App review: Star Trek Countdown

With the release of the new Star Trek movie came the inevitable merchandising—toys, posters, books, remastered DVDs of the old series, even Burger King shot glasses! One piece of merchandise that has slipped under the radar has been Countdown, the prequel comic book series to the movie.

To make the comic book more accessible, Paramount decided to release it in iPhone app form, one app per book in the series. This works surprisingly well. It functions only in landscape mode, with each comic image resized to fit the iPhone screen. The same was done with all of the text as well, so it is legible despite any image scaling that may have happened. This results in an app that is very good-looking, and really does feel like a comic book on the iPhone should.

Navigation between pages is easy, swiping with a finger to the left or right to move between pages just as you would expect on an iPhone. You can also tap on the screen to bring up an options menu: this allows for jumping to any page in the comic, as well as choosing between different page transitions. The default is slide (the page moves to the next as your fingers swipe), but additional options are fade and curl (like a page flip). Although the other transitions are nice, my favorite is slide. A few times in the comic two pages are side-by-side images, and the slide transition allows you to transition from one to the next in a way that feels like panning left-to-right on a single image.

The downside to the iPhone version of this comic is that there is no way to view resized images in their original resolution, as they were in the physical book. It would have been nice to have those images with the ability to zoom in and look at the details. The art in this comic series is quite impressive, and it would have been great to get a closer look at it. My other complaint is due to the fact that this is a comic book series. Each comic book in the series has its own app for $0.99 with about 40 pages, but there’s no way to download the entire series as one app for $3.99. This means that putting the entire series on your iPhone will take up an entire row of applications. That’s not such a big problem, but it is annoying.

Now on to some discussion of the plot. This comic contains no real spoilers for the movie that follows (aside from the appearance of certain characters in the movie), but if you want to remain entirely unspoiled, skip to the next paragraph. The story is relatively simple: several years after the last Star Trek movie (Nemesis, not nearly as good as this movie), a supernova threatens the Romulan homeworld, and only Spock and a miner named Nero realize the danger it poses. Helped by various Star Trek: The Next Generation alumni, they try to avert disaster, but things inevitably go wrong and the events that follow lead directly to the start of the movie (and yes, time travel is involved). It is well-paced, and actually gives a much better explanation for the movie villain’s motivations. This is explained in a short flashback sequence in the movie, but I found this way to be more effective. The appearance of so many Next Generation characters seemed a bit forced, but worked out okay in the end.

Overall, this app is very well done. Minor complaints aside, it’s a very good comic book on its own, well-translated into iPhone form. Perhaps most important of all, the app is a lot cheaper than the physical comic book, which retails for $12.23 on Amazon.com, as opposed to $3.99 for four apps on iTunes. That’s an excellent deal, and the product is well-worth it.