Armada

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Armada is an Arcade-style game first released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010, which was later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. This is a game that has you managing air traffic control for an aircraft carrier, much in the same manner as the game Flight Control, but with a military theme.

The graphics in this game seem to start with a “blink and you’ll miss it” 3D flyby of your aircraft carrier before the rest of the game takes place from a single viewpoint, apparently using 2D visuals… I think. Honestly, the aircraft are so tiny on-screen it’s hard to tell. In any case, these visuals aren’t particularly appealing, but they get the job done. This is backed by militaristic-sounding music that fits the game’s theme, but is pretty forgettable.

The gameplay takes the standard approach to games of this ilk, where players draw lines from planes to their landing zones, managing where everything is to avoid crashes. The military theme even allows them to play with this a bit, in some game modes having players draw lines from a missile turret to incoming enemies to fend them off, which is a nice touch.

Unfortunately, this game is very picky about what counts as a proper landing, meaning you’ll likely draw a line to a landing zone only for it not to connect, needing to redo it… and that’s if you’re lucky and notice it didn’t connect – if not, you may just see it fly by the place it’s meant to stop, right into another aircraft. Even without this issue, the difficulty of this game seems to spike pretty early, with countless aircraft buzzing around the tiny screen with only a few places to land them.

I normally enjoy this style of aircraft management game, but Armada’s problems just made it too frustrating for me. As much as I enjoy this game doing something a bit different than others in this style by making use of the military theming, this doesn’t make up for the problems with the gameplay and difficulty. I suggest you skip this one.

tl;dr – Armada is an Arcade-style game where players direct various aircraft to their landing spots on an aircraft carrier. Armada’s military theme allows for a unique approach to this style of game, but unfortunately this game’s frustrating gameplay problems and difficulty curve make it hard to enjoy this one.

Grade: C-

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