Star Trek Armada - Torpedoes away (Star Trek - Armada (PC))

Member Name: OlyBoyz

Product:	Star Trek - Armada (PC)
Date:	04/09/01 (95 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Original features, Star Trek theme

Disadvantages: Slow and buggy at time

Star Trek Armada is a RTS like Command and Conquer however it is set in space. It follows the normal line of building up a strong base with enough resources to build your weapons of war. Resources can be gained by mining dilithium from moons or decommissioning captured star ships. The best thing is that it carries the Star Trek theme with ships and characters that all fans will know and recognise.

The story line behind this game is that the Borg have yet again tried to take over the Alpha Quadrant. A ship from the future is sent to warn the Enterprise of the impending danger. Picard is told to prepare for this encounter with the Borg and to recover quickly from the recent war with the Dominion. His only chance is to pull together the resources of the Federation, Romulan and Klingons. However as all 3 sides are recovering from the war with the Dominion, this will not be an easy task.

In the campaign section of the game, you can play as all of the four races including the Borg. Each of these races have 4 missions to complete before you can carry on with the next race. These vary from search and destroy missions to escort missions and more. Like most games of this type, there are 3 different difficulties and believe me, even on easy mode a mission can last in excess of 2 hours.

There is also multi player options. You can chose to play against the computer, on the internet or on a LAN. There are many settings that you can customise your game with. You can change the amount of resources you start off with, arrangement of bases/teams and many more. Each ship has it's own special ability that can help to tilt the battle to your advantage. Ranging from mines to holo emitters to project the image of a ship and draw fire away. All the famous classes of ships are there as seen from the television series such as the Romulan Warbird, Klingon Bird of Prey and my personal favourite the Borg Cube. These function as real ships and have ship systems whi
ch need to be repaired when damage. The ships also has a number of crew and the more crew you have onboard, the faster the ship repairs itself. Also the search and destroy option and the scout option makes exploring the map and find that last enemy unit much less tedious.

There is an original ability to switch between normal mode of play to full 3D action. This however is not brilliant as controlling the camera angles is hard. The video sequences are not brilliant either as the characters are not as smooth as they could be and the dialogue is rather dull. The stability of the game is not up to the level of Command and Conquer as even on my 500Mhz, 128mb RAM and Voodoo 2 card, it becomes very jerky. This only happens when you build a very large fleet and is solved by moving to an area on the map where fighting is not happening but it is very annoying.

This is a game for Star Trek fans but it is playable RTS with some original features and requires enough skill for even those hard core players out there.

Summary: