Short and sweet, this is a great game, with a few minor, but persistant flaws.
Platform: PC
Control: Keyboard + Mouse
Any Starfleet hound will tell you that this is probably the best Star Trek game that has been made to date.
The game as a whole is quite a lot of fun - in fact, I finished all 3 campaigns in 3 days, much to the chagrin of my sleeping habits.
Its a typical space SIM where you start out with a small ship and puny weapons and get brought through progressively harder missions, winning Prestige points that will buy you larger vessels and weapons with more punch. There are 3 campaigns - Klingon, Romulan and Federation, to be done in that order to follow a chronological story. The story line is quite good, and Patrick Stewart's voice talent adds a lot of class to the Federation roles.
The game also has "conquest" mode, where you are basically just supposed to take over the galaxy - I haven’t played with that much, but it just seems to be more open ended action of the same ilk as the campaign. That is probably a good and bad thing - good because it allows you the freedom to fix and re-supply your ship when you want, and bad because it can potentially get monotonous.
You can also play as the Borg in conquest mode.
Now for a few flaws -
Combat can be quite fun, or really frustrating, depending upon the situation. Sometimes it feels like a Ballet of Hippos with these ships just endlessly circling each other, trying to get in the next shot. Other times there is so much going on, you really feel that it is pushing your limits of tactical awareness. So, flaw 1 is potentially monotonous combat situations where you just pick away at each other until one of you dies.
Flaw 2 - the map mode is horribly unintuitive and sometimes quite buggy.
Flaw 3 - actually flying the ship can really be a pain in the tush. Basically you click with the mouse on the 3D window indicating the direction that you would like to turn in. The ship then plots a set turn and executes until that point, with a clock style thermometer reading to let you know how much further you have to turn to meet you last command heading.
I haven't found a way to tell it to just KEEP turning in that direction. There is a "Set Course to Orbit Target" mode, but that doesn't work very well i my experience. I have to see if it can be done with a joystick, but I don't think so. In fact, using the ships systems probably precludes that, because you do have to go back and forth a bit with the mouse to do things like beam assault teams, etc.
Conclusion:
Anyway, despite a few flaws that bugged be me the whole time, this is an awesome game, and one that I'll play for quite some time from now. Its an oldie that requires some looking on EBay, etc, but it is more than worth it.
If you like the Star Trek Universe and space SIMs in general, you'll find this to be a lot of fun.
Closest Games for Comparison: Master of Orion II (3 sucked!), or Freelancer, sans the merchant aspect.