Asteroid belts form impassable barriers, while wormholes let you instantly transport your fleet to another point on the map. The various colored nebulae disable or impair any ships within and may create tactical opportunities for ambush or retreat. And most all of the deep-space geography you'll come across has a direct impact on the gameplay. Armada's outer space is filled with swirling, colorful gasses and nebulae, dense asteroid belts, bright stars, and huge planets slowly going about their day cycle. What's more, although the battles in Armada are set in outer space, the setting is anything but the cold, featureless expanse that's to be expected. You can throw an awful lot of ships at your enemy, yet the game's frame rate remains steady even on less powerful computers. Ships' phasers and photon torpedoes sizzle against their enemies' shields and once the shields dissipate, a ship's hull will start to melt and burn as the ship spirals out of control and finally explodes. The ships aren't the only impressive element of Armada's graphics - almost everything in the game looks great. But aside from a few discrepancies in scale, all the ships in Armada look dead-on accurate. That is, while the impressive Federation Sovereign-class is much bigger than anything else the Federation has, it appears to be the same size as the imposing Borg cube, which is supposed to be many times larger, according to Star Trek canon. Although the spaceships in Armada are depicted to relative scale, the four races' vessels do correlate to one another. The various spacecraft look and move more or less exactly as they do in the Next Generation movies and television episodes - the smooth curvature of the Federation and Romulan ships comes across just as well as the more jagged Klingon ship designs and the plain geometry of the Borg vessels. Although you play the game from a slightly skewed top-down perspective similar to most other real-time strategy games, Armada's 3D graphics engine lends the game a distinctively crisp and colorful appearance, as well as a pronounced cinematic flair thanks to all the impressive special effects throughout the game. It lets you do battle with the fleets of four of Star Trek's most popular races, and while it isn't an especially complex game, it still manages to be highly enjoyable even in spite of some technical problems, thanks to its good graphics and gameplay. It's an impressive real-time strategy game that borrows action and gameplay elements from many of the genre's classics. Most Star Trek games aren't very good, but Star Trek Armada's an exception.
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