This isn't at all atypical for Star Trek Online. The space MMO itself has warped in unprepared, jury-rigged, piecemeal and scatterbrained. It's a jumble of

broken-up content, inconsistent rules and half-finished systems that does a great job of throwing players together but a terrible job of keeping them

together, a game where you never really know what's going to be on the end of your next warp (although it will probably involve blowing stuff up). I'm not

quite sure that's what Gene Roddenberry would have meant by the wonder and mystery of space exploration.

To be fair, it does keep you on your toes, and like Cryptic's other games Champions Online and City of Heroes, Star Trek Online possesses an unpretentious,

scrappy charm and a kind of fast-and-loose immediacy that you don't come across too often in MMOs. Unlike those carefully masked superhero adventures,

however, this game isn't hoping to get by on its winning personality alone. This one comes with a peculiar and hugely popular pop-cultural phenomenon

attached: the camp, worthy sci-fi world of Star Trek.

It gets it a long way. I've already written about the Pavlovian response you'll have to its unmistakeable, iconic sound effects, for one thing. The game is

smartly set later in the timeline than any existing Trek fiction, allowing Cryptic to conjure a scenario that suits the game - a reignited war between the

Federation and the Klingon Empire - while liberally peppering it with references to anything and everything that has gone before.

The game's chat channels are already bubbling with happy Trekkies revelling in this banquet of fan service, batting arcane knowledge to and fro while

enjoying the wish-fulfilment of captaining their own Starfleet vessel or visiting Deep Space 9. If you love Star Trek, it's a great place to indulge your

enthusiasm and share it with others.

Furthermore, despite the fact that Star Trek Online is built on the same engine as Champions Online - which will be quite obvious when on foot - Cryptic has

been careful not to simply force Star Trek into an existing MMO template, choosing instead to build the game around what makes sense for its licence. It has

the fundamentals - long-form RPG progression built around loot and skill customisation - but it's structurally and mechanically pretty unusual for an MMO,

and moment-to-moment it's quite a different experience.

The most obvious manifestation of this is the way the action is split between space and ground action, since it simply wouldn't be Star Trek without either.

There is one sense in which it's not very Star Trek at all, though - although there are simple-exploration elements, the majority of what you'll be doing in

either instance is combat, and pretty frenetic combat at that.

On foot, you participate in messy firefights with quite large groups of enemies, backed either by four AI bridge officers, four other players, or a mixture

of the two. You're selecting hard targets and punching out skills in the MMO style, but everything's a lot faster, you have fewer skills, and there are

several action-game twists such as flanking damage, cover and a crouched "focus" mode that make movement and positioning important.

It's shallow fun, but rather incoherent, and the extremely fast rate at which your shields and health recharge means that you seem either to be invincible or

dead in a flash, but it's seldom clear why. The three character classes - Science Officer, Tactical Officer and Engineer - each have different utility, but

they aren't that clearly drawn and are defined more by the weapons and equipment they're carrying, since these dictate their main combat skills.