Armada's story takes place shortly after the Dominion War ends, Enterprise - E (commanded by Captain Picard) discovers a starship under attack by The Borg. After saving this ship Picard is informed that it is from a future where The Borg have almost completely overrun the Federation. Picard uses this information to prep the Federation for a rather large war with The Borg. The story then develops over twenty-four missions. For each of the four races, which include Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and The Borg, there are four missions that make up their campaign. The final four missions being the final confrontation.

The mission structure is somewhat familiar to those who have played Starcraft, but this is undoubtedly the best way to link one story between more than two races. The missions themselves are admittedly a little short. The smaller number of missions per race has been somewhat compensated for, with multiple objectives. Unfortunately some of these mission objectives are short, and are rather routine. The missions, however, do have a sense of scaling difficulty, so when the Romulan and Borg missions are reached, the missions should last a lot longer as the enemies get stronger. The story is presented in a pretty decent manner, keeping the flow of the storyline consistent by using scripted events. The quality of the opening movie, however, is just not matched by the cutscenes placed between missions. They harken back to the movies Sierra used to employ in their older adventure games. The mouth moves, as well as the area around it, but that is pretty much it.

The visuals are outstanding. After doing a driver dance with my GeForce I was able to get it stable in 1024x768x32, and does it look nice. Full zoom control as well as a cinematic camera views compliment the many visual options that make this title such a treat to look at. The ship textures are really nice, and each model accurately represents the ships from the television show and movies. Damage is shown through different textures as well as effects showing off venting gasses and/or flames. The control for the cinematic camera is a little tricky, and I still haven't been able to get used to it enough for it to be practical. For most of my games it is kept minimized in the little window of the control panel, where it constantly updates me on where the action is taking place, and with a click on the window I am there. One interesting option has been included for owners of the Matrox G400, and anyone who has two decent videocards. The Muli-Mon option allows a person to hook up Armada to two separate monitors. One monitor would show the usual stuff, but the other would show the Cinematic view all throughout the game. When not in player control, the Cinematic view is exteremly flashy and very nice to look at.

The most important aspect of any real-time strategy title is without a doubt the Artificial Intelligence. Although I have been excited about this title for quite some time, I still remembered that this alone is what would make or break the title. The AI in Armada is not dumb, because in many instances it can present a challenge that proves that point. Yet it seems as if it was not fully tweaked to deal with the particular environmental elements that are presented in a standard game of ST: Armada. Some of the more popular chokepoints in Armada are located right outside of wormholes. Proper defenses can devastate most fleets that dare press through. The AI does not seem to recognize the losses of sending fleet after fleet through a wormhole that means almost immediate death. This little AI quirk can be compensated for by map choice, but I am sure this little kink in the AI will be worked out.

Other environmental elements that effect ST: Armada's gameplay include blackholes, asteroid belts (moving or stationary) and five different types of nebula. The blackholes suck in any ship with disabled engines, and the asteroid belts provide a natural barrier that can really effect how strategies are pulled off during a game. Of these variables, the nebula I feel are the most important. Each of these five have different effects on ships; one kills crew off, one causes your ship to explode, another increases repair rate of the ship, and the two others disable certain systems on a ship. Others have argued that the nebula really aren't practical, but I would have to argue the use of these things depends on how the person plays the game, not how the game plays. The single player game also has guest starring races such as the Cardassians and Dominion. These other ships pretty much just get in the players way and try to destroy them. The universe is such a nice place to live in.

The unit balance is something that also must be called into question. There are only about seven ships per race. Although these look unique, for the most part they posess nearly the same general abilities. What saves this system is Activision's use of special weapons. Each ship has its own special weapon, and most of these are very practical. While the scouts are important, as are the larger classes of ship, the escort class is left in the dust. The Romulan and Borg escorts do not suffer nearly as much as the Federation Defiant class and the Klingon Bird of Prey. These two ships are outfitted with forward firing only weapons, weak shields, and near useless specials. The Romulan has cloaking ability, and the Borg Interceptor has a wide range phaser, which are normally reserved for larger classes of ship. The strategic use of units and their unique specials is what really compensates for the small variety of units. Others argue it should be more like Total Annihilation and have lots of units, but most of the units in TA were really not that special. I will agree, however, that the tech tree could have been expanded upon a little more to add a little more oomph to player options.

Thankfully the multiplayer and skirmish modes of this title are really nice. There are a lot of options that can be tweaked to orchestrate the battle of your dreams. Play on WON.net is acceptable, and for the most part pretty lag free. The community is still growing as people are still getting their hands on the game. I have spent a great amount of time playing with some of the people in WON.net, and for the most part they are pretty mature, so I guess I cannot totally condemn the use of a gaming network. Although I think many would have appreciated a way to play without one.

What holds this title back is mostly the rather large amount of incompatibility issues. Over the past few days of checking out the Tech Forum it seems these glitches center around the mouse, graphic cards, and AI pathfinding. The Nvidia cards seem to suffer the fate of bugs more than any other chipsets out there. Crashes tend to be somewhat frequent, but rest assured Nvidia as well as Activision are hard at work developing new downloads to remedy the situation. The other bugs have also been reported to Activision and are also being addressed. It seems Armada is taking a little flak for the same issue over bugs that Battlezone II was victim of.