It's so trite and cliché to remark how the Star Trek license has become almost synonymous with an awful computer game that you won't see that comment here. That isn't because Star Trek: Armada has unexpectedly broken the mold and delivered unsurpassed gameplay and superior design. It hasn't. Instead, Armada does something more interesting: it gives fans of Star Trek such an attractive, immersive way to get involved in their beloved Trek universe that the game's play elements are almost secondary. Everything about Armada shows that the development team knew exactly what makes Star Trek appealing. While the underlying game is fairly derivative and mediocre, the way in which it is implemented is guaranteed to make any fan of the series forget about anything other than Alpha Quadrant and the Dominion Wars within the first five minutes.

Armada is a real-time strategy game that makes no apologies. Any hint of original or inventive gameplay is completely illusory. All of the elements of a traditional RTS are present, including resource-gathering (in the form of dilithium). There are crew and officer resources as well, but these are passively gathered by proximity to planets and number of starbases. Various structures are available, and the expanding tech tree allows for increasingly advanced weapons and ships. Once these are built, of course, they are meant to be thrown into combat.

Armada unfolds on a flat, 2D expanse of space. There is no attempt to utilize the 3D possibilities of space combat as in Homeworld. Armada does contain some "terrain," though, in the form of asteroid belts and various nebulae, the latter of which combine nicely to provide different game effects while enhancing the Trek atmosphere. Purple "Mutara" nebulae, for example, act just as they did in Wrath of Khan by slowing ships down and rendering their sensors and shields inoperative. Because of the limited nature of the AI and the single-player missions, however, any creative tactical use of nebulae is left to multiplayer combat.