Desappointing... Aside from the original story.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Star Trek fan. But this game is just to plain flat. Let's start with the good side... You can pilot or command most of the knew ship class that appear in all the different Star Trek series, plus a few more that never really made it to the tv screen. The modeling of the ships are pretty decent. Maybe just a few round side that you can see segmentation, something you should expect to not see in a next gen space shooter.
The voice acting is made all by the real actors, which is probably the best point of this game. And the storyline, while stepping maybe a bit too much on the existing story, is pretty original, but just a pretext to space fight. However, the mission, while limited in number are also pretty original.
And... That was the good side.
Visually, the game doesn't cut it. Ship textures is pretty bad, and use of normal mapping is plain wrong in many place. Many visual bug occur in the game as camera clip in meshes. They often try to put WAY too much color in the skybox, which often means it's just a colorfest of random stuff.
The scaling is just plain wrong. Planet are tiny compared to your ship... And stars aren't much bigger. Same with scaling from ships to ship. A borg cube should normaly be huge compared to any starfleet ship. Same goes for the D'deridex class. But nope! Cubes are just a bit bigger then your ship.
There is no physic. The what? Yeah, colliding your ship in full speed against an other ship result in... Nothing. No damage, no explosion, no bouncing off shield... Not even sparks. Same with your ship and planets or stars. Aim directly at one, and try to hit it. Nothing happen.
As for the gameplay, it just suck. Bad. The whole space is calculated as a flat surface by the engine. Which mean, your ship cannot perform a flip or backflip. Its nose will stay stuck in a 90 degrees up or down motion. Also, the control to select where you want to warp often make you appear at the wrong place, as it's a 2D surface you select from, you can appear miles over your target since some level designer decided to put a planet far bellow that 2D plane.
The AI suck. But mainly the one from the 3 other ships your control. You cannot tell them to attack a target. You can tell them to warp at some coordonate (on a 2D plane), but once they reach that spot, what they do next is totally random. This really shows up in a mission where you have to blast douzen of asteroid that would come to collide with 3 planets. Well, you place your ship around the planets, but once done, the AI aim any random asteroid, and can often lead itself to be pretty far away from the designated planet.
But over all that, the weapons. Most of the time, you will simply rely on spamming the phaser bank, which automaticly lock on your closest target. No need to aim, no need for skill. Totally not the same for the photon. The aiming systems for the torpedos is amazingly broken. The game tells you you can only shot torpedos at ship when you lock on them in a really tiny arc in front and back of your ship. Sadly, even once the torpedos is locked, 1 torpedos out of 2 will just ignore any locking system and launch itself in the deep of the spaces. But even then, your ship can be directly aiming at your target, and the torpedos locks won't come up.
Switching targets is much harder when you need to target a specific one when all the enemies are of the same ship class. They all shows up as the same on your target selection screen. Did I say you cannot really force your 3 dumb AI to target a specific one? Sometime they will target what you target... And sometime they will just forget you exist.
You basicly destroye douzen of enemies ships. Your are simply amazingly more resistant then their. And if by some weird luck the enemies AI manage to focus fire on 1 of your ship and deal any kind of damage between the phase of shield regeneration, you just need to warp it away from the fight, and ask it to repair... Which mean after 2-3 mins, your ship is back to max! No need to say the enemies obviously don't repair their own ship.
Remember I said the story is good? Yeah... It is. Just ending just suck. But they rest of the story is great.
You know, I'm surprised that after all that time, the best space shooter I know is still the old Colony Wars on Playstation 1.
I think the different review of gaming website went way too easy on this game.