Techtite's PC Game Reviews!

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"What were the best Trek games...?" 

Just off the top of my head, I thought I'd salute my top 5 favorite Trek games for the PC, in no particular order:

---Star Trek: Judgment Rites

---Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

---Star Trek, The Next Generation: A Final Unity

---Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force

---Star Trek Armada

...agree?

"The little Details..." 

To be honest, there are several little details added to the original game engine, which I could not find the right place for in this review. Such features include warp travel, which makes getting around much faster. Another is the ease of assigning ships to fleets; you can even assign a shipyard a fleet number, and then all ships manufactured will automatically become a part of that fleet. These may have been, quite honestly, features in the original as well, though I never noticed them, and they're an important enhancement for the intense missions of this sequel.

What's the one Star Trek game you played in the past two years, that you'd love to see as a sequel? Well, that would be Voyager: Elite Force, if you ask me, though a sequel to Star Trek Armada is pretty good, too. No, that's being too understated; this is actually wonderful news, in a holiday season with very few major releases at all. If you have a Trekkie on your holiday shopping list, this is a cool present for them...presuming they don't have it already!

I won't get into the basics of the game per se, since I already covered that well enough in my earlier review, of the first game in this series. The short end of it, is that this was an already well made, real-time strategy game. In single player, you could perform around 20 missions --5 missions each-- as the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and even the Borg. These missions were excellently suffixed by a surprise batch of missions, where you controlled the three Armadas at once, in their final battles against The Borg. This isn't even getting into one of the cooler moments of the game (shown here); the chance to make an Armada of ships, identical to the Enterprise, and send them anywhere you wanted to in the current system, obeying your every command.

So, what can a sequel offer, to a game that was already spectacular? For starters, Armada 2 removes all of my biggest gripes about the original. Armadas, for example, can now include as many as 16 ships, which is double the paltry number of 8 from the original. Crew is no longer limited to just your starbase, and can be increased via colonized planets nearby (more on that later). AI of your ships is also much better, allowing for broader control of your ships' decisions in battle, as well as better flight-path decisions (most ships will automatically avoid a dangerous nebula in their flight path, even if you hadn't mapped that area of space yet). Adding to the fun; there's even the multiplayer option to play as the Cardassians or Species 8472. Best of all, mouse-control has been vastly improved, with well chosen left and right button control, and even the wheel (which can be used to zoom in and out of the current game map at will).

This mouse-wheel enhancement is alluding to the best new feature; the game grid is now three-dimensional. The original's game grid was rather illogical (if you'll pardon the term) in that all ships were set within a two-dimensional game grid. Ships had difficulty passing by even a simple sensor array, if it was in their flight path. In Armada 2, all this has changed, where items can be built either higher or lower than the actual game grid. This makes it easer for your ships to maneuver, though it is also good strategy against enemies, who must now pay attention to targets that can be above and below them, and not just straight ahead.

The three dimensional game map would mean little, however, if not for the visually stunning systems explored. The first game's battles were held in ho-hum sectors of space, with one or two  dilithium asteroids, a nebula or two to hide in, and that's it. In Armada 2, each sector is a solar system of multiple planets, and that's half the added challenge. Inhabitable planets must be colonized, then protected from enemies who would try to conquer them. Uninhabitable planets must be mined for metals to make your ships; unlike the first game, metal no longer comes from The Metal Fairy --as if by magic-- and has to be either mined or bought via trading stations. Trading stations increase your supply of gold latinum, which is needed to build the more specialized research stations. As for nebulas, they are also more diverse than the original game, and can either slowly kill off the crew in your ships, damage ship systems, or slow engines to a crawl (there are, of course, the beneficial nebulas, like the "gold latinum nebula," which sounds a bit silly yet is fun to mine, just the same). This also allows for alternate challenges, for alternate races; while the cybernetic Borg must deal with a limited number of power nodes, the other races must deal with owning enough latinum to pay for research in their bigger research stations.

This also, as you'd expect, leads to several battles that are just plain cool to watch, let alone control yourself. With nebulas in the backgrounds, planets in the forteground, and ships all over, any screen capture is a good one, and may even be used by a few Trekkies as a desktop image. Even on my laptop computer (while on vacation), the sight of the Borg's pyramid shaped "colony ships," assimilating a planet with its attack beams, was pretty ominous to see. Species 8472 is pretty foreboding to watch as well, and can combine ships to form a force beam that can destroy almost any enemy vessel (as shown in the Voyager series). This all makes for a very challenging game --much more so than the original-- though also much more fun to play.

There are added play styles, as well. Six tutorial missions will make even the newbies to the series more than happy (even fans of the original game may want to check out the tutorials for the colonization of planets, as well as the features of Species 8472). Single players can now play randomized missions at any time, via the "Immediate Action" option. Using this option, you can compete with up to 7 other fleets, in any of 25 game maps. You can even select enemies of various difficulty; 2 "easy" opponent fleets, and one tough armada, for example. These added options should keep players happy for many more days after playing the 30 (yes, thirty) single-player missions.

Then there are the minor gripes. The single-player story, for example, is much less "fascinating" (so to speak) than the original's. Some of the missions have titles that are inspired (the mission where the Borg take over a whole system of planets is amusingly titled, "There Goes The Neighborhood"), and yet the overall storyline seems rather ho-hum. This is disappointing, when the voice acting includes both Patrick Stewart himself as Captain Picard, and even Alice Krige, who reprises her role as the Borg Queen. The difficulty level of some mission objectives is equally illogical; in one mission, just getting a damaged Enterprise-E through a simple nebula cloud is one of the most difficult moments of the first half of the game! The finale, last of all, is disappointing, and is bound to leave you wondering, "Is that really it...?" However, admittedly, you'll be too busy moving on to the multiplayer missions to care.

In the end, I find myself giving this sequel the same solid thumbs-up grade I gave the original...and that's saying an awful lot. On the one hand, there are many nice enhancements here. On the other hand, is this really worth the added price compared to the original, which is probably discounted by now? That's a tricky question, though I would have to say that first timers could buy either game first, and be pleased. The first game is easier to get the hang of, yet the sequel has added features, plus the cool tutorial missions. Be that as it may, there's no denying that the original game had a uniqueness and overall storyline that is sorely lacking here. This is a fantastic sequel for the multiplayer fans, though it's a shame that single player fans may be longing for a re-install of the original.