Gaming Bullets

• A review of the recently-released 'Star Trek: Armada II' has been posted at The Naked Edge. "Very little effort has been put into making the vessels reflect their on-TV counterparts," the review said. "This can only be a mistake, as we all know full-well how exacting a true Trekkie can be ('that's impossible!! They can't beam out through shields...'etc.). Instead, they seems to have just plonked a few of the Federation ships into a tech tree, and given each one increasingly powerful phasers." In the complete analysis, the game was awarded a score of 68%.

• GameSpy gave 'Armada II' a considerably more positive review, calling it "quite possibly the best Star Trek game to come out for a while." Tim McConnaughy was especially impressed with the multiplayer:

  Activision listened to its fans and has made both the Skirmish and Multiplayer modes robust beyond measure. Team games, free-for-alls and cooperative-games-against-AI are all available game modes. The game is highly tweakable, and can generate random maps. Multiplayer is available over LAN, Internet, and the multiplayer gaming is also enabled over GameSpy Arcade.

  The full review, in which the game scored 80%, can be found here.

• A few first impressions on 'Armada II' have been posted by Ryan Thompson at Gaming Age. He was disappointed in the game, writing that it lacked any stand-out new features. "Very little attention was placed on refining the new things added to the game," Thompson said. "A good number of new ships were added, but their addition seems extremely superficial as they don't seem to affect how Armada is played at all. The ability to harvest a fourth resource (metal) has also been added. This introduces the idea of harvesting and colonizing planets, but again, the entire process feels pretty half-finished." To read more, head over to Gaming Age.

• Activision has released its 'Armada II' demo, which is available for download here. The demo is 86.9 MB and contains the first mission in the Federation campaign. A mirror version has been uploaded here at TrekNews.de. Thanks to Aaron Nadler for this!

• The first review of the German version of 'Armada II' has been posted at TrekNews.de, in which the game was awarded a score of 90%.

• The official 'Bridge Commander' web site has been updated with six new screenshots from the game.

  Thanks to Blue's News for most of these!

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