Star Trek: Armada II

"I am the Matt91486 . . . resistance is futile"

LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND SURRENDER TO ME!

NOW!

Oh, I'm terribly sorry. You see, I’m just playing some Star Trek Armada II, assimilating some of the Cardassian flagships, reconstructing a resource processing node, constructing some Borg Spheres, and wishing I could solve the mystery of why Species 8472 ever came to our dimension in the first place. And if that sounds complicated to you, you are in for one hell of a ride.

The ride opens with Captain Jean-Luc Picard reciting the opening from Star Trek: The Next Generation, all beautifully animated and incredibly detailed, with Patrick Stewart providing the voice-overs, as he does for all Federation missions. From there, his familiar European voice trudges on, guiding you through the twists and turns of an original Trek story. Sadly, the major voice talent ends there. No other major TNG characters supply voices, not even Michael Dorn (Worf), who handles a lot of video game voiceovers. I would have liked to hear Jonathan Frakes (William Riker) or LeVar Burton (Geordi LaForge) contradict Picard at some point, or hear Marina Sirtis go into that wonderful accent of hers as Counselor Deanna Troi, and point out that your foes “aren’t true to their stated intentions.” No, the second biggest vocal talent is Patty Yasutake, who sporadically played Nurse Ogawa, assistant to Gates McFadden’s Beverly Crusher in sick bay. Yes, a character, but not an important one. Even worse, Yasutake does not reprise her role as Nurse Ogawa, instead merely providing generic voice overs for the game. Including the real series’ voices may not be a major aspect of a game, but when one is dealing with a universe as rich, diverse, and complex as that of Gene Roddenberry’s creation, they help flesh out the story line and allow the player to comprehend changes in the plot with ease.

Casual Star Trek fans will have trouble following the story anyway. Set in 2375, the Federation is basically ignoring their directives, and they are heading on an all out offensive into the Delta Quadrant to defeat the Borg once and for all. The setting relies heavily on the Dominion War and counts entirely on players having beaten the original Star Trek Armada, referencing the Borg’s Alpha Quadrant invasion on innumerable occasions. Since the Federation is on the offensive, the Klingon Empire is fulfilling the Federation’s traditional role as the United States of the Alpha Quadrant: Bullying and pestering the other nations so that everyone can get along. Naturally, this has heightened the interest of the Klingon rivals, the Romulans, to invade, and the on-again, off-again Cardassian allies to contemplate if supporting the Federation is worthwhile. Couple all of this back story with what actually goes on in the ships, and you have one intertangled mess to deal with.

So, in the Mission Mode, you will have to take charge of the Federation -- for the first time in their history launching a major offensive into another quadrant, Klingons -- carrying out the routine peacetime missions that the Federation is typically in charge of, and the Borg -- the Collective is now on the run, trying to drive Picard and the United Federation of Planets back to their own quadrant. Missions are time-consuming beasts, and quite often you will have to save and finish saving the universe another day. The very first mission in the game took me two hours to finish, and I was playing with far more abandon than I usually do. All generally take between one and three hours, with very few exceptions.

But who needs missions, anyway? We all know that the real fun of Star Trek Armada II lies in the random wars for the hell of it! You can customize your skirmishes in the Instant Action Mode a great deal, to setting battle parameters, resource and officer allotments, species alliances, and technology requirements, and then head into a vicious free-for-all to gain control of your sector. Very rarely do you actually get to concentrate on all-out war in missions, so this is the only chance to test your true combat skills before heading to the hallowed domain: online play.

If you head to the GameSpy Arcade to play Star Trek Armada II online without sufficient experience, you are just asking to embarrass yourself. The players are experienced, skilled, and not afraid to kick a newbie out of the sky, so get ample play time before even signing on.

That being said, Star Trek Armada II can be a very difficult game to get the hang of. It has nuances a plenty, and there are three distinct species types. The Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians all play in a similar manner, concentrating on aspects of trade, science, and military in roughly equal terms. The Borg can assimilate these four species and add them, their bases, their ships, and their technologies to that of the collective. They do not trade, and their sole purpose is that of utter domination. Species 8472 has the same goal, but goes about it differently. The mysterious species was first discovered by the Borg in 2373. Hailing from fluidic space, the species is entirely organic -- ships, structures, personnel, and otherwise -- and can travel between the actual universe and fluidic space by utilizing quantum singularities. They cannot be assimilated, and have no need for metals. Ships are not built, buildings not constructed. Instead, they evolve from lesser beings in the species into organic beings designated to serve one task. To make them even fiercer, all are capable of regeneration, so they must be defeated with swift, strong, and efficient attack patterns.

The four humanoid species have ships, special abilities, and structures that all perform similar functions in a different manner. For example, the Federation’s Vulcan Research Institute is nearly a clone of the Klingon Imperial Research Institute. The Cardassian Union’s flagship, the Keldon-Class, is quite similar in size, function, and armament to that of the Romulan D’deridrix-Class. The only difference that sets the Federation apart from the other three is the lack of a kamikaze vessel -- a suicide ship constructed apart from the others, with a super weapon that will destroy everyone and everything within range.

Star Trek Armada II presents a merger between two of the major genres in the history of electronic gaming: real-time strategy and space shooter. As in a real time strategy game, you must create your units while your friends and foes do the same, and it is as much a race against the clock as against your enemies. Like a space shooter, you must concentrate on controlling ships individually, moving them around with control of the mouse, selecting weaponry and firing patterns for optimum destruction. Clearly the game leads more to the RTS side of the equation, but there is plenty of twitch shooting present, with the only alteration being that firing is automated.

The mining of resources is one of the major aspects that sets Star Trek Armada II closer to the edge of the spectrum dominated by games such as Starcraft and Command and Conquer. Latinum, Dilithum, and Metals must be mined to construct ships and buildings, assuming one is not playing as Species 8472. These resources come from nebulas, moons, and planets respectively. Each requires structures and starships to harvest the resources.

While Latinum comes from a nebula, that is only one of seven types of nebulas that fill the universe, all of which have different effects on a starship. Metaphasic Nebulas contain healing properties to repair damaged ships, while if one enters a yellow Radioactive Nebula, it is only a matter of time before they perish and their ship is destroyed along with them. Coloring is the identifying aspect of each nebula, as it is with most things in the galaxy.

Each species will assume a different hue in the map, so that they are not only easily available on radar, but can easily be distinguished from a Borg-fascimile should a ship be boarded, or a vessel commandeered by another species through a crew beam-in. Without these marks, one would have an extremely difficult time deciphering between friend and foe. Thankfully the coloring does nothing to detract from the extreme amount of detail put into each ship and space station. Individual windows are visible on a Klingon Vor’Cha-Class vessel. Phaser banks can be seen on Sovereign-Class Federation flagships. Activision's developers clearly did their research in staying as true as possible to the vision of Gene Roddenberry and those he shared it with.

The ships easily stand out against the dulled colors of deep space, even visible in the brightest centers of the most brilliant nebulas. However, some color selection, purple in particular, can be difficult to view on the radar, and that can give that species a distinct tactical advantage, especially if they are located near a Mutura Nebula or a planet, whose gravitational pull is outlined on the radar map in shades of purple.

Planet detection is vital, and one must find all the hospitable planets within reasonable range of their Starbase early on so that their colonies can have time to flourish and grow. Since the only defense that a planet colony -- which can only be created on H, K, L, or M-Class planets -- is a shield, they must constantly be defended by a fleet, or a combination of torpedoes and pulse cannons. Colonies not only add to your overall score tally when a mission or skirmish is complete, but they also provide valuable crew so that commandeered vessels can be re-crewed, or so that ships that have been boarded can replenish their killed allies.

Planet colonies are very difficult to sustain at times, especially in the later missions of the game. The mission difficulty plays a big role in the game. Star Trek Armada II’s difficulty curve is arithmetic -- it adds difficult each time, but never makes it too much more difficult than the one before it, and Activision tried to make it always possible for a mission to be beat if you could think of the method that would best reach the solution. Sometimes a mission will have to be replayed more than once to understand exactly what one is supposed to look for, but that is the way that they wanted it.

While missions will be replayed because you do not know how to complete them, Instant Action and online play will be played a myriad of times just because of how entertaining it is to attack and destroy ones foes. It is especially enjoyable to undertake this act as the Federation because it is a very atypical mission for the, keepers of peace in the galaxy. I would have replayed Star Trek Armada II even more often had there been cameo appearances by characters from the rich fabric that makes up Star Trek -- The Traveler, with Wesley Crusher in tow, the Doud, posed as human Kevin, who alone caused an entire species to become extinct, and, of course, Q. Everyone’s favorite immortal entity.

While there may not be cameos from third party players in the universe, music from the series does play a starring role. The theme song from the Next Generation serves as the theme for the game, and a remixed version of a song that is heard in some especially mysterious episodes is the background in missions and skirmishes. These even further the atmospheric effects in the game, and in the missions make you feel as if you are really controlling the Starship Enterprise.

Sound effects from the series also make appearances, with everything from phaser and torpedo shots to voice cracklings over the comm sounding like they are straight out of an episode. All have been touched up with the digital enhancements that have occurred since the late 1980s, and they add an atmospheric quality to Star Trek Armada II that few other additions (excluding those voice actors, of course) could match. Nothing like familiarity to enhance a vision in the mind’s eye.

Activision did all they could to immerse themselves in the legends and lore of the series, from the classic episodes starring William Shatner as James T. Kirk to the heyday of the early nineties, where The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager ruled the airwaves, to the current Enterprise, which is a prequel that focuses on the starts of space travel, when the warp drive was still being perfected. Star Trek Armada II unveils a new chapter intricately woven into the fabric of the future, without conflicting with any information revealed to date in the series. Instead of focusing on peace itself, it concentrates on a war to bring peace, to eliminate the Borg threat, so the Collective can allow the species of the Alpha Quadrant to not live in fear of a Fusion Cube to come out of nowhere, and steal their very existences. Peace will always come again, in one form or another; Thus is the lesson that Captain Jean-Luc Picard wishes for all of us poor beings in the twenty-first century to know.

PROS
*The addition of a Star Trek mainstay (the Cardassians), and a quirky new species (Species 8472).
*Beautiful meld of traditional space shooting with real-time strategy.
*Incredible detail in the ships, both in specifications, combat, and visuals.

CONS
*Nowhere near enough personnel voice overs.
*Planet colonization should be far deeper.
*More differentiation of species would make for a deeper game

SCORE SUMMARY

GAMEPLAY--8
GRAPHICS--8
MUSIC--8
SOUND--5
CONTROL--7
FUN--9
CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
REPLAY VALUE--MEDIUM

OVERALL--8

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/02/02, Updated 08/02/02