I've only seen quite bad reviews here, so I'll have to post one.

OK, here we go.

Technical: From technical viewpoint, everything seems ok. Graphics and sounds are awesome. Well, mostly because of the details you will soon be hooked by the game. E.g., shields flaming when bathed in phaser fire or glowing when entering an athmosphere or the great soundtrack (my favourite: the victory tune) or sounds. Voice acting is good too.

Gameplay: as we all know what the game is about (in short: taking leadership of a huge battle vessel in the Star Trek Universe, with powerful weapons but sluggish movement and protected by large shields, you are to overpower rather then outmaneuver enemies), I'll get right to the point... Gameplay is overall good, but has some problems. It is suggested by the game to let the crew do the work with you in command, freeing you from tedious details. This doesn't work, at least concerning combat, IMO. It would help much if I could give more orders concerning combat, or delegate only some tasks, rather than having the choice to let the crew do combat all alone or doing it all by myself. Great would be the option to order evasive maneuvers while engaging (evade all! or evade this!) or having the crew handle firing while I steer the ship. An outright bug is for me that Felix (the weapons officer) sometimes doesn't attack when ordered or chooses not to move the ship when already in range...

The guirks: well, who doesn't complain about the save games? You can't save in mission, what is sometimes very bad, if you have nearly beaten the mission, but fail to succeed in the last objective, which you cannot achieve because you are to far away (SPOILER: the diplomatic mission, the first time I tried I was too far away from the klingon vessel to intercept it - mission lost). Even worse, after a hard mission, spanning several systems, multiple encounters, saving a lot of buddies, taking 45 min. "work", the game crashes on loading the next mission. Doh! There should be more savepoints, or just one quick save OR an automatic save every XXX min. Lip sync: Hmm, well. Many complained about that. Lip syncing is done by "prerecording" a models movement, sync'd to the speech. As this game has a lot of dialogs, and the characters aren't prerendered (they are 3D-models, like in games like quake, which are rendered real-time) it is quite difficult to fulfill this (unlike EF, which hadn't that many dialogs). OTOH, there are technices to smoothen the problem by generating lip-movements real-time accordings a script, AFAIK. Should have been done. Ah, and yes, it's rather short OR it's rather difficult, depending on difficulty setting.

Overall: a nearly must-have for any trekker, don't be fooled by the quirks. Others will have a blast of a time, too if they like space-sims.

Ah, yes, that's it. I hope for an inexpensive mission disk. And I will outright kill someone if this is a crapload like the one for Elite Force. Wow, what a rip off.