Star Ocean Project: Executioner Assault

Description
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time was the latest venture (of 3 games) into the universe of a futuristic Milky Way universe where Humans had ventured forth into space, sprawling across many systems and constructing many large bases throughout their network named as the Pangalactic Federation. Of course, where there are Humans in a sci-fi universe, there are aliens. The aliens, the Vendeeni who are included in this mod, are but one of the other races whilst the Aldians are also at war with the Pangalactic Federation, but are not in this mod. Set after TtEoT where a shocking discovery is made that the universe as known turned out to be a virtual reality and the protagonists of the story defeated the creator, but restored their galaxy from ultimate destroyers sent by the creator of this universe, shows the re-cooperation of two races (coming in a future patch, more on this later) that play a prominent part in the story; the Humans of the Pangalactic Federation with their smaller ships and less developed technology with a counter of the Vendeeni who boast extremely powerful ships (early on, I should add) with vast technology. It's a classic encounter of good vs. bad.

Of course, that's just the story which you can read when opening up the mod! There's still the entire game to play! So, let's do this in an objective way:

[b]The Good[/b]
[list]
[*]Ship designs - 2 new races made up of entirely new designs that have never before been seen in any Armada game (bar the couple of releases). They are extremely well done and thought out and whilst there are but a few images of some in the games (with only a couple even shown on the Vendeeni front), the made up ships fit in perfectly with the race. None seem to stand-out in a "oh, I'm a filler ship” and every ship has a role, although it did take me a bit of time to work out the artillery ships.

[*]Stations - The stations fit in again. Both races have themes, with the Vendeeni running on weapons that blister the fabric of space with a bone-crunching race special with the Nebula Creator/Destructor that can obliterate fleets in seconds. The Pangalactic use bulky stations running on themes to either enhance or protect their ships with additional fire-power, which against the Borg and Vendeeni are greatly needed.

[*]Re-vamp - Whilst the Klingons and Romulans have been chucked out, replaced with the additional races, the Federation and Borg have been re-done giving them a few new ships (not too many for the Feds, but still enough for plenty of variation) and abilities. One I enjoyed was the Galaxy class deflector pulse, basically an additional weapon just taking a long time to recharge whilst the Excalibur's quantum-artillery blow-crap-up weapon was the créme-de-la-créme to the Federation's repertoire of weapons. The new Starbase for the Federation is also very fitting. The Borg, most notably, sport better textures, much more in-kind to what we've come to accept as the spooky-First Contact/Voyager textures.

[*]Game-play and Tech - Whilst nothing to general game-play has changed with these two races (nothing fundamental being changed to the game it self) the tech is incredibly easy to get to grips with. On first run of the two new races, I was able to very quickly work out what was needed to get to the top and my Vendeeni carrier and dreadnaught (lovely ships) whereas I knew with the Pangalactic Federation that I needed to get my Gravitic-Warp gate up and running to by-pass some VERY powerful 4d beings (from the 'real universe') = these being the 'angel and demon' like creatures depicted in some of the earlier shots. Be careful! They are NOT to be taken lightly. I recommend 3 full fleets of high-end ships from any race concentrated on one to try and take it out and even then, you'll need to replenish.

[*]Balance - As mentioned above, the Pangalactic Federation and Vendeeni are fundamentally opposites and this makes for good game-play (you'll need a respective 2 of each class of the Pangalactic ships to counter one of the Vendeeni) and against each other, they make for some great battles. Similarly, the Federation are relatively balanced to the Borg, but unfortunately it seems the two universes aren't quite balanced to one another. When playing as the Federation against the Pangalactic, I was struggling to take out some of their higher end ships with my higher end ships (for note, the Pangalactic and Vendeeni high-end ships can tear apart low-end Federation and Borg ships). I'm sure this can be fixed though in the future.

[*]A bit-of-colour makes dead ships cool - The textures for ALL the weapons and explosions have either been enhanced or completely replaced. All I need to say is that they're great. The special weapons, re-done of old ones too, look absolutely stunning. One thing to not change about this mod is this!

[*]Vendeeni Carrier - I thought this was worthy of special note. The carrier, equivalent in size to the dreadnaught but not as powerful, looks fantastic. Zoomed in, you can see under-hung on the model is a bay with fighters in with static force-fields keeping them in-place. The animation for the attack (automated) launches two waves of them at the enemy. Unfortunately, the animation just has them ram the enemy. If this could be re-worked for them to launch, fire some sort of weapon and return and come out again, that would be perfect. As it is now, it's still worthy of special note.

[*]Pangalactic Federation Engines - Just look at them. The smaller ships have trails. Honestly, trails. Simply, it's frikkin' awesome![/list]

Of course, there are bad points (granted some have already been noted, but these are in particular).

[b]The Bad[/b]
[list]
[*]Fayt Class Battle-cruiser - As far as I can tell, just when I was re-viewing the shipyard icon of it, it crashed to the desktop. Now, whilst this is bad (especially considering it's the race's special (yup, a ship not a station) which is needed against the Vendeeni) as far as I can tell, this is the ONLY BUG in the entire mod. Considering the work done, that's a heck of a good job and this can be easily fixed I'm sure.

[*]Shipyard Alignments - When sending ships to repair and this was present on all the shipyards, the ships queued up fine but entered the repair part out-of-alignment, in some cases adjacent to the yard or half-way into it, which looks a bit bad, especially with ships being built in-side. On a similar note, the Galaxy class barely fits in the shipyard. For 1.1, just make that yard a little bit bigger. Whilst this problem is of course dismissible, for perfection, this can be changed to make it look even better.

[*]Textures - Honestly speaking, these aren't the best textures around (Vendeeni and Pangalactic) and at some points they're a bit blurred and don't match-up entirely, however after just a short time, you seem to completely forget about this and carry on playing. I recommend, pushing the limits a little bit which I think is possible considering you don't have the light-maps and such that A2 has, is to increase the resolution of the textures so that they just look a bit more detailed. Still, they're fine and you really don't notice them after some time.

[*]Maps - There are indeed custom maps, but I don't feel enough. Perhaps editing the stock ones would create a bit more variety?

[*]Interface & Sounds - Both races use a mix of Romulan, Klingon and Federation voices (or none at all) and whilst their interfaces are generally edited of the Romulans and Klingons, I feel as if they could also be edited a bit more. Again, a quick job on this behalf, as for sounds, again dismissible, but that being said, hearing the mix of voices for the Pangalactic actually seemed to fit quite well, so if this was just made a bit more consistent, I think it would work. As for the Vendeeni, I don't know what to do about that. All this being said, EVERY item in-game has build-buttons and wire-frames, something which a good few mods lack. I did note though that the Vendeeni Nebula weapon station, its build-buttons were not quite fitting, perhaps some quickly made-up ones?
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As you can see, the advantages CLEARLY out-number the disadvantages and that's why I can easily see that this is one of the best custom mods out there. It's thoroughly enjoyable to play and at the same time, rather challenging. If it's not for the randomly placed extra-universe fun things (Stargates, 4D being's etc.) it's the enemy that provide a difficult trial. The Ai is very good against you, even on easy, so I dare find out what Ai hard is like as the Pangalactic Federation versus the enemy Ai of the Vendeeni.

The most important part of this mod is that hands-down, it's fun. If you have Armada 1, you'll want to download this and play. As for waiting for patch 1.1, I do hope that comes quickly. I also ask that at some point along the way, an A2 conversion is made, allowing more races (clearly a lot of creative talent here) and just a bit more oomph, not that this is lacking because it is there in abundance. It has a lot of creative thought and originality into it and is definitely playable for a long time to go. 10 out of 10 is reserved for 1.1 coming out, so I'm going to have to give this 9.99 recurring. Fantastic job. If you have Armada 1, download NOW!

[i]A fix for the mod can be found [url="http://armada2.filefront.com/file/;77953"]here[/url].