It's free, so there's that. Is it a masterpiece of gaming, definitely not. But if you're a Star Trek fan, holy shit the lore is deeeeep. And they're still always adding new content, have regular events including seasonal events for winter and summer (Risa) with pretty worthwhile rewards, but once you get through the entire story and hit endgame it's very repetitive.

It's definitely a LOT better than it used to for the first few years where every mission seemed like forced references and callbacks to shows and characters but they really scaled that back. There is a lot of voicework done by cast and crew of the shows.

As stated, space combat is very very fun while ground combat is an afterthought. If you wanna make it as worthwhile as possible, wait for either the next Recruitment event (they happen 4 times per year, once per faction) as there are very unique rewards you get that help you rapidly breeze through the leveling and most of those rewards are claimable account wide...or start on a double XP weekend so you can hit max level stupid fast. As soon as you can join a fleet and donate donate donate to unlock access to fleet benefits.