The Alien Critic Reviews...
The Alien CriticReviews...

TAC Reviews...Star Trek Armada

Date Posted: 16/06/24

 

A PC game released in 2000 by Activision is probably my favourite Star Trek game of all time. It is a real time strategy (or RTS) and is set within The Next Generation era. Star Trek royalty like Sir Patrick Stewart and Michael Dorn return to reprise their roles as Captain Picard and Worf with Denise Crosby as the Romulan Sela and J.G Hertzler as Chancellor Martok. 

 

Cover Art

 

Now, you may have noticed I have been away for a while, and that is because to paraphrase a quote from the Romulans at the end of the TNG episode The Neutral Zone: “Other matters have required my attention, but no matter, [I] am back”.

 

There are plenty of games that I have been playing and are worth talking about including Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy. There are various movies and TV shows as well, however, before all of those what has been occupying much of my time of late is a game that I didn’t think could even be played on a modern PC anymore.

 

Back in 2000 I had this game and used to play it frequently with J, now games from twenty-odd years ago I have found virtually impossible to play on a current PC or even my own ship’s computer, likely because games that old are simply not designed to be played on current software. Then whilst on Instagram an advert for this game popped up on a website called gog.com (goodoldgames) and as the game was only about £5 I purchased it. Admittedly I was not expecting it to really function properly but to my delight it ran surprisingly well.

 

As far as the plot goes, the game is split into separate campaigns. The setting of the game is not long after the end of the Dominion War, and first campaign is from the perspective of the Federation. Its story revolves around Captain Picard of the Enterprise-E encountering a timeship named the USS Premonition, which has travelled back in time to warn the Federation of a full scale Borg invasion that begins with the assimilation of Starbase 612. The Enterprise high tails it over there and is able to repel the initial assault. Meanwhile, Worf becomes entangled in a conspiracy by his old enemy Toral (the son of the traitor Duras) to seize control of the Klingon High Council.

 

Jumping to the Klingon campaign, Chancellor Martok is repelling the Borg as well, however, Toral has rallied a force against him claiming that he (Toral) has found the Sword of Kahless which plunges the Empire into civil war. As his father was in league with the Romulans, Martok suspects Toral is as well, and dispatches Worf to learn the truth.

 

We then join Admiral Sela of the Romulan Star Empire, whose alliance with Toral has been discovered and has dragged the Romulans into a costly war with the Klingon Empire. She is made aware of the existence of the Omega Particle, something that the Borg reveal as being Perfection itself, and a source of almost limitless power. Looking to sever all ties with the Klingons, and source the Omega Particle for themselves, Sela seeks to make a deal with the devil.

 

Next we become part of the Collective, having failed to secure Omega, a new tactic is activated. A Dominion cloning facility is assimilated in order to clone none other than Locutus of Borg. With the mind of Captain Picard behind Locutus, the Collective begin their campaign to assimilate the Federation leading them to directly attacking Earth…

 

I had played RTS games like Command and Conquer before this one and the basic premise remains the same for the most part. Enter a map, establish a base, and then destroy everything that isn’t you. Now it might seem as though Armada is basically just a Command and Conquer engine with a Star Trek paint job but the game never feels like that. The voice acting helps immensely because this does feel like the events could have taken place in the Star Trek universe. Now yes there are things that take some suspension of disbelief, but we will get to that in a minute. Essentially certain things remain the same from campaign to campaign. Building anything from stations to ships require dilithium, crew will also be required (unless constructing unmanned weapon platforms) and so will officers or power nodes. So you will need mining ships to harvest dilithium, stations to gain more crew and build more officers quarters or power nodes (if playing as the Borg). In the early campaigns you have access to more limited ships but as the game progresses you get to build most ships from the Star Trek universe we all know and love plus a few that we don’t.

 

Being able to command a fleet of Sovereign-class ships, or Romulan warbirds is so cool and each faction has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example the Romulan warbirds can drain the shield strength of an enemy vessel to add it to their own, Klingon Vor’cha-class can fire a torpedo that pierces an enemy’s shields and deactivates a function (like its engines, weapons or life support, Federation Nebula-class can be outfitted with Engineers that will restore all systems on a damaged ship and fix half shield power, and the iconic Borg cube that can assimilate enemy ships using a Holding Beam.

 

You have access to the transporter so if an allied ship is being attacked you can bean over personnel to repel the attackers. This is generally the only viable tactic to prevent a ship being assimilated by the Cube’s holding beam whilst you work to destroy the cube itself. But more than that if you get an enemy’s shields down you can transport to their ship or station and take it over. Enemy ships like the Breen, Son’a, Jem’Hadar fighter and Dominion warships, as well as a couple of Cardassian classes crop up during the campaign. If you capture these ships they are yours to control, and if you capture their ship yards then you can build some of these ships yourself. It never stopped being fun to capture an enemy construction ship and from it build up all of their technology so you could use it against them.

 

Each faction has around six different types of ship with each one carrying a specific role, the scout ship can detect cloaked vessels, then classics like the bird-of-prey or defiant class. The thing is that none of these ships are like their in universe counter parts. The first time I spotted a Borg Cube I basically shat myself as I wondered how the hell I would defeat it. The thing is that a Cube, whilst powerful is just its faction’s battleship. If a cube, a sovereign, a warbird and negh’var class battle one another it is generally down to their special weapons that will dictate which will win. A cube with a holding beam can assimilate other ships but if a vor’cha class takes out its weapons or shields with its special weapon then that cube could be rendered defenceless. Sadly this works against the defiant class as it is basically very easy to destroy when in universe it is said to be one of the most powerful warships in the existence.

 

Each faction also gets its own special weapon. The Federation can build a temporal distortion facility which will freeze enemies caught within its radius for a set amount of time. The Borg have a transwarp gate that enables them to travel to any location on the map they have previously visited, and the Klingons and Romulans get ships which explode doing massive damage to anything caught in their radius.

 

Each faction also has a science-class ship that can have multiple technologies developed for it, including the shadow-class which can charge an ally’s shields, a nebula which can disable shields, and it is up to the player how or if they wish to use these vessels. If you want to just build as many of your most powerful ships as possible and cross the map destroying everything that looks at you funny then go ahead.

 

Pretty much by the endgame you have free reign to develop whatever faction’s technology you like the most. It creates a weird dilemma because any losses of Federation ships are a tragedy (think the events of Wolf 359). But to the Klingons, to die in battle is the most honourable thing a warrior can do, so do you build their ships. The Romulans betray and backstab so any losses to their fleet would be shrugged off by their High Command, and the Borg, any losses are irrelevant as long as they succeed in their goals.

 

Now you might be sitting there wondering why a Star Trek fan would actively enjoy playing as the Borg and attacking, assimilating, and ultimately conquering Earth. See here’s the thing. In The Next Generation and Star Trek First Contact, the Borg were terrifying, and I have said before that before Voyager turned them into the villain of the week, the Federation struggled to fight off this massively powerful race. It was basically just luck that the Cube in Best of Both Worlds was beaten, and whilst the Federation was able to cause significant damage to the Cube in First Contact it was Picard’s link to the Collective that ultimately allowed him to identify the weakness in that ship which lead to its destruction. In the episode Scorpion of Voyager the titular ship enters Borg space and encounters 15, yes FIFTEEN, Borg Cubes each one as powerful as the vessel that obliterated 39 starships at Wolf 359 without even breaking a sweat. Myself and other Star Trek fans I know have always wondered why the Borg only send one ship to conquer the Federation rather than two, or three. In another Voyager episode we see the Borg attacking a civilisation and there are numerous ships present, including cubes and diamonds. I have often thought that if the Borg ever assimilated me then the galaxy would fall because the thought to send an armada after Earth rather than a singular cube would catch on and the Borg would finally achieve victory.

 

Sadly the game is not perfect and there are some levels that are okay but not massively fun to play through. One of the early ones features Worf having to evade Toral in a treacherous area of space, recovering derelict ships along the way to aid in fighting back against Toral’s more powerful ship. Years ago when I first played this game I just raced from one objective to the next but this time decided to explore areas that I basically had no reason to investigate, in the hopes that there might be an Easter egg of sorts or a more powerful ship that the little fighters I was finding…no such luck. There is also a level in the Borg campaign in which you have to exterminate a race of space-dwelling life forms that are unsuitable for assimilation. The creatures have weapons that kill half your crew with each shot (which they do a lot) and the only way to beat the level is to build the Diamond’s ultrium burst, so most of the Borg’s cool technology there is basically no point in constructing.

 

It has to be said though that for every weaker level there are at least three strong ones. I have also found it interesting to watch YouTube videos of the game and see just how differently I played the campaigns compared to others. It helps with the replay value of the game because you can try different tactics to complete the levels and play around with different ship combinations.

 

The Enterprise-E, a defiant class called the Avenger captained by Worf, Sela’s Warbird and Martok’s Negh’var are all controlled by the player which each actor’s voice lines linking to the commands you are giving. Picard will refer to Data or Number One (although neither Jonathan Frakes nor Brent Spiner are in the game) which is a nice touch. Although in later missions if one of these ships is destroyed the mission fails. Now all of these ships are beefed up versions of the others you can build. A defiant class ship is typically crewed by 80, but the Avenger has 100, the Locutus Cube has 1500 instead of a regular Cube’s 1000. The problem is that in later missions Worf’s Avenger is more of a weakness than a strength so I generally just stuck it somewhere at the back of my bases out of the way. I have watched playthroughs and some put Martok’s ship or the Enterprise front and centre but that always seemed foolish to be because if they are destroyed then mission over.  

 

The truth of the matter is that my biggest complaint of Armada is that there is just not enough of it. Each faction’s campaign has four missions ranging in difficulty with the Federation’s being the first and generally easiest. A fifth campaign opens up when the other four have been completed, but that is only twenty missions, and precious few in which you get a chance to play with each faction’s best toys.

 

Armada II came out in 2001 which I never played because J did and he said that basically it was made too complicated. The Borg could construct Tactical Cubes which were made up of 8 smaller cubs but once a player had one of those it was game over to any other faction. A starbase did not generate crew anymore, which factions having to conquer planets to boost their crews. I think the plot revolved around the Federation having to team up with the Borg to beat Species 8427 which represented a greater threat. None of these features made me inclined to play that game and to this day I still have not done so.

 

There is also an online multiplayer options in which you can fight other players, which I have never been inclined to try. Or what is called Instant Action if you want to play a map on your own against AI factions. You can pick the map, who you want to fight, and you have access to all your faction’s technology. Unfortunately I found this mode to be very unstable and was unable to play for more than twenty minutes or so without crashing to desktop. It was also a real shame that whilst there are several iconic ships you can control, you cannot build Galaxy-class vessels, although they do crop up on a couple of missions allowing you to command them.

 

All in all, when I purchased the game I didn’t really expect it to run properly and aside from the multiplayer issues and one crash in the main campaign it was really stable as well as being just as much fun to play as I remember it being. I am awarding Star Trek Armada with a well-deserved Two Thumbs up because a game that I played twenty years ago and being just as much fun now as it was then just makes me wish for another Armada game which goes back to the design of this one with more ships, more missions and more technology.

 

 

9/10 – I loved this game back in the 2000s and I adore it just as much now. The voice acting is great fun, the missions varied, the technology cool to play with and demonstrates that if the Collective ever assimilated a Star Trek nerd then Earth would fall pretty soon afterwards. 

 

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© Chris Sharman