Recent reviews by Polito

Hey, you!

Star Trek Online is a game I have sunk many hours into, I have played the game (sometimes intermittently, sometimes continuously) over the course of almost a decade. The amount of hours I have in this game is, suffice to say, embarrassing. So embarrassing that I have stopped running the game through the Steam client despite still actively playing it, there's a bit of sad trivia for you. No, approaching this without a bit of bias might be as impossible as quitting this game for good is, but let's try! I think I can explain. I enjoy it, really. But I don't think you will.

In Star Trek Online, we are offered the playground of the beloved science fiction franchise in its entirety! But that's a lot smaller than you might think. We can create a Captain from (as of the time of writing) six faction options, nearly a total of thirty species - but they soon coalesce into just functionally two: the Federation and the Klingon Empire. Want to join the Starfleet from the 60s? Yeah, you can. How about the one from the fandom's controversial Star Trek: Discovery? Please do! A Starfleet officer or Klingon warrior from the game's own plot-line? Absolutely. There's some Romulan representation, too! And you can even be part of the Dominion if you really want to. Starting to read like a bit of a melting pot, huh? Something for everyone, to serve every flavor of Trekkie.

So why do I say No?

Where do I begin? It's.. big. Flush with content if you're into just playing through the mission episodes. There's a lot there and it might easily overwhelm a new player who just starts out now, and that might even be a plus to some people. But it's an MMO and relies too strongly on practices that haunt this genre of game, it's repetitive as all hell and boils down to either shooting something, one of maybe three mini-games that you'll grow to hate, or a mercifully brief 4-second interaction with your mission target. We're not using space exploration to illustrate an analysis of the Human condition here. That's fine, i'm reviewing a product, it doesn't need to be deep, it needs to sell to an audience. It's functionally identical to many games of its ilk - with a few more 'moving parts' behind the space combat sections, attributes you might expect from other games in the medium, like strength and endurance, are painted over as energy damage and hull capacity. It plays much the same, though; focus on buffing one or two statistics (usually your critical chance & damage, if your play-style is shooting things) and that's most of the superficial depth and difficulty out of the way already. Get used to shooting things, too. What's that? You joined Starfleet to explore things? Well, too bad. They patched most forms of that content (i.e: exploration clusters) out of the game a few years ago, so you'll just have to make do with the mission episodes and system patrols. But, there's a more immediate red flag than that - Trek Online wants to form an intimate attachment to your wallet, know what I mean? It wants you to invest. There's a psychology behind these recurrent microtransactions - and the way they affect this game in particular - that I just can't condone. But it might require some explanation...

This game has loot box lunacy. Yeah, let's call it that. It ties some ships that are not inherently more powerful than other ones, per say, behind the 'master keys' and their boxes. Some of these ships are fan favourites, ones you might wish to own. You might buy these keys, or you might grind the in-game currency with a roster of many characters to do such, then maybe you can crack open a box or two a day, it's capped and limited like that - or you can buy your keys and ships with credits, that being your uncapped currency, but I hope you brought MILLIONS, or hundreds of millions if you wanted a ship. You can only hold ten million credits without an ingame purchase to uncap yourself, too, so maybe that warrants mentioning. There's a catch about these ships in the boxes, by the by, they are more powerful. The abilities a ship can slot and use vary per ship, as do what you can equip on it (number of fore/aft weapons, number of consoles that buff X skills or grant an ability that does Y, some do both). A ship from one of these premium boxes will come with a unique trait that is unlocked through playing around with the ship for awhile - and a console that can usually be equipped on any other ship you might happen to own. These two factors can change the entire game. Some are comparatively useless and entirely forgettable; but some clearly demonstrate the disparity between an 'investor' and a free player. I just cannot in good conscience recommend this to any progression orientated player - for placing ships, or any item that can give a feasible advantage over another player, behind gambling mechanics (yes, it is gambling by the way) is just wrong. Many ships are also available for direct purchase with equally beneficial consoles and traits in the game's cash shop, too, and it's very likely that you will feel compelled to buy one when you hit the level cap. That must be an daunting choice by now, the amount of ships in the final level bracket is immense. The amount of ships with useful traits is considerably smaller than this. There's limited room to manoeuvre with a play-style, and you're probably going to end up buying more ships to their collect traits and compensate for an uninformed earlier choice. That is, if you aren't spooked away from the game already. Then maybe you'll buy a couple more to fill all five of your starship trait slots up, see where i'm going with this? Then before you know it, that's a couple hundred dollars that just slipped through your fingers and into the corporate maw.

The game's also showing some worrying signs of fatigue from the longevity of its development life-cycle, too. It has added a veritable mountain of content since I began playing, changed development studios and gotten a strange fixation with streamlining what had been added before. Maybe we're getting more than we're losing, though, maybe Trek Online isn't in the state of decline that I think it is. What's been lost can be seen in the gradual homogeneity of every faction as the mission storylets progress. They begin relatively distinct, but are soon all ham-fisted into an awkward alliance for development convenience, with the written mission text given some VERY subtle rewrites from faction to faction, that's if you're lucky. We can use the popular metaphor of a theme-park for the solo content, when you've been on all the rides once? That's kinda it. And, well, I can't talk about missions without mentioning an elephant in the room. If ever you grew bored of the game's episodes and same-ish 'save the day' plot threads, there was the foundry; the amazing, but increasingly neglected and broken, set of construction tools in which to create and share your own missions, able to remedy any content drought - another mountain of content that was right at your fingertips! The possibilities were almost endless. But they got rid of it, unfortunately. Lamenting might be crass and pointless, especially in my review of all places, but it's important to understand it was a source of incredible creativity, home to stories that, at times, outshone the game's own writing staff. You wanted to play your Klingon warrior and actually feel like you were taking part in a story engineered for that particular narrative? Take a nice break from the rota of PvE queues and content? You went there. It was great.

That's it for the time being. This story's over. Maybe I'll append this later, but this is real close to the text limit, so probably not. I am of a mind that this game's days are coming to be numbered, with MMO's I feel this is kind of a given - but I could be wrong? If you've made it this far, thanks! And I hope you understand a bit more about Star Trek: Online.

You have the bridge, Number One

Maybe I'll come back and elaborate on this after the Steam awards, but it really is a great game :-)

Important to note, to buy it and enjoy it is to take the DLC dive. They add a lot of cumulative flavour to the game. Buyers beware!

Morrowind is, arguably, tied with Oblivion with being my favourite game in the Elder Scrolls series. While Oblivion and later procedings to the series depict environments not too dissimilar from florid landscapes that can seem tantalisingly similar to our own - Morrowind is a strict outlier. A bold thrust into the unknown with an utterly alien art style that is immediately apparent from the beginning up until the very end.

For the sake of this game's unique story, I will keep spoilers to a minimum. Players can select one of the many iconic species of the Scrolls series and are dumped into the world with barely any guidance or hand holding involved. The game lacks quest markers and the easily accessible fast travel system players might be familiar with from Skyrim or Oblivion. It is tricky to weigh this as either a pro or con - for it can be either. It encourages exploration, yes, but when you surface from a ruin overburdened with loot it may seem quite the opposite. Fast travel is not non-existant, however, for there are various ways to traverse Vvardenfell but only from certain points; such as dockyards or the bizarre fauna travel of silt-striders.

It can be an overwhelming game at first play, but it is for this very reason that the game has a heartwarming and vast sense to it that seems vacant or overlooked in later games. It is true that Morrowind has the smallest land mass of the Scrolls games, but it feels anything but. Quests are everywhere and being left to one's own devices after leaving the initial area is all part of the experience; and it is a unique one at that.

Morrowind has aged considerably since it's release in '04, but still has an active modding community that can patch holes in the hull long after the initial developers moved on from the project.

A major con which is immediately apparent is the outdated combat system - even for it's release date. It relies on a superfluous and complex system of dice rolling, factoring in countless algorithms for whether an attack hits or not. Armour, weapon, fatigue, skills, spells and those of the target all fall into a hopelessly headscratching equation. But, nothing a mod cannot fix.

Last, but certainly not least, is the game's soundtrack - produced by the same Jeremy Soule who worked on earlier and later editions of the Scrolls series. The compositions fit a game with so unique an artstyle flawlessly, with an almost equal amount of uplifting tracks which seem to encourage the exploration of this unique environment.


TL:DR Version:

I enjoy it a lot. It's something everyone should experience for themselves.

9/10