Armada 2526 goes gold

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Iceberg Interactive has announced that its 4x space strategy game Armada 2526 has gone gold, and will be out in the shops on June 25th.

And no, 4x doesn’t mean that you’re obliged to drink dubious quality Australian lager while playing. It actually refers to the four “x’s” of explore, expand, exploit and exterminate (sounds like a Dalek’s ideal summer vacation).

Essentially, it’s a rollicking great space opera in which you make your race’s mark across the universe via conquest, diplomacy and trade, establishing new colonies and researching new technology.

Featuring twelve playable races, Armada 2526 has a more casual gaming slant than most efforts of this ilk. It’s designed with an emphasis on help features to get the novice going quickly, and the games aren’t designed to last forever, eating up entire weeks of your life.

Played in two sections, this strategy offering will be turn based when it comes to managing your empire, and real-time in the 3D space battles.

Combat and strategy will be far more important in Armada 2526 than fiddly bits of economic micro-management, which sounds like a good thing to us.

A real challenge is promised from the AI, too, with opposition CPU races that know how to make full and proper use of the diplomacy system to ask favours, make demands, and issue ultimatums.

Armada 2526 will retail at £29.99 on the PC. Anyone dressing up in a green alien costume, walking into their local games store, picking it up off the shelves and asking the assistant to “Take me to your manager” gets a free bonus scenario. Maybe.