I bought and played the game briefly in the last week since I had some time. (I work for the federal government and they've been closed for almost a week due to the snowstorms battering us).
My first impression of the game was that it was fairly buggy. Obviously this isn't my first rodeo with a new MMO so that is technically par for the course in this day and age. Gone are the days of quality control before putting out a new product I guess. I know I know, lots of variables are involved.
Nevertheless, the character creation is extremely robust. If you have ever played city of heroes or champions online (or any other cryptic game for that matter), you will immediately feel comfortable with the layout. I was pleased with the amount of racial options and traits to assign your character and it didn't feel like I was confined, which is good. My only disappointment was that I was hoping to see the wrath of khan era uniforms in the selection list, but I settled for the next generation movie uniforms for my engineering officer.
Now, when I started, I pretty much went in blind. I hadn't read any reviews, explanations or news about the game. My base knowledge of the game at the time was that it was an MMO by Cryptic based in the Star Trek universe, nothing more. Upon the completion of the character creation process, I was given the chance to fight off some borg during the tutorial. I thought, "Hey, this is fairly neat". The controls were familiar and everything seemed pretty self explanatory. Your phaser has two attacks and you have a knocking back punch. Cool. Unfortunately, I realized (probably cause it was the tutorial I can only imagine) that your phaser is stupid powerful. The enemies moved so slow that you were never in danger of taking a single hit and you can stun each of them for a long time on a short cooldown. If any enemies actually manage to get through your unmitigated phaser domination, you can just use your punching attack and the enemy goes flying backwards.
Following this tutorial, you are given the option to pick your chief officer (science, tactics, engineering). Since I was already an engineering officer, I picked a science officer for my first mate essentially. This led me to a stunning realization that I probably should have seen coming. I was given my own ship. Let me step back a moment and say that when I chose to be an engineering officer at the start of the game, I did so with the complete intention that I wanted to be the main engineer on someone ELSES vessel, not my own. I imagine the rigors of being a captain will not give me time enough to bang my wrench on some warp cores at my leisure. Now, piloting my own intergalactic space ship, you are given the tutorial on space combat. I have to give it, this is where the game shines. Ground combat was meh, but space combat is where its at. The controls make sense, you are given a multitude of options for how you navigate, to how you fight, to how you even direct your shields when you're under attack. This feels like star trek and I can tell that this is where they probably put in the lion's share of their effort when making this game.
All in all, I'd say give it a try if you're a Star Trek fan. If you are not, then I probably wouldn't recommend it. The game has some bugs to work out naturally but I think it will do well enough to stick around for a little while. Not that I think anything needs to top WoW to be successful, but the game (from what I've seen of it) isn't bringing anything ground breaking to the table. It's just coming out to slide into it's niche in the MMO world like so many other games recently. It's not actively doing anything to make me as a gamer and Star Trek fan want to go out of my way to play it. It's just kinda saying, here I am, I'll be here when you want to remind yourself what a mediocre MMO looks like. There is room for expansion in the market and room for innovation, but other companies seem to be content with letting Blizzard do it's thing while they just chill out.
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