Meh. Not bad for a browser game. Lots of posts on their forums though, saying those graphics rival STO's. Which just means they seriously need a better PC. :-P
I'm a big fan of the Okuda's work, but I couldn't honestly say I'm even slightly excited about this game. I can't imagine how they're going to make it feel like Star Trek, I think it's going to be even more combat-only centric than STO initially was. I'll be very happy if I'm proven to be completely wrong, but as far as I'm concerned a successful browser-based game needs to let you drop in and get into something fun extremely quickly for those moments when you have ten free minutes, be addictive enough to make you want to stay for longer, then be able to satisfy you if you do choose to play for a long time. Games like Farmville manage that by having lots of things to grow/buy/collect, a narrative with about as much depth as Dappy from N-Dubz's personality, and a very large onus on peer cooperation (to persuade you to persuade your friends to join in). What’re we going to be doing in ST:IS, exactly? Will we have to load each other’s torpedo tubes before we go into battle? It works for things like Farmville, but I think that combination with a Star Trek skin, however pretty and canonical, will lose too much of what I like about the Trek universe; the stories it tells. I wish them the best of luck, but I can't see it making a long term impact after the initial novelty.
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Incidentally, something that made me laugh was the rapidity of the old argument that sprung up, in the graphics/screenshot discussion thread, about Star Trek having sound in space. After all this time, I can't believe people still get hung-up about that. Personally, I don't think Trek canon breaks our scientific understanding at all; what we hear is not due to air, it's mostly thanks to the vibration of the warp field particles that saturate the area around a starship, even when it is not at warp. And any impression you might get that you can hear a starship passing at warp from further away that those particles should naturally extend, simply hasn't taken into account the affect that faster-than-light travel would have on time/space distortion and the way in which that would affect your perception. Additionally, any shock-waves (from physical to sub-space) in the vacuum of space would certainly be silent, until that is they interact with a solid object (like a ship), at which point they would excite that matter's particles and thus a lot of that energy will *then* become sound. Between those two phenomenon, and the fact that it would be logical given how people naturally perceive things for a starship's computers to translate some of the sensor readings it receives and output sound to augment a crew's perception, there seems to be more than enough justification for the sound in space for me. :-D What do you guys think? Does the roar of the Enterprise warping past bother you?
