Companies with that much background can afford to fool around a bit. Witness the recent release of X-COM Interceptor -- a game that met with mixed reactions from critics (frankly, we liked it a lot) and didn’t do gangbusters business with the public.

Not to worry, Microprose (and the rest of us) said, we have X-COM Alliance coming next, a mix of Unreal and resource-management that should revive public approval. But then…

Then came Klingon Honor Guard, a first-person shooter built on the Unreal engine and based on the Star Trek: The Next Generation universe. The player is a Klingon warrior training to be in the Honor Guard, a sort of elite corps of bodyguards for the Klingon emperor. In the middle of a training mission, a bomb wipes out the Klingon High Council, and it’s up to the player to unravel the conspiracy before the emperor is overthrown.

Okay, we admit, we’re not viewers of the various Star Trek series (except the original, when Captain Kirk kicked ass, took names and got the beautiful babes), but this storyline sounded intriguing. The whole conspiracy thing certainly promises to involve more thought than "lone Marine kills everything in sight to stop alien invasion."

Besides, all those Trekkies (Trekkers?) have really developed the Klingons from one-note characters to a full, rich society with a complete language and history. Surely a game based on this will be chock full o’ alien customs.

Ah, but these are the rough-and-tumble Klingons, for whom death in battle is the highest honor. So what we have is, essentially, Quake with the Unreal engine and Klingon skins.

The player tromps through all the usual locales you’ve come to expect from these games: sewers, caves, ice fields, city streets. The weapons are definitely Klingon (including ceremonial swords that act like the lightsaber in Lucasarts’ superior Jedi Knight games), which adds a little flavor. Yet the player never really gets a sense of being Klingon -- he might just as easily be a Marine or a Jedi Knight or any of the other usual suspects.

In other words, where Lucasarts made its Jedi Knight engine work around the Star Wars universe, Klingon Honor Guard instead forces the Star Trek universe to fit the Unreal engine.

In even shorter words: Wait for X-COM Alliance.