Complete and utter crap
The actual real-time combat is a dumbed-down version of Star Trek: Encounters battle system except that you can control up to 9 ships during any single engagement. But what little depth that was present in Encounters has been ommitted from this game. No going up and down to different planes in space, no target-locks or mutliple target locks, no special weapons, no reassigning power to different defensive systems. And the game has a very simple exploit that makes it impossible to lose: weopons have unlimited range, but the enemies will only fire at you if they are visible on screen. So all you have to do to win any battle (even just one scout agains a whole starbase), is to fly around in very long circles, holding the speed-burst button, aiming your firing arc in the general direction of the enemy ships and repeatedly fire. Eventually, you will destroy the entire enemy fleet, and will take little-to-no damage yourself.
And the designers just pulled stupid things out of the Star Trek mythos and haphazardly threw them into this game. The super-weopons are all ridiculously stupid, the Admiral characters that you can select from are generally completely obscure characters that nobody cares about (many of which are dead by the time this game is supposed to take place). And there is NO diplomacy whatsoever. Totally NOT Star Trek.
DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BUY THIS GAME!