As a game, Starship Creator Warp II doesn't come recommended. It is difficult to recommend even as a reference tool to the Trek completist. This is unfortunate because there are pieces of the product that aim to please Trek fans. The mission creator and scripting language were obviously resulted from some hard work. The mission creator's graphical front-end makes it relatively easy to compose simple missions, while the underlying language allows ambitious users to embellish them with dialogs, multimedia, and a variety of events. There are features that facilitate the sharing of ship designs and missions with friends, through color printing and starship export. Users can import and doctor their own photos to become members of crews, and ships created in Starship Creator Warp II can be imported into the upcoming combat game Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Dominion Wars.

These features, however, are ancillary to the two main purposes of the software, to serve as a ship design tool and as a game. Slim documentation, an inconsistent interface, and poor design decisions hurt both. The most grievous issue is the one that hits most games suffering from the Trek curse, however, that of being officially licensed and officially unentertaining.

By
Bernard Dy
Contributing Editor