All of your major races are here, the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, and everyone's favorite half man, half computer, the Borg. Alliances are breaking down and factions are developing among the Klingons, as a Borg attack on the horizon is imminent. Star Trek Armada includes voice-overs by Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard and the Borg Locutus, Michael Dorn as Commander Worf, and Denise Crosby as Admiral Sela.

Taking place after the Dominion War, the alliance between the three powers of the Alpha Quadrant is breaking down. A Klingon rebellion threatens to break up the Klingon Empire. The Federation is slowly rebuilding their outpost and the Romulans are plotting a method to shift the power balance in their favor. Looming in the far reaches of space, the Borg is also returning. This is the world in which you'll be playing. Multiple factions, wars, alliances, and battles of all sorts, all leading up to a huge confrontation between Picard and Locutus.

The game covers twenty missions, divided into four campaigns. The mission design is pretty well conceived, with some originality with the missions. Each race's missions are well suited to the characteristics of the races. The Romulans, for instance, have more secretive, stealthy missions, like infiltrating a spy into an enemy base. The Borg's missions are heavily weighted on assimilating their opponents. Most run-of-the-mill RTS's are plain kill the opponent, while STA has a good bit of variety to the mission types. Missions range from capture and defend, to escape, to the standard eradication of the enemy.

Graphically, Armada is quite impressive. The cutscenes are part of the in-game engine mixed with movie files, making it relatively seamless. I found the animated menus to be very nicely done. The STA crew put some time into making the details show. In-game graphics are decent enough for a 3D overlay on a 2D map. Units move, turn, take damage, and spin. The backgrounds of nebula and other space phenomenon are colorful. The asteroid fields and gas clouds add a three-dimensional touch to the main board. The console is laid out nicely and even includes a mini video window that displays areas of action. There is also a command view that is a 360-degree 3D view where you can manipulate your fleets. It's not very useful, but it is an interesting feature. The developers state that they are working on refining this into a much more usable option. My main issue is with the stability. Armada shipped out the door with the developers acknowledging that it was problematic with different video cards. 1280x1024 on my TNT meant instant exit back to windows. 1024x768 was playable for a while, but you'd suddenly find yourself staring at your windows desktop again. 800x600 was rock-solid for me though and that's where I've played most of the game. The developers suggest setting the display to 640x480 if you're experiencing problems, but I had no problems going to 800x600. At 640x480, there's just not enough of the map in view. If you've got a stable video card, 800x600 and 1024x768 are perfectly suitable, but you can go higher if you'd like. All in all, the graphics look nice, but there's just a little bit of an unfinished feel to it, obviously something that can be easily patched down the road.

The audio is good, but a little bit shaky. The speech and sound effects are good and the voice-overs definitely put you into the Star Trek universe. Star Trek voice-overs have traditionally been decent and this is above par. Music is average, though some of the music sounds slightly fuzzy. Each race has its own background theme music. I found the Borg's to be the most interesting, a haunting, transient sound that felt distinctly Borg. My biggest gripe here is that some of the cutscenes have background noise that drowns out the dialogue. Dialogue in cutscenes is important, background noise isn't.

Game balancing is excellent. Each race has a compliment of ships that are all similarly matched. Each ship has a special ability unique to each race with the exception of the science vessel. The science vessel has four specials for both defensive and offensive actions, ranging from the Romulan psychonic blast that causes enemy crews to attack each other to the Klingon ion storm with its area effect. In addition to these vessels, each race has a super weapon with a devastating attack that causes widespread destruction. The variety among weapons creates huge opportunities for the gamer to form their own strategies. One of my favorite features is the ability to capture your opponent's ships. Kill off the crew and it's yours for the taking. The Borg are the best at this, having two ships with special attacks for assimilating the crew. These tactics can also be used to capture enemy structures. Makes the game that much more interesting when you can steal all your opponent's ships and then send them back at him. A couple minor things bugged me, primarily that you can't send a second construction ship to speed up building. This is something that would greatly benefit the player.

Multiplayer works great as well. Up to eight players and it's not all that laggy. A good server helps for those of you on modems, and even for those on better connections. This is the one other area where Armada seems unfinished though. It's rather buggy, I exited back to Windows almost as frequently as I got a game to completion. Armada is still under heavy crunching by the team at Activision, so I'm sure we'll see patches that help cut down on latency and stabilize the gameplay. STA's definitely a fun one to play with friends or with anyone across the internet. The other is that there's no restart mission button. It's annoying to have to Abort Mission and then go back to the main menu just to restart a mission. Like I said, minor issues, STA is has solid gameplay overall.

Star Trek Armada is one of the finest real time strategies to come out in recent times. It's built upon the tried and true method for RTS's so anyone who's familiar with this genre can jump right in and play. The variety between ships and races makes for an overwhelming amount of tactics. The graphics are a step above most RTS and the mixture of mission types gives it an added edge. The Federation campaign is a bit too fast. In the opening four missions, you're through them relatively fast and you don't get to use much of the Federation technology. The other three campaigns more than make up for it though, as does the final mission for the Federation. It's only March and we've already got a great candidate for RTS of the Year. Trekkies and RTS junkies need to be sure and put their hands on this one, especially after Activision pops a few patches out.

Highs: Great variety in units and missions, well above average RTS, its got Picard!

Lows: Buggy graphics and multiplayer