The Cookie Monster... err, Borg! (Star Trek - Armada (PC))

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Product:	Star Trek - Armada (PC)
Date:	02/09/00 (98 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Jean-Luc offers his voice

Disadvantages: Not enough Jean-Luc

Star Trek Armada goes hand in hand with Birth of the Federation in providing a game that has obviously been created by fans of Star Trek.

In Armada you get to take control of all four powerful forces: The Federation, Romulan's, Borg and Klingon's in an attempt to destroy the other. In a unique twist you need to play as all four individually to win the game. As you play a Federation mission more Klingon ones become available, and so on.

The amount of ships under your command is what makes Armada so great. Playing with Defiant-class, Galaxy-class and all new futuristic ones is what gets my blood pumping. The Borg are the Borg, totally ruthless and unstoppable and this translates well in the game with the ultimate showdown being between a joint alliance of Starfleet, Kligon's and Romulan's taking it to the Borg at their homeworld.

There is some nice detail, like having the Sword of Kahless in the game which was only introduced and used in one DS9 episode, also the Dominion and Breen make frequent welcomed guest appearances during the Federation missions. To such an extent that the very first Borg mission is to capture a Vorta cloning facility.

The sound can be a little annoying as Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc) provided his voice to the game (as did Worf, Martok and that mad Romulan woman) but this was done in an hour, and it shows, with the same 5 universal sayings running throughout the course of the game, surprisingly "engage" doesn't come up at all. This can be overcome though.

Before each mission loads up you are met with an orange screen with the Star Trek Armada logo in the centre, you'll get quite use to this as it usually takes 5 minutes to load each mission, slowly a status bar moves along the screen. I presume it's faster on more up-market PCs.

A good game, great graphics with some repetitive sound effects but excellent game play.

Minimum System requirements:

200 MHz Pentium processor
32 MB RAM
685 MB Hard drive space

Contrary to what is stated on the box you can run the game on a 166 processor, why they don't put this is beyond me, it states it on the official website. There is a patch available that gets rid of some technical glitches with the game excepting exotic graphic cards, it's a 2MB download so not worth bothering with, the only other thing it will let you do is fire mines when you're either the Defiant or a Bird of Prey whilst cloaked!

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