Our character had four AI driven away team members as we beamed down to the Klingon base to capture it. The Klingons, naturally, were not happy to see us. We could target individual Klingons and then fire our phaser rifle in several different modes (beam, sniper, and more). After two waves of Klingons, we managed to take over their base only to discover that the Klingons had other plans.

They were heading to the planet that contains The Guardian of Forever, the time travel being-thingie at the center of the classic Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever. Our final mission had us travel to that planet, take out even more Klingons and then speak to the Guardian itself (no we don't know where Harlan Ellison or Joan Collins were at the time).

And just like that our PAX 2009 demo is over. The game certainly looks good and its use of the Trek universe in a timeline that is several decades beyond the Next Gen/DS9/Voyager time zone allows it to use pretty much everything in the Trek universe (no J.J. Abrams alternate timeline here). The gameplay is definitely action based, much like Cryptic's earlier work. Our biggest worry about the game at this point is that it feel much like other MMO games.

Cryptic is getting close to launching the game's closed beta test so perhaps we will see some other aspects of Star Trek Online that will be more unique to the title. In the meantime we still think this could be a media-based MMO that will actually work out in the end (Matrix Online anyone). The game is due out in 2010.