A mess of a game (but didn't have to be that way)
On the good side, the game looks nice for a 5-year-old PS2 game. The ship-to-ship battles are actually fun in an arcadey kind of way, There are a good number of missions (20), and the skirmish mode is okay for a little while. The campaign story was all over the place and didn't make sense in some instances. But there was a good spread of enemies and missions over the various eras, and you get to fly the different Federation ships. I even liked the music, and they got William Shatner to narrate the mission intros.
Now, the bad parts. Where to start? Many of the missions are very frustrating. Even the tutorial missions (yeah, the one with the rings) are super annoying. The average player will end up redoing some mission objectives dozens of times before successfully completing them. And generally it's the same kind of bad missions: fly through these rings, follow those warp trails, escort that weak ship, beat the timer, wash, rinse & repeat. It's just poor level design and really should not have passed the quality-control people at Besthesda. The game becomes a chore really quickly, and I found that I could only take it in small doses before playing something else. It's really a shame, since the Star Trek license should be a good starting point for coming up with decent games. I really do hope that Bethesda has given up the license. They have thoroughly abused it with games like Encounters and Star Trek: Legacy (Star Trek: Conquest is pretty good, though simplistic).
One major warning: If you have an older PS2 like me, there is a good chance that you will not even be able to play this game out of the box. For some silly reason, the game is on a cd instead of a dvd. I got it to run by tweaking my PS2, which required opening it up and adjusting the spindel that controls the height of the disk. There's a good guide at www.tweak3d.net/articles/ps2repair/3.shtml. Ultimately, the game is not worth the effort.