Starship Creator Warp II isn't sure if it wants to be a reference tool, a game, or both, but it ends up being neither. It opens the door to potential entertainment but trips itself before it can step through. Star Trek computer games are infamous for being poor products, so saying that Star Trek Starship Creator Warp II makes the others look good is truly saying something. Sad but true, Starship Creator Warp II is a product deficient on many levels that does little to dispel the stigma clouding the Trek license.

The first oddity players encounter from Starship Creator Warp II is the lack of documentation or, at least, traditional documentation. The package includes a nice wall poster that charts the icons of the mission builder on one side and some rudimentary but sparse documentation on the other. The mission builder and the starship creation part of the game are both detailed and yearn for thorough manuals, tutorials, and training missions. None of those are included, and from the first run of the program, players may get the feeling they've been thrown into the deep space without a space suit.

Game resolutions peak at 640x480 and this only exasperates the situation, making it harder to read the screens if you are used to higher settings. It's almost a crime to omit high-resolution support given the capabilities of current video cards. That isn't the only poor design decision affecting the interface. While the screens have the Next Generation Trek console motif and benefit from authentic sound effects support, they are often less than intuitive in everything from navigation to text display. Imagine a web site where the navigation bar changes location on every page; that's what you get here. There are numerous text areas and pop-up windows that provide information on ship components and crew, and these too are victims of inconsistency. They cannot be resized and their borders aren't visible. Some of them scroll smoothly when their scroll bars are clicked, and others jump by a page. On the ship systems screen, where players will spend most of their time adjusting ship capabilities, there are varieties of components that scroll in a bottom pane while a picture of the ship is in the top one. It's nice the developers endeavor to show such cutaway details of the ship, but the lack of descriptive names and labels on the components, and the fact that the bottom pane requires much scrolling may frustrate some.