Playing Star Trek Online really is just like starring in an episode of Star Trek - you spend a lot of your time being told where to stand and what to say and do, and sometimes the director isn't very good at handling action scenes.
Storytelling in MMOs is hard. In a lot of games in this genre story is what happens when you pick up the quest and when you hand it in, with what goes on in between being all about the gameplay - which is usually mostly combat. Give or take the occasional NPC to talk to during the action that's how most MMO quests are structured.
The "Romulan Mystery" story arc in Star Trek Online tries very hard to get away from this format to deliver a story-focused experience that's truer to the source material than the standard MMO kill 'em all. That's laudable, but while the game delivers on the sights and sounds of Star Trek as it always does, it has a few more problems than usual when it comes to incorporating the story into the gameplay. There is good story content in here, mostly in the form of conversations, but whenever the game tries to advance the narrative through non-combat gameplay it usually comes down to following the mini-map to an indicated location and clicking on something, then doing it again a few more times until the game tells you you've done whatever it was you set out to do. It's extremely linear and there's not much sense of have accomplished anything beyond having demonstrated an ability to follow basic directions.
Some of this is unavoidable given the setting. The player can't work through situations intuitively because this is Star Trek, where problems are often solved via technobabble. Likewise there's only so much information that can be conveyed by environmental storytelling - one console looks very much like another. But the same go-here-and-click-this narrative style also comes up in combat missions, and when it does the demands of the script can be very at odds with the gameplay.
The final mission of the arc takes place during a battle in an urban environment. The layout is fairly interesting, with catwalks over the streets adding a vertical element to the map. There are multiple routes that can be taken, but more often than not you're at a disadvantage if you do so.
I was on my own - no away team - and soon ran into trouble when I encountered a full squad of enemies. I took down about half of them before they defeated me and, following a respawn, I went back to take on the rest. It was only after I'd done so that a prompt appeared on the screen telling me that I could call for reinforcements in this location, so I did that and watched a security team beam in to help me fight the foes I'd already defeated. Said security team then stood there idly while I moved on.
Here's the problem with this: there was no indication that I could call for support until I stepped into the exact location where I could do so, and I was already in combat before I got to that point because I was armed with a sniper rifle so of course I was going to open up at long range rather than run in close in the hope of tripping over the very small area on the map where I could call for reinforcements, which I didn't know was there.
This happened something like three times over the course of the mission, and the overall effect was of a wide open map that actively punished any attempt to explore or take advantage of the layout to look for alternate routes or vantage points or in fact to do anything other than follow the indicators on the mini-map and click on the correct prompts at the correct times.
To go back to my earlier analogy, this is the game trying to do big screen action on a small screen budget. Sometimes it works. A lot of the time it doesn't.
Star Trek Online tries hard to provide an authentic Star Trek experience, but the game is far better suited to combat than it is to non-combat. Some of the scripted sequences just don't work, and that's a problem when there's a lot of them, as there is in this particular arc. In fact there's very little in the way of the standard space and ground encounters which are a strength of the game as a game, which makes for an ultimately unsatisfying experience.
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