| Review : |
The play balance, which should be the crux of any RTS game, is well out of whack. As the Federation, a player can quite easily wipe the floor with any other race. Paradoxically, the Borg are one of the weaker races; Until the player can make the advanced Cubes, the Borg are very weak in the early game, where a Cardassian is throwing Galors and the Federation is throwing Akiras around, the Borg gets a slow to build, expensive, Cube. In the same resources, if I remember this right, a Federation player can build five Akiras for one Borg Cube and the Akiras are available at a lower tech level. The Cube doesn't win. The single player campaign, to a word, stinks. The bane of all RTS players is the 'survival mission' where player's tiny force A has to reach point B against overwhelming resistance with no hope of reinforcement or repair. Armada II relies on this horrible abuse of everything RTS stands for far too much. That said, the game is a lot of fun to play and a lot more fun to mod. Armada I was good to mod, but had some crazy texture limits and design limitations. Armada II alleviates most of these but due to it being the weaker game, comparisons would always be made and most of the more talented modders stayed with the original before moving on to other games. It's worth a look, mostly as a demonstration of how many mistakes (as we regard them today) early RTS games made and serves as a useful introduction to modding because it'll simply piss the player off so badly that he'll have no other choice! |
| Review : |
Of the early 3D RTS games, Armada was one of the most well regarded. The single player campaign, often a weak point in RTS, shone through like a beacon in Armada. As Picard's Federation is forced into an uneasy alliance with the Borg and one neither side is happy with, the tension isn't just left for the player's imagination. Armada was one of the first games to not use packed resources, meaning the player could modify the. Modding wasn't a priority back then, presumably it was just simpler to not pack the resources at all. Early modders found that Armada was the easiest (and only!) RTS game that could be modded. The play balance is great and each major power has their own campaign. Beat down the Cardassians as the Klingons or the Borg and eventually 8472 as the Federation, the choices are yours to make. Online play wasn't so great (a bit like the lack of paragraphs in these reviews really) due to a lack of precise balancing. It was pretty trivial to work out which was the most effective unit for the resource cost and play time and spam the hell out of it, something that Starcraft would take great lengths to avoid by giving each unit a "counter-unit". Armada was a lot of fun to play, it still is, and of the myriad of woefully weak Star Trek games, stands apart as being the only one which could survive without the crutch of the license to support it. |
