Intense arcade fun at some times, and boring and frustrating missions at other times.
Some Trekkies may be disappointed that you don't see any people in the game; the Starships are the heroes and villains here. I never did feel like I was Captain Picard directing the crew of the Enterprise. If anything I just felt like I was the Enterprise, or at least the awesome new automatic pilot software they installed.
The game is played out in an over head view of the ships. It is essentially a 2D plane, but you do have limited maneuverability to raise and lower your ship along a 3rd axis.
I found much of the game is reminiscent of an 'free roaming' (i.e. not a side or vertical scrolling) arcade style space shooter, and these are the fun parts. Most of the other game-play elements the designers attempted to add were boring and even frustrating at times.
Much of the boring stuff takes place in the first third of the game. I felt I was spending far too much time scanning debris fields, and following warp trails. The warp trails are glowing clouds, telling you the direction that ships you're trying find are going. Warp trail tracking are also timed objectives, so if you don't find the next warp trail quick enough it disperses. It's as tiring as it sounds.
If you can make it through the first third of the game, you'll be in for some fun. There's lots of fast paced combat presented with a mix of defensive and offensive mission goals, particularly around the Next Generation era of the game. You'll get thrown into swarms of enemy vessels, and locking on to three ships at once to watch multiple streams of phaser fire take them down is quite enjoyable.
Of course that only lasts until the last third of the game (particularly the Voyager missions) where they decided to take everything that was fun about what you just went through, use it over again so that it becomes a little repetitive, and add all the crap from the early stages. So you end up stuck on the pendulum of the crazy clock going from having fun to being bored and frustrated on levels that last far too long, which may have decent continue points, but sadly no save points. I will admit however that the last level was a lot of fun, and left the game on a positive note.
Taking a step back to look at the game as a whole, you will get to pilot starships from all walks of the Star Trek life, but the weapons for all the ships, for the most part, remain the same. You can use phasers or a limited number of torpedoes as your primary weapon, and mines as a secondary weapon. You can also switch from your mines to using a tractor beam, or even the ships teleporter to send away teams onto other ships, or steal weapons and energy from them.
You'll also find character cards throughout the levels which will help improve the performance of your ships engines, weapons, shields and scanners for tracking and locking on to targets.
The environments for the levels don't change all that much. It's really just space with some asteroid and debris fields, a few different planets, and a couple big gas clouds. The biggest change was when you went inside the body of a massive luminous creature of some kind, but even that was still similar to the rest of the places you'll visit.
The audio is about as vibrant as the environments. The weapons sound good, and the music is okay, but it didn't jump out for me and got rather repetitive. The explosions all sounded the same to me, and the only voice over is that of an uninspired William Shatner at the beginning of the levels.
The control scheme may take a little while to learn. At first, the buttons kind of feel all over the place, but after some practice they are functional. It's definitely not a jump-in-and-play control scheme, which seems to go against the fast paced retro arcade feel of the battles.
When you first put the game in there is also an option to go into a Skirmish. This is where you can jump right into battles against an AI opponent or against a friend in a deathmatch style game-play, where you can set the number of frags to win, and which ship you will use (and which the AI will use if application) in the battle. These power ups include things like unlimited phasers, temporary cloak, and more.
If deathmatch isn't your thing, you can also choose to pick a team of ships to go against another team of ships (based on species). Who ever blows up the other team first, wins.
The final skirmish option is Onslaught, where you have to last as long as you can against a never ending barrage of increasingly difficult enemy ships. The skirmish modes make up the most fun for me, and it's what made it worth while to play through the campaigns to unlock new ships and locations for the fights. If you've ever wanted to pit a Borg cube against NCC1701-A, this could be your chance.
It was released as a budget title, and the production value shows it. But with at least parts of the game delivering some solid entertainment, and the random battles you can have with plenty of ships to pick from could make it worth while for fans of action with an old school feeling. It's just too bad the best parts are buried under the tedious content that makes up the rest of the game.