Tug a slot machine enough times, and the ting-a-ling of instant income might convince you to continue emptying your change bucket, but it won't make yanking the lever much more enjoyable. Just as games in a gambling joint rely on the psychology of addiction to lighten wallets, Star Trek Online seems to leverage the same principles to generate sustainable subscription numbers. New spacecraft and memorable locales act as the sole enticements for advancement, and obtaining or reaching them is only slightly less dull than spinning that one-armed bandit's dials for hours on end. After what felt like eons of quest grind, I'm finally tooling around in Deep Space 9's Defiant.

Lifetime subscription owners are quick to label STO's repetitive combat as casual and arcade-y, but neither marker quite matches up. Casual implies easily accessible, and STO -- like all of developer Cryptic Studios' games and many massively multiplayer games in general -- is anything but. Rather, it's overly simplistic, devoid of depth to such a degree that success is all-but-guaranteed in spite of the absurd web of incomprehensible numbers and terminology attached to every item, skill, and ability. Accessibility is one thing; shallow is something else entirely.

This data looks complicated, but it's patently meaningless to the player.

Simplicity doesn't always preclude depth, just as complexity doesn't always guarantee it. Chess grandmasters operate on the same simple ruleset as the scrubbiest neophyte, but the former understands intricate strategies that elude the latter. Unfortunately, STO is simple and shallow. Ground combat is typically a two-button business, and the assistance of a bridge officer (STO's simplistic answer to MMORPG pets) drastically reduces your odds of dying. Not that kicking the bucket counts for anything: With no death penalty to discourage poor play, every encounter becomes a matter of perseverance... perseverance in the face of certain boredom.

Scrapping it up in space seems more involved at first glance, with subsystem power and shield management combining with the need to dish out phaser fire to opposing pilots. But here, the corrosive effect of repetitive play kicks in. Crush arbitrary numbers of functionally indistinguishable aliens long enough, and -- as your hand cramps into a claw, and you catch yourself contemplating the comparative durability of every keyboard you've ever broken, and your mom/roommate/wife/whoever comes by and dramatically closes the bedroom door because they're disgusted by the sound of that single key clicking again and again, and your friends on Ventrilo tell you to turn your f**king microphone off because it sounds like they're listening in on a busy Mumbai data entry center -- you might begin to wonder why you have to mash the space bar so much. Is it because wrist-rescuing phaser auto-fire would further oversimplify space skirmishes? Should you even bother with extraordinary measures to keep your craft cohesive, or just let the respawn timer handle the healing? Can the human brain suffer a repetitive stress injury?


The real tragedy is that STO's encounters are unworthy of the locations created to contain them. Cryptic's art team clearly cares for the source material; gaseous nebulae, glowing wormholes, and ringed terrestrial planetoids inspire the inner Trekker to spasmodic glee, but its all window dressing for recurrent scenarios. Even the overlong "episode" content comes down to slaughtering this-or-that and clicking these-or-those, with a veneer of Trek narrative to halfheartedly shore up the boring activities.

If I sound overly negative, know that I haven't even begun to nitpick. "Up" and "down" are rigidly defined in STO space, and ships are limited to 45-degree angles of ascent and descent, leading to all sorts of firing-arc frustrations. Bridge officers exemplify the irritating MMO pet, actively aggroing everything in their vicinity and getting stuck to every single surface available for them to stick to. Every encounter is instanced, meaning STO is, like Champions Online, more moderately than massively multiplayer. Items are numerically tiered (Phaser I, II, III, IV, etc.), dulling any drive to gather them. Time-sinks like plodding through sector space -- shoebox-like chunks of empty galaxy dotted here and there with star systems -- are plentiful and irritatingly obvious.


I could go on. Having reached the rank of Captain, I'm convinced: Star Trek Online's appeal is classically conditioned. Trek fans are meant to salivate at the sights and sounds of their favorite universe made manifest, like a dog hearing the chime of a chow bell. And publisher Atari is banking on the hope that -- like Pavlov's pups -- consumers will be content with the same ol' kibble day after day. The result is a shallow, poorly paced, and repetitive game that, divorced from its storied source material, wouldn't warrant a second look. But hey, at least I'll always have that Defiant.