"A different type of Trek game"

Unlike most Trek games, Starship Creator was not meant to be a ship battle game, or a Civilization type game, but a game where you could build your own starships and take them out on missions. It was an interesting attempt to take starship engineering and look at it in detail, showing you many things not readily apparent on the shows.

First, you come to an account screen, where you enter in a name and are now in the role of an Admiral, something which you rarely get to do in a Star Trek game, mostly you either get to be a captain, or you control a variety of different characters in a point-and-click adventure. Fairly nifty, but not the kind of thing that most people would get excited about.

Next, you first see just how you make ships in this game, by building variants of classes that already exist. What? Most Trekkies simply photomanipulate their own, brand new classes into existance, so what's this? There are seven in the original game, three in an add-on pack, and one in a new version of the game, along with six of the existing classes. You select one, and then move on to the next section, where you choose from one of three to five saucers, stardrives, and nacelle types, not a lot, and several of them are saucers with notches cut in the front.

The naming screen is self-explanatory. In the first game, the registry was selected from a list of around half a dozen, a commonly occuring one being 52916, and in the other versions, it was redone to allow you to put in a five digit number (four digit for the Constitution class), making it much more flexible.

The "Build" screen is kind of pointless, with a wireframe model and a "Build" button which transforms it into a primitive 3d model, both of which can be swiveled around, although the model gets covered in shadow a strange amount of the time.

The Systems screen is fairly interesting, with an extremely large array of system categories with mostly one to four choices in each one. Sometimes, there are some interesting type names and outputs, other times there's simply a generic technology name, like "Shields".

Finally, the Crew Screen let's you see many intricate bios of Star Trek personnel, with various tidbits made up especially for the game, like Uhura's interest in Andorian music, and Clark Terrell's being trapped on an alien world and being able to communicate with the inhabitants.

The Missions, as many others have commented, are slow and don't involve you, except as an observer. The Real Time mode is ludicrous, taking in some cases even a few DAYS to complete. Yes, that's how it went a few times for me.

Anyway, if you like a look into the intricate workings of Star Trek ships, you might want to get this, otherwise, just download or buy a ship combat game and forget this.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/16/08

Game Release: Star Trek: Starship Creator (US, 1998)