Originally released in 2000, this is a game that would be so popular with Star Trek fans that it would spawn a sequel as well a popular fan mod. There have been more good Star Trek games than bad and if you ask me, Star Trek: Armada here is one of the best. This is yet another missed opportunity to make something truly great out of a guaranteed-hit licence. And, while the presentation is good, it does have a certain unfinished quality and a few crashing bugs that are very hard to forgive. You can zoom right into the action (there's even a cinematic camera mode), but, as usual, this is useless in the heat of battle. The engine-rendered 30 cut-scenes give an idea of what could have been if it had gone the Homeworld way rather than stupidly blocking off bits of the map with asteroids and covering unscanned areas of space with an ugly grey mass. In spite of this, things can get repetitive and boring and it's hard to forget that a 20 space map just doesn't work. You can also take over enemy vessels by destroying their shields and beaming soldiers aboard. You need to use the space terrain (nebulas, ion storms, black holes and worm holes) to your advantage and research special weapons and features for your ships (anti-matter mines, commando teams, shield disruptors and tractor beams). While the strategy is quite simple, there are a couple of things that add more depth to the gameplay. No matter which race you're controlling you have three resources: Dilithium, crew and officers. With all this variety of missions you might think there'd be no base-building but, while the game does go easy on the resource management side of things, it is still an essential part of the game. It's tempting to reveal too much, but we will say this towards the end of the game you can lead a Borg invasion of Earth.ДЄnd this isn't the only highly interesting mission - you can look forward to beaming a Romulan spy onto a Klingon prison facility from a cloaked ship, assimilating a Dominion cloning centre, so you can clone Locutus, using the Enterprise to. What is so good is the way the narrative unfolds through the missions, and how these are structured around scripted moments.There are four campaigns (Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Borg) which you can play in any order, although you'd be stupid to spoil the plot by doing so (if you want to try out all the races straight away, go for the excellent skirmish mode). The Klingons become involved, complicating things with an internal struggle for power, as do the Romulans (led by Tasha Yar's daughter) with their deceitful self-interested tactics.

A ship comes back in time to warn the Enterprise of an imminent Borg invasion, which in another timeline has been successful and reduced the Alpha Quadrant to an assimilated Borg outpost. The main plot revolves, as so many of the best Trekkie ones do, around the Borg.

In fact, it's better than some of the film efforts from recent years, and works like a string of exceptionally good episodes.

This could have been a big problem, except for the fact that the story is so damn good. Story GloryДЄrmada is very much a story driven game, with the strategic and resource management side of things kept as light as possible. But when you're a simple and limited person like me, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Homeworld might have hurt a lot of people's brains with its fully 3D galactic beauty, but it was a massive achievement that makes Armada look very limited and simple by comparison. And this is where we encounter the first problem, because there is something just wrong about space vessels moving around a 2D plane. FC is a land-based 3D RTS, while Armada is more like Command & Conquer in space. The answer is both yes and no, although to be fair both games are quite different. Following last month's Force Commander disappointment (at least in terms of what it could have been), it was always going to be interesting to see if a Star Trek RTS could fare any better.

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