This game feels like a dumbed down, clunkier, ****-tacular version of Bridge Commander. This game looks awesome, but that's where awesome gets off the bus.
Flight controls, to start with, are just plain bad. WASD is basically all you have for control. That's it, no rolling, and if you happen to find your ship flying 'up' or 'down', the thing will rotate to align itself to be 'upright'. Sure, it will handle like you expect a starship might when you're going along level, but once you hit that z-axis, physics fly out the window to so you can spin around and stay 'right side up'. By the way, I'm using the little 'tags' to denote directions that plainly should not exist in a space flight game.
The weapons actually do damage as you would expect, but you are unable to target individual systems as you could in BC. Not to mention that the LMB is mapped to two commands. The first is fire, the second, triggered with a double click, is the autopilot "fly this way" command. If you try to fire too fast, the autopilot turns on and you momentarily lose control of your ship. Rather than giving each weapon on the ship it's own seperate charge, the ship has one consolidated charge that is depleted while you fire. So much for cycling through phasor arcs, as it now doesn't matter how your ship is oriented... unless you have the misfortune to want to fire a torpedo. Torpedos will not fire unless the target is within a certain cone in front or behind your ship. While this cone seems too large (and I'll come back to this in a moment), it will also periodically disappear while your target is clearly right the **** in front of you. Back to it being too large, you can often fire while your target is so far off to the side that the torpedo will have to turn sharply midflight toward the target, which, even with such atmosphere killing turning ability, it still manages to just miss, leaving your torpedo spinning madly around the nacells of your target trying to hit something. Combat consists of lowering a ships shields with phasors, then blasting it's hull with torpedos. That is the combat in this game.
Targetting itself can be a pain. Hold a button, and scroll with the mousewheel sounds easy, doesn't it? It does, but half the time it doesn't work properly and you end up targetting nothing. I'm not sure how something so simply can not work part of the time, but they have managed somehow.
You also have no control against what you fight in skirmishes. You can set the number of credits each side has to spend on ships, but you are only allowed to choose which ones you start with. Then there's the four ship limit, which I suppose is necessary for the small RTS aspect of the game, even if does get in the way. Why only four ships, you ask? Good question.
The maps themselves are also usually pretty bad. Rather than space being a big open... well, space, it is a cluttered jumble of uniform asteroids, planets with diameters that can counted be in ship lengths on both hands, and stars that could be mistaken for glowing, oversized planets. None of these objects can be collided with, which is actually something of a blessing, as otherwise the terrible ship controls would be fatal. Nebulae are also thrown in, although I can't stand to be in them because of the annoying sparking effect the game does periodically while you're inside one. The maps are also quite small, often taking only seconds to warp clear across.
As for sound, well, the sound was okay. They have the voices of all five captains, and that's pretty special in itself. The taunts would be okay if the enemy did them once at the start of the battle, but when you've heard the same taunt for the third time in the same fight, the novelty wears off.
This game is broken. Horribly, horribly broken. Their beta phase should have been a wake up call, but it would appear as though they skipped that phase of developement. Modders will make this game better, eventually, simply because Mad Doc has set the bar low enough that changing pretty much anything would cause an improvement. Companies need to stop porting to the PC from consoles. Rather than give us a dumbed down game, make the game for PC, then dumb it down for the console crowd.
With such a good model of what a Star Trek game should be like, I don't see how they managed to get this so wrong. 3/10, bonus marks awarded for having the voices of the captains are lost for giving the Star Trek franchise yet another bargain bin game.