Look at the pretty red nebula.. nooooo - BOOM!

With a game so full of life and depth as Armada, you'd expect the graphics to follow suit and follow they do. You can use the Mouse to change views and although it seems fiddly at first, you do quickly get used to it. Zoom in and ships look almost as detailed as the real thing, zoom out and nothing much changes with ships looking just as detailed as there were up close. Extremely well modelled and accurately depicted is the best way to describe them, with sexy particle effects and solar flares thrown in for good measure.

However as we have come to expect these days, all that glistens is so rarely gold. Armada seems to have a very serious set of issues with certain graphics cards, most notably GeForces when combined with almost any AMD K7 chipset. Most Intel and GeForce combos should be fine, however add an AMD into the mix and suddenly a whole slew of bugs arise. From the game crashing back to windows, to graphics glitches and occasionally even going so far as to reboot your system.

Almost all the Intel Nvidia issues were solved with the v1.1Beta update, however the AMD ones remain in plentiful supply. Our advice is to avoid 32Bit like the plague and instead use 16Bit as for some reason that's dramatically more stable and has solved our problems. On a side note the difference between 32Bit and 16Bit is quite noticeable, in 32Bit the textures on ships are sharper and don't looked blurred when zoomed all the way out.

We also found that for even the fastest of chipsets and CPUs, Armada starts to chug along and reducing the ship details and colour depth doesn't seem to help much. Especially since this can occur when there might only be as much as 15ships on the screen at once, this on an Athlon800 (115Mhz FSB/230Dual) with a GeForce DDR 32mb AGPx4! We put it down to bad coding on the developers part, perhaps using OpenGL would have saved a lot of trouble.

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