"Resistance is futile...."

For some odd reason, strategy games have this addictive hold on me that can take a productive Saturday afternoon and throw it away in favor of taking over a galaxy or blowing up the computer enemies that test my mettle. Star Trek: Armada is one of those games that took me by surprise and kept me away from the important things that I had to do that day! Placing you in the story line just after the great Dominion War, you take the role of either Picard of the Federation, Worf of the Klingons, Sela of the Romulans or Locutus of the Borg Collective. Through each of these, you’ll face off in four missions that will test your strategy skills and your patience as you’ll either win or lose the battle depending solely on your ability to create a fleet and then roll over the enemy, or be turned away with your tail between your legs!

Finally, there is a game that takes the Star Trek Universe and breaks it down into different factions of the Quadrant and allows you to play as your favorite creature, whether it is human, alien or robotic. Through the different factions, you’ll create ships; researches new weapons and complete different missions that come about with each of the four ‘episodes’ that each faction has to offer. You must begin with the Federation, and work your way through the different factions however, and the Borg is the last one that you get to play with, abet the most fun and challenging to control! In each ‘episode’ your objectives will change at the drop of a hat, whether it is to escort a ship, rescue a spy or simply eliminate everything in your path. Something of interest in the game play is that you’ll have to really have to keep up on the minimal things such as mining dilithium and recruiting more people to man the ships you’ll have to create.

In game, you’ll have several different options at your disposal, with ships that you both surround and destroy, or ones that you can board and take over with mass amounts of away teams. In terms of what you can do with the ships, it ranges from guarding different objectives, seeking out and destroying anything remotely enemy and just getting into dogfights with the closest hostile object. All of these small things add up into a really explosive game that puts emphasis more on your strategy than it does your might, even though a fleet of huge star ships is sure to win just about any battle! Every faction has ships that can pretty much do everything that you may have seen on the television series and then some, from the cloaking to mass firing of weapons at an enemy target, it really does stay true to the Star Trek Universe. Additions to this are the special weapons that can be targeted to ships in a chain reaction, also adding just another piece of strategy to the overall game play. What is a little different from Star Wars: Rebellion, is the fact that you can’t perform special missions such as inciting riots and assassinating key figures for a different faction. Those takes away from the game a little bit, but also keeps in line with the rather ‘clean’ feel that Star Trek has always had over the years.

The control interface is something that needs to be worked on by the player and probably could have been made simpler than what it is. With the different factions, you have different hotkeys that allow you to bypass having to go through the various menus with the mouse. Once you learn these hotkeys and just what they do, what they operate, and how well they function, you’ll find that the game takes on a different meaning in terms of learning curve. If you have the Director’s Cut option on, you’ll also have to learn how to use your mouse in an extremely fast way, because all of the fights with the Director’s Cut on, move and they move fast! It should take about an hour to get used to how the game controls and how to glide through the interface menus, and strategy vets shouldn’t have any problems picking up what needs to be done and just how to do it.

Visuals depend on the type of machine that you have and just what you can see. All of the cuts scenes are done in true Star Trek fashion, with most ships and characters looking as they do on the television series. The most interesting aspect of Armada is that you can turn on the Director’s Cut, which allows for fully running battles and dogfights between big and small ships, as well as animations that you can’t see without it! However, unless you have a fast processor, and a decent monitor as well as plenty of RAM to back all of this up, you’ll have to tone down the visual display in the menus just to get it to work right. On a 450 MHz machine, I can only go as far as three quarters of the way with the visual detailing, but even that looks completely awesome and there is nothing like a running dogfight with a Borg Cube to really get your attention!

The audio is something that needs some work. Musically, there isn’t much there but some foreboding music that sets some of the mood, but doesn’t really get you into the game like the visuals and game play do. The voice over acting is straight from the Star Trek cast, with Picard and Worf performed by Patrick Steward and Michael Dorn respectively! This adds a bit of fun to the overall sound and the sound effects are something that really stands out in the different battles and fire-fights that you’ll encounter. With the cut scenes, the story is drawn in and told in a rather pleasing fashion.

Overall, Armada is a good choice for those who like Starcraft, Star Wars: Rebellion and the Command and Conquer series. Even though the story is outdated, and the characters get a little tiresome, you’ll find that the game really brings the ST Universe to life without going too far overboard. With an impressive story and the ability to play as one of the four major factions in Star Trek, you’ll find that if you’re a fan it’s a dream come true. Good for strategy gamers and Star Trek fans alike, anyone would do well to get a copy of the game and take a break from the Starcraft and History strategy games that envelope the market today!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/19/01, Updated 11/19/01