Star Trek: Starship Creator

The Good
This game allows users to build their own Starfleet ships complete with starship class, name, ship systems and crew. You can choose from old ships from The Original Series, new ships like the Enterprise-E from Star Trek: First Contact or some of the "in-between" ships like the Miranda class as seen on The Next Generation.

Building your ship is fun because you have a large number of ship systems to choose from, as well as a large list of candidates to man your ships. The information provided for each was worth reading.

The game comes with just one CD, a relief for anyone who does not enjoy swapping disks during gameplay.

When launching ships, you can warp through space at reasonable speeds using bare-bone systems, and do not have to have a happy crew unless specific moments of a mission require it.

The Bad
This game lacks any of the graphics you would have expected to see in a game, even back in 1998.

You can change the design of most ships, but the Constitution class does not include modifiers for the Constitution-Refit configuration design as seen in the first six Star Trek films. When one considers that the graphics for this feature are incorporated into the Miranda class ships, this is very disappointing.

The user interface may be based on the LCARS screens as seen on The Next Generation, but the failure to implement this design in an intuitive and user-friendly way makes running the game a frustrating experience. You cannot have more than three or four ships in your fleet without the UI hindering your ability to manage your fleet efficiently. When reading information menus, the textbox is so small that you will have a hard time reading all the text as the scrolling buttons skip to the end of the text. This problem is also seen in mission reports, officer logs, and worse, the ship damage report box. You cannot read important information about your ship in missions, such as remaining torpedo supply. The user interface prevents an otherwise half-decent game from delivering a satisfying experience for casual users. It is possible that some of this text scrolling problem occurs only on modern PCs, and that older Pentium and Pentium II PCs are unaffected.

Modern PC or not, the game is buggy and missions suffer from a litany of issues. Patches and addon packs do not at all address any of these issues. Worse yet, your ship will fly through space much more slowly after updating your game.

Using the game patch or addon pack, you can use custom registry numbers for your ships, but you cannot use registries in the manner of NCC-1701-D, only 4 or 5 digits depending on the ship class. This is disappointing for any fan of The Next Generation.

The missions are by far the worst feature of the game. This is where frustration will kick in whether it is an in-game mission you are running or a custom mission. In mission after mission, you watch the screen and wait for something to happen. Your ship will crawl across the map, and then you have to read all the mission events with little to no visuals to add atmosphere. Custom missions are written as basic text files. This is fine but one should not have to be an expert computer programmer to write custom missions. A proper custom mission builder could have made the mission segment of the game as good as the shipbuilding aspect of it.

Game documentation is not very useful. Anyone wanting to write custom missions will be disappointed.

The Bottom Line
This game suffers from serious design flaws. Even in 1998, Starship Creator failed to impress and failed to deliver on the promise of building one's own ships and testing them in missions.

Although it is less buggy than the subsequent Starship Creator games, the original sets a very poor precedent that is never addressed in the deluxe or Warp 2 versions.

Star Trek fans looking for good Trek games from the 1998-2000 era would do best to look at Star Trek Armada or Starfleet Command.