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Armada II - you get a chance to play Starfleet admiral
and send a lot of Starfleet's best and brightest off to a cold lonely death in the depths of space.
The bottom line: looks great, hard to play, not much on storyline.
Disclaimer: before you take my opinion seriously you should know:
1. My RTS gaming experience is primarily Starcraft, Command and Conquer, and Star Wars: Galatic
Battlegrounds. If this were a world class review I would also be a pro at Homeworld (which this
is supposed to be similar to) and Armada I for comparison's sake.
2. I just finished Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. Which is a 5 planet game - so f***ing awesome
that I was completely blown away. The greatest line
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ever said in a video game: "You think you're
bad? You're not so bad. You wanna know who's bad?..... You're looking at him!". If you have not
played this game, stop reading here, go get a copy and set your phasers to frag.
Buy Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force!!
3. I am almost done with the federation missions (1 of the 3 sets of missions) I don't know if I can bear
to complete the game.
Ok, now that all of that crap is out of the way...
This, like many of the latest generation of real time strategy games, is not an easy game to play.
If you are familiar with the genre it will still take you a couple of solid days of play to get a
handle on all of the races (you can play Federation, Klingon or Borg in the single player. Multiplayer
includes those and Romulan, Cardassian and Species 8472 (from Voyager).
To offset the complexity there is an incredible number of shortcuts. Over 160 when you add in all
the units and races (the game comes with a 10 page word doc of shortcuts!). Beginners can get by
with the mouse driven menus but (as Gamer42 and I can attest from playing Codewarrior aka Thea
"I know every Starcraft shortcut" Prum) if you are playing a pro you will get a severe ass kicking.
On the other hand, this is a beautiful game. The cinematics are fantastic (Enterprise).
Patrick Stewart gives the game some flavor with the voice of
Picard (but no match for the full cast of Voyager on Elite Force...).
The 3d environment difficult to work in, but the engine is fantastic. There are two view modes, a top
down strategic view which you can zoom up and down on and a battle view mode.
Adding a third dimension is problematic because the strategic view maintains proper perspective (images
that are "higher" on the map are bigger, those that are "lower" are smaller. The problem is that the
lower images are so small that you can barely see them. In fact one good multiplayer strategy is to build
a fleet and send it down to the bottom of the map. Your opponents will have a hard time judging the size
of the fleet if they even see it at all.
The other problem is that a lot of the Federation ships look alike (saucer section and nacelles). You
can see on this screenshot, I
have three different ships firing on the borg beacon, but no way to tell
which one is the steamship class (or whatever class you are looking for). And this is in battle view,
it can be worse in other views. This is problem because each ship has its own set of special weapons
and uses and you need to be able to pick them out of the crowd.
Battle mode view is incredibly cool, but you will never use it because you won't spend an hour
bulding a fleet and then say "Gee! Why don't I piss it all away by sitting back and checking out the
camera angles on this battle".
But, if you were to do that you can see some amazing stuff. The screenshots do not do the game justice,
since alot of the beauty is in how the ships move, or spin out of control. Regardless, see the screenshots.
In this screenshot I threw away a
bunch of ships against a Borg Cube. You can see the halo from a warp core rupture, and a second ship below
that about to explode, spinning out of control as the warp nacelles vent plasma (did I mention that you
need to be a hardcore Trek geek to get off on this game?).
While being a Trekkie makes the game better in some ways, it also takes away from the game. A lot of
hardcore nerds are complaining that the ships don't match the Federation specs laid out in the show
and books (these losers need to get lives. Nobody cares whether the Akira class comes standard with
1 or 2 phaser banks). Another departure from the show is that it's weird to be throwing away ships
at an incredble rate. While the Enterprise always squeeks it out and only occasionally gets blown up
in the movies, you will be cranking out ships and watching them get mowed down every minute of the
game.
Sadly the storyline has not been compelling; perhaps it gets better but I really have a hard time
forcing myself to sit down and start another mission. It feels more like a job than a game.
My final verdict: 2.5 planets, do yourself a favor and pick up Elite Force
instead.
Talk about
Star Trek: Armada 2>> |
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Buy it @
amazon.com |
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