This game is beloved by gaming Trek-fans, while not being all that great on multiple levels. I loved it back in the day, because there was nothing quite like it. And frankly there still hasn't... Bridge Crew is the closest you could get, but that game is geared around fun with friends and coordination, rather than being an actual starship-simulation. The story of the vanilla-game is essentially fan-fiction IMO, despite the box saying that some actual authors of the shows including D.C. Fontana were involved. But it's serviceable for the game itself, and it's far from bad. The vanilla-balancing is basically in favor of the ships you command, most non-federation ships have poor weapon-arcs and very vulnerable hardpoints. Weapons feel rather weak as a whole, but that's so that you don't get one-shot by a warbird or something. On highest difficulty you do in fact need to prioritize subsystems and also you often need to "draw aggro" from multiple hostiles at once in order to protect mission-critical objectives. The elephant in the room are the technical issues, which have always been present. It's not just under modern OS, but the crashing and performance-issues were just as present on contemporary systems. For now, it seems to run a little more stable in XP-compatibility-mode, but that might also turn out to be incorrect. With the game now being on gog, perhaps the modding-community will be revived to a point where a solution is engineered, but that remains to be seen.
