A Little Good, Lots of Bad, and Way Too Much Ugly
Now, this is nothing like that, but I don't think it's quite like a FPS either -- flying a starship here is more like piloting a catamaran. It takes a while to figure out how to manage 4 ships at a time, but they do a decent job of managing things on their own. The zoom-out tactical map is one of the game's better features, because it enables to you get a quick overview of the action and give out orders quickly.
Voice acting is adequate, but the script and story are all too standard. It's pretty hokey when you're dueling Romulan War Birds to occasionally hear the same hackneyed taunts over and over. Surely they could have done better. Or was this project deliberately sabotaged?
As for the graphics, the good news is you can max out all the settings and still get fluid motion on an average system. The bad news is these graphics are about 3 years behind the curve. Space battles in Star Wars: Empire at War are much, much richer, and they're not even as good as they should be.
There are no sound options that would allow you to take advantage of the Creative X-Fi. There are just volume controls.
Not being able to save in the middle of missions is a major pain. It's just a cheap trick to stretch out a limited campaign.
As of this writing, online play simply does not work. You log in and see a bunch of hosted games with one person waiting for others to join. Whenever you try to join a game, you get a message saying the host has another version of the game. This happens whether you have the out-of-box version or if you have applied the patch. That is totally unacceptable.
I was really looking forward to the ship customization described in interviews with the designer, but as far as I can tell there is no customization whatsoever. This is plain fraudulent. This is the kind of game that might be fun for a newbie gamer for a few days, but it offers basically no enjoyment for gamers looking for any amount of substance. Disgraceful!