Star Trek Online: Victory is Life Review - 4/5

For a considerable eight years since it's launch in early 2010 the serially under-rated massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Trek Online has been plugging along. From a shaky beginning STO has slowly grown into something rather remarkable, showing more staying power in a relatively crowded market of free-to-play MMO RPGs. Steady patches and fixes combined with regular and completely free expansions and content drops has kept STO steadily growing for the last eight years.

When the game launched players were limited to exclusively playing as Federation captains, a small roster of ships and not much in the way of endgame content. Now new players can choose Federation, Klingon, Romulan and now Dominion factions, play as dozens of species or make their own and have a roster of ships numbering in the scores. Endgame content includes numerous public events, five-player pve missions, a dozen reputation systems with unique abilities and gear rewards, battlezones, social-zones, crafting and more.

Just a few weeks ago the latest new content expansion went live, called Victory is Life. This new content expansion added the new Dominion playable faction, expanded the level cap by five, added a number of new ships, a new reputation tree, new story missions and new pve queue missions. I have only gotten around to writing this review now because only now do I finally feel I have put enough time into the game with this new content to review it, and I have yet to even finish the new Gamma Task Force Reputation progression and won't for another week or two at least.

Immediately after Victory is Life dropped I logged in and made a new Jem'Hadar character and began playing through the new content. Dominion characters start the game at level 60, skipping the initial leveling and character progression and jumping straight into the end-game. However, if you want to play through the story content, you can do so with any character, any-time, as many times as you want and you are rewarded for doing so with end-game currency, unique gear, bridge officers and duty officers.

All players can access the new faction for free and start out with a free end-game Jem'Hadar Attack Ship as their starting vessel. However the microtransaction Zen store has a whole heap of new stuff to purchase if you want. Personally I was able to purchase both the Vanguard Starter Pack and Vanguard Carrier without spending a dime, using nothing more than the in-game exchange system where you can turn in dilithium crystals you can acquire in-game for Zen. At current exchange rates every player on your account can exchange 8,000 dilithium a day for about 30-31 Zen. The Vanguard Pack cost about 2,000 Zen and the Carrier about 3,000 though I picked it up on sale for 2,400 and sales are fairly frequent. As an established STO player I had about five end-game characters and was able to earn about 150 zen per day so saving up for those two purchases did not take that long and my two new Jem'Hadar Characters, one standard and one Vanguard, only sped that process along. If you are new to the game or don't want to take the time to earn the Zen in game you can spend real money, but you do not have to and that is something I absolutely love about this game, you never have to spend a red cent if you do not want to and yet you can still get pretty much everything in the game with enough time and effort.

Now on to the ships. The Vanguard starter pack I bought included the more advanced Vanguard Jem'Hadar species option, Vanguard Jem'Hadar Tactical Armor outfit, and the Jem'Hadar Vanguard Dreadnought. All of the new Vanguard Jem'Hadar ships come with a new and interesting feature where the ship is escorted by a pair of Jem'Hadar Raider wingmen vessels. Designated alpha and beta these two ships are persistent, do not have to be summoned and can only be temporarily disabled. If they take enough damage each ship shuts down temporarily and returns to service after about fifteen seconds. Each ship also has a trio of abilities that can be used to command each ship and choose how to put them to best use, focusing on attack, or defense. The Dreadnought also has a single hangar equipped with Jem'Hadar Vanguard Gunboats, essentially a new and upgraded version of the original Attack Ships that all Dominion players start out piloting. Each hangar supports two squadrons of a single gunboat. This gives the Dreadnought effectively four escort craft flying in support, drawing enemy fire and putting out their own considerable damage. The Vanguard ships are further equipped with a larger and more substantial interior than previous Jem'Hadar ships possessed but not by a huge amount. All of the new Dominion ships are restricted to Jem'Hadar captains only until you unlock their sixth ship mastery ability which serves as an account unlock allowing the ship to be requisitioned by any captain of any faction.

The second ship I picked up was the Vanguard Carrier. In addition to the escort wingmen and two hangars the Carrier also possesses the ability to separate off an Attack Ship from it's hull. This mechanic is not new, Saucer Separation has been a thing that has been in the game for a while as an ability possessed by certain Starfleet cruisers, and some other Romulan and Klingon ships also have the ability to separate off attack craft or split into multiple ships. However I had never expected to see this ability on a Jem'Hadar ship and certainly not one that also possessed hangars and other escorts. This means that the Carrier can effectively have seven attack craft flying in escort, two wingmen, four hangar gunboats and the separated attack craft. Players can now effectively command a small fleet of their own. I have already had some success using this to block and tank enemy attention so my own ship can activate various mission objectives during end-game pve queues. If that wasn't already good enough Jem'Hadar captains have access to a fleet support ability that is much better than the standard available to captains of other factions. The normal fleet support ability summons a faction battleship but it can only be activated if ship hull is below 50% and has a cooldown of 15 minutes. The Dominion fleet support call has a five minute cooldown and can be used anytime regardless of hull health. Several times in pve queue missions I have managed to bring in two Vanguard Battleships in the course of a single mission. Players can also now unlock a Cardassian playable species and a trio of new Cardassian vessels, as well as two more Vanguard Jem'Hadar ships. The complete, and expensive, unlock pack for all the new content gives you all of the new Vanguard and Cardassian ships, the Vanguard Jem'Hadar and Cardassian playable species, the Jem'Hadar tactical armor, some other bits and bobs and the older and very hard to get Cardassian cruiser and Jem'Hadar Dreadnought and Heavy Escort Carrier, a ton of ships for your buck.

Which brings me to the story content. Like previous major expansions in the last few years Victory is Life brings back a lot of characters from the various Star Trek TV shows, with voice-acting by the original cast. This time major character returns include Doctor Julian Bashir, Captain Kira and Odo. The story details the return of an ancient threat known as the Hur'q and reveals the distant and shadowed past of the Dominion itself. Players unravel ancient and nefarious history and do battle against a fearsome new enemy faction. Like each new enemy faction the Hur'q have a distinct style of combat with unique abilities and equipment. Fighting the Borg is a constant struggle to maintain shielding or rotate the frequency of ground weapons, the Vaudwaar forced players to keep moving to avoid devastating energy weapon barrages that could tear apart a tank cruiser in moments and the Iconians frequently turned the table with energy-sapping probes, solar gateways unleashing devastating energy beams and powerful forward weapons. The Hur'q bring something new to the table: sheer weight of numbers. While smaller attack craft are not uncommon when fighting various faction the Hur'q employ smaller attack craft in large numbers and many of their ships frequently launch more in combat, heck some Hur'q ships launch smaller ships when they blow up. Every engagement against the Hur'q is a struggle to target and engage dozens of smaller vessels and stay constantly mobile to prevent chain-reactions of exploding ships from rapidly disabling your own vessel.

Out of sheer curiosity I also decided to play through much of the older story content with one of my new Jem'Hadar characters and found to my surprise that some of the older content had been updated to stay consistent with more recent changes. Various areas in the game have received face-lifts in the last year or two including Earth Space Dock and Deep Space Nine.

Lastly there is a new Reputation progression track. I had to count these, because coming back to the game I found three new ones I had not done, Lukari, Competitive and now Gamma. These three new ones now make twelve total reputation tracks. In order: Gamma, Task Force Omega, Nukara, New Romulus, Dyson Joint Command, 8472 Counter-Command, Delta Alliance, Iconian Resistance, Terran Task Force, Temporal Defense Initiative, Lukari Restoration Initiative, and Competitive Wargames. Whew, that's a lot! At the high-point of my participation in STO there were only three or four Reputation progressions and they were something of a tree. Each tier you achieved of the five tiers in each Reputation gave you a passive ability with the fifth tier granting an active ability for either space or ground. These bonus' added up to quite an advantage and it was well worth going through the reputations to improve your fighting capability. As these reputation projects multiplied STO changed the system so you have a limited number of traits you can pick of the many you may have unlocked but you do not benefit from all of them. The continued expansion of the reputation system has watered the whole thing down in other ways too unfortunately, I don't feel like any of the new rep systems have the weight or depth of the Task Force Omega, a system which included more missions, more challenge and had more rewards. I still stick with my adapted borg space gear and weapons and have little interest in replacing them with any of the new things that have come out. Unfortunately most of the newer reputation systems rely on a handful of queued pve missions to obtain marks and progress through the system and the queues lack the background or detail of the older Task Force Omega reputation. So far my favorite thing about the new Gamma Reputation is that the ground armor looks a bit like MJOLNIR power armor so that's a plus. Otherwise I doubt I'll invest too much into this new system.

Victory is Life is the latest in a series of solid and fairly frequent content-drops that continue to keep Star Trek Online alive and flourishing. Perfect World has shown a willingness to hold on for the long haul and maintain its MMOs for years. At over eight years old and growing STO is better now than it probably ever has been and only continues to grow and improve. Like many older massively multiplayer games STO does have a problem with outdated and unused systems cluttering up the game, but Perfect World has also worked to improve, refurbish or remove and replace such outdated content. The crafting system underwent a major overhaul last year, Earth Space Dock and Deep Space Nine both received major face-lifts and improvements, the carrier-ship mechanics were updated and improved a few years back, just to give you a few examples. This continued commitment to steady improvement and expansion and a heavy focus on PVE end-game content is why I love this game, even though I am not a particularly big Star Trek fan. STO is a game that respects the time and money of the player and provides considerable content for your investment. Unlike other Free-to-Play games non-subscriber players are not penalized or constantly reminded of their second-class player status. On the contrary, no matter where you turn or what you do in STO as a free-to-play user your actions are almost completely uninhibited. You can always pay to unlock more space, more stuff, progress faster, but you are not punished for not paying and that is very important.

If you have been on the fence about getting into Star Trek Online or if you played before and need an impetus to get back into it, Victory is Life is a great opportunity to do so. If you like MMO RPGs or space combat games, give STO a try. If MMO RPGs aren't your thing you may even still like STO, I am generally very tired of the MMO myself but still enjoy Star Trek Online. STO allows considerable player customization and freedom of choice. At this point my alien but human looking character is wearing a Vaudwaar long-coat that looks sort of like robes, Kobali armor, has the telekinetic and telepathic traits, and is carrying a nanopulse-edge bat'leth... which is basically a lightsaber, so I have effectively made my character look and fight like a Jedi, in a Star Trek game!

All told I give Victory is Life a 4 out of five, a superb expansion only held back slightly by the watered down reputation tree and relatively few new pve queues. It is still an excellent release, it's free, and well worth sinking a few hours into. Especially since you can now jump straight into the end-game content if you wish.