Star Trek, DDO, WAR, Allods and Fallen Earth. How did your favorites do?

Star Trek Online

It should be noted, right off the bat, that Star Trek Online has a specific slider to let you adjust the size of your captain's paunch. Kudos to Cryptic for acknowledging that the members of the Starship Enterprise weren't always at Olympian fitness levels. Now if there was only a setting you could choose that would let the size of your captain's belly grow as the season went on, it would really feel like Star Trek.

Like Cryptic's other game, Champions Online, STO gives you tons of options in character creation. One standout is the number of Trek races available, from Andorians to Klingons to races we had never heard of. If you don't find what you're looking for, there's an option to create your own brand new alien race, like one of the writers from the original show. Each race looks hot as fire in the different variations of Federation uniforms too.

The music during character creation is a triumphant score and welcome addition to the famous Star Trek themes. When you finally get to naming your own starship, by far the smartest choice the developers made, your heart will probably be pounding.

Live Long and Prosper, Star Trek Online.

Grade: A

Fallen Earth

We never felt like we could make a proper post-apocalyptic hero in Fallen Earth's character creation. It's weird that there are many more options for face paint and piercings, than there are for hair styles or clothes. There's an option to have multiple tattoos on your face but not on a single arm, and, we don't know about you, but we'd rather give our character sleeves worth of tattoos and leave the face ink to Mike Tyson.

It seems like the plethora of choices for face decoration would lead to looking like one of the crazy raiders you see in games like Fallout 3 and the Mad Max movies, which is appropriate, we suppose. But they won't make you look like the hero, Mad Max, just the guys he kills. The options lean towards freakish, not cool and not heroic.

We also have a problem with the facial hair options, which are done by shading the character's face, not by actually rendering a beard. It really makes the facial hair look fake, like a hobo-clown beard or make up for high school play. It feels like you have to work against the character creator to avoid making someone really awkward looking.

Grade: C

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Each race in Warhammer has its own four classes, which are different than other races, for a total of twenty four different classes, over twice as many as competitor World of Warcraft. We really liked the Human Witchhunter class, gothic looking pilgrim hat and all, who builds strength through Accusation and the Chaos Marauder who can mutate his arm into a crab claw!

If you like creating an Elf character, Warhammer seems to have the best options we've seen. Consider the Shadow Warrior, that seems to be the High Elf's version of a ninja, or the White Lion, who has a constant lion companion that he's raised since childhood. We also like their tank, the Swordmaster, who builds his attack by using a deadly blade dance.

One strange issue is that not every class can be accessed by both genders. Want to be a female Orc or Goblin? Forget it. Females are also excluded from being two Chaos classes and males can't be the Dark Elf Witch. Also, if you've aligned with the Order side, you can't create a Chaos character on the same server, and vice versa. They're limiting decisions, but honestly, we don't see too many female goblins running around in other games anyway.

Grade: B+