about the origins of the hero. The fact that Champions chargen is exactly the same as City of Heroes smacks of plagiarism.

- controls (2 out of 10): the controls were clunky as hell. I heard that you could attach an xbox controller to your computer and have massive fun, unfortunately I don't have one and didn't think about it. I suffered through, what has to be the worst physics known to man. It's as if my hero was 4 tons and didn't have control of his own muscles. While the developer at E3 called the gameplay heroic, it is anything but. The worst thing were the travel powers. I tested them all. unless you chose superspeed and flight, you had zero precision of how your character moved. None of this stop on a dime. I also was disappointed with the flying disks that they put in: ice, electric etc... those travel powers used a disk, and when you stopped moving you floated to the ground. I just don't get the point of that. Do you lose control of your disk in relation to gravity? I'm sure it's to prevent some exploit, but for game play it sucks. Speaking of ice, I thought it was going to be like iceman. You know he cools the air under his feet and creates a path of ice. No, it's a floating icy disk. How lazy are you that you can't program an icy path that fades in 2 seconds behind him after 10 yards. Yet in the videos and the splash screens he has an icy path. Mind you it wasn't even my power of choice, but I found it disappointing.

- ui (0 out of 10): User Interface! What can I say about their user interface. Oh one word comes to mind: HORRIBLE!!!! This was a pain in the butt. Man it was god awful. I just cannot say enough about it. There were these ... and then these ... also these... ugggg it was ridonkulous. Who thought it up? And, lastly, it wasn't even something new, it was just a bad copy of other UI's. uggggg!!

Story
- rpg ( 3 out of 10): Is there a story you can follow? Yes, and they do convey it. Yes you get a feel for what is going on in the game and it's not just something boring. Ok, for there being a story Champions gets a pass. As for the actual merits of the story? Fail. They had the most unimaginative staff come up with the worst scenarios possible. I've seen more imagination in table top games from complete social rejects, than what i saw in this game. The story for a super hero... yes a SUPER HERO, should be epic. Literally the challenges in this game, a swat team could handle and be home by dinner. It was just so bleh.

- lore (6 out of 10): Was there background to the story and the world and the game? Yes, they have cut scenes and npcs that talked to you. The voice acting was well executed and gave you a sense of the character speaking. Not bad build up to it.

Advancement
- rpg (1 out of 10): Does your advancement in the game have a story like quality to it? No.

- hack n slash (1 out of 10): Is the game advanced by hack n slash? Yes

Overall
- Immersion: Did you feel immersed in this online game. No

- Must have: Is this a must have game for video game nerds. No. This is not going to be a classic and a "if you're a nerd you must have this in your library". This doesn't advance any game style. In fact it doesn't even advance the Champions franchise. I'm sorry to say that. I played champions only once, hell i spent a month making the character. This game is not impressive in the least bit.

I predict a lackluster launch and a lackluster following. This game just does not capture the imagination.

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