Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2

[quote name="Mischief Maker"]In a world where I'd never played Battlestar Galactica Deadlock, I would probably be over the moon about this game. Instead it's giving me flashbacks to Star Trek: Starfleet Command, and not in a good way. In short, it's a turn-based boardgame converted into a realtime strategy game, and manually controlling all the board game active skills for each and every ship in real time is a frustrating mess. You've gotta chase around each individual ship and make sure they're activating their stance skills, special weapon skills, boarding actions, etc. Many skills like torpedoes need to be manually fired, by which you need to manually turn the ship to the correct facing and hit the "fire" button at the exact perfect moment. Did the enemy board you? Oh dear, activate the call to arms skill. Meanwhile what happened to that tech priest ship that wandered offscreen? And I mean it when I say you need to "chase" your fleet around because the default attack AI circle strafes their selected enemy and will happily wander offscreen and into a minefield. It's doable, it's winnable, but the interface makes this otherwise average complexity tactical game way more frustrating to control than it needs to be. The ship models are amazing, and the weapon effects are great, but to play the game properly you've got to play at such extreme distance that all your ships just look like little triangles. Boy would this game have benefited from BSGD's dynamic camera battle replay option. But even if you do zoom in and play by the seat of your pants, you'll quickly discover that this isn't a simulator and the battle effects are all abstractions of dice rolls, like seeing a boarding action start to take effect onboard a ship before the assault craft even touch down. Again, I don't hate this game, but BSGD does everything this game does better, with a plot that doesn't feel like a Saturday morning cartoon. And at over 40GB of hard drive space, BG Armada 2 isn't worth keeping around just to admire the ship models. Slightly negative! [/quote]