Why Trekkies Should Play Star Trek Online

The Borg, Q, Spock, phasers, photon torpedoes and Klingons.

With Star Trek Online, the new sci-fi MMO from Champions Online developer Cryptic Studios, out this week, now's the time to bust out some STO-related goodness for you budding Starship captains to soak up like forward facing shields absorbing photon torpedoes. The wonderful truth is that, if you're a Trekkie (owning a Starfleet uniform isn't required), you should be playing Star Trek Online. Read on for ten reasons why.

You get to be a Starfleet Captain!

Not at first, of course. Well, you do, sort of. When STO begins, you're a lowly Ensign, but after the kick-ass tutorial, you're promoted to Lieutenant and given your own ship. Now, we know that this makes no sense; Lieutenants aren't allowed to captain Starfleet vessels, but you can forgive the game this inaccuracy because otherwise you'd be sitting in a ship banging on a computer console in engineering for hours in order to level up. The point is that STO lets you live out virtually the starship captain fantasy; the James T. Kirk/Jean-Luc Picard fantasy. And for that, we are grateful indeed.

Set phasers to stun

In STO you can beam down to planets and tackle away missions with other players or use your bridge officers. Now, pretty much everyone agrees STO's on-foot combat isn't up to much, but it does let you fire phasers, and… wait for it… set phasers to stun. How good's that? All you do is equip your phaser, auto-target a bad guy with the Tab button then press the hot-key to fire, but it looks right and it sounds right. When you're in a five man group and everything's kicking off, you can't help but feel like jumping out of your desk chair and doing a forward roll on your bed. No? Maybe that's just us, then.