Star Trek Armada

Pros • The uselessly cool Director's option • Be the Borg...you know you want it • Space represented as a place full of lively "terrain" • Excellent, vibrant graphics	Cons • Ships not to scale from race to race • Not a lot of lasting depth in the single-player game • Some stability problems
Bottom Line Arguably one of the best, prettiest Trek titles produced to date in terms of look, play and faithfulness..but lacking that long-term gravity. Star Trek: Armada is Star Trek's first C&C-style computer game, and succeeds on a number of levels, the first of which is its astounding good looks. If you must reduce the concept of armada-level conflict to what is, after all, a 2-D plane, then this is the way to do it. Never mind that, though, Armada plays perfectly fine and its well-timed missions, scripted with lots of incidental surprises and challenges, will keep any kind of Trekker "engaged" throughout the four-race, 26-mission campaign game. It's just that, after the initial gloss and sheen wear off, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that if Armada were left in the shop for only another few months, it would have two or even three times the lasting appeal.

Star Trek: Armada puts players in control of Federation, Klingon, Romulan and even Borg forces in a 26-mission, multiple-viewpoint campaign game revolving around the Trek universe's equivalent of nuclear-war nightmares: A Borg invasion, the big one---a Federation starship from the future returns to warn that the Biomech Boyz are back, and thus ensues a huge, almost operatic storyline in which the Borg attack relentlessly, the Klingons are trying to hold their sociopolitical stuff together, the Romulans are of course stabbing their carbon-based kin in the back for their own gain, and the hapless Feds are running around like chickens with their heads phasered off, trying to save the universe for the umpteenth time. Armada contains creative elements from Next Generation, DS9 and the various films as well as entirely new ship classes and weapons geared to RTS chic, and works surprisingly well the first time through. Superficially resembling a top-down cousin of Interplay's Starfleet Command, Armada presents the "empty" blackness of space as an attractively busy place---a war map/Einsteinian space grid serving as canvas for huge, screen-filling planets, clouds of glowing colored nebulae, and moving, tumbling drifts of asteroid fields which serve as mobile obstructions, an interesting notion. Trek lore has it that shields and sensors malfunction in certain nebula regions, but a whole new spring catalogue of color-coded nebulae allow for unique types of "terrain" to fight over, around or in---various nebulae can disrupt weapons, kill off crew while leaving hulls intact, or even serve to speed repair and restoration of a ship to good health. Those moving belts of asteroids mentioned earlier also give the armchair-general pacing, a kind of action-game urgency not normally found in RTS games---time things just right, and you can make a single, fleeing starship cause an entire pursuing fleet grief by weaving through a window of opportunity, thumbing you nose back at the hunters all the while.

If you've played StarCraft or C&C then, mechanically, you've played Armada. Players build starbases to serve as production centers, ore-mining freighters to collect Dilithium crystals from resource-rich moons, deep space "artillery" gun-batteries to defend the perimeter, science centers to research the tech behind the weapons that will, ultimately, distinguish the races (as they begin the game dishearteningly alike)---and of course ships to go out and fight. Armada is full of nice little touches that make it fun to play, such as beaming skeleton crews aboard derelict ships and taking control of them, or using the local "terrain" of nebulae to take advantage of weapon-crippling radiation or healing green energy. Another nice touch is that, for a while at least, each starship is an individual craft with a name, a skilled crew, officers (personnel are as much a resource here as Dilithium) plus weapon, shield & engine subsystems, and in many cases a special weapon or ability (the self-destruction option is a last-ditch and nicely mean-spirited way to prevent your precious tech from falling into the enemy's hands). For additional eye-candy, enabling the Director's Cut option makes the standard RTS shot-exchanges a little more exciting, with ships performing intricate little dogfights...it has about .0002% of an effect on gameplay, but it livens things up.

Armada's single-player missions are timed and scripted so well, with entertaining little diversions---blundering across a derelict but useable alien ship while running away from vastly superior forces, for example---that it takes about six missions before even ardent Trekkers begin to realize that there isn't a lot of long-run depth here: Rarely are there viable deterrents to players building up massive fleets which are then thrown willy-nilly at the enemy like so many C&C tank rushes; enemy AI often fails to grasp that, by golly, it might be a good idea to replace some of those critical installations the human player is having such a hoot blowing up; and, when you get right down to it, each race only has about five or so distinct combat craft , none of which are radically different from those on the opposing sides...until the special technologies are cultivated. Employing both original sciences and those inspired by the TV show and films, Armada allows players to let fly with unusual weapons that feed off enemy shields, split ships (temporarily) into present and near-future versions of themselves for double firepower, deplete the opposition's crew (while leaving hulls intact) and even fire torpedoes that chain-react off clusters of nearby ships like some kind of pinball from hell. It can be a little disheartening, however, to work one's way up the tree to, say, a killer Borg mega-ship, only to discover that it's presented as no bigger than a comparable capital ship from the yards of the Federation, Klingon or Romulan armadas. As long as we were mucking about with "director's cut" options, I'd have liked a Borg cube that took up, say, two-fifths of the screen at any given time.

Also, keep your fingers well away from the ESC key---I know many of you have come to rely on it for pauses or menu options, but don't try it here.

It's isn't that Armada isn't good---it's just that there's depressingly little of it, given the quality of what one sees right off the bat. Even though the story-driven single-player campaigns lack long-term depth, there's still multiplayer; of course, the crank-'em-out-like-light-tanks RTS tactics can still apply here as well. In many ways, Armada is more suited for Trek enthusiasts who perhaps aren't so familiar with real-time strategy games, so used to the conventions and typical gambits which comprise such games. Perhaps two learned Trekkers could enter into a kind of unspoken gentleman's-agreement of a game, where massive, faceless fleet-crushes could be eschewed in favor of smaller engagements more redolent of the Trek universe (this as opposed to the average RTSer, whose idea of "gentleman's agreement" would likely be to not actively throw feces at the other player's monitor while tank-rushing him). Armada would need one humungous, black-hole-sealing patch before it could hold veteran RTS gamers for long---consider that an encouraging hint, Activision---but in terms of presentation and variety, it's still one of the superior Trek titles available for the PC

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