Fantasy Flight’s massive space war game, Star Wars Armada, is designed to emulate the epic battles of the Star Wars movies. After the wow factor of the initial starter set, fans grew concerned that the game might run out of enormous things for Star Destroyers to blow up. Would a game focused on a specific sort of conflict, tied to a specific franchise, work?
The answer appears to be a resounding yes. The two most recent expansions (wave 3 and 4) focused solely on providing interesting spaceships and fresh new tactics. Wave 3 brought what may sound like an unexciting element to the game, Transport ships.
The Imperial’s get Gozanti-class cruiser, a relatively slow but powerful transport with that can really shift it when under fire and is well armoured. It’s okay as an anti-fighter ship as well. The various extra add-ons the ship comes with gives you lots of options to slow down Rebel fighters down. From slicer tools (which let you hack any ship commands) to the notorious Agent Kallas (one of the baddies from Star Wars Rebels). It works reasonably well as a bomber command centre, letting you get the most out of those breakable TIE Bombers in your fleet. The Rebel equivalent, the GR-75, does pretty much the same sort of thing but with less style.
Wave 4 comes with a much needed big ship for the Rebels. Firstly, the MC80 Liberty type Star Cruiser is a gorgeous looking model. It’s also very Rebel looking (lots of curves and colours). The piece is well painted and looks like a pointy shard of doom. It’s also as big as a Star Destroyer, which is always fun. The add-ons included allowing you to turn it into a cannon-laden defence machine, or a desperate last measure style weapon of carnage. In play, it’s still going to get torn up by the superior firepower of the Imperials, but it has the punch to tear apart the dark side fleet before that happens.
The Imperials get the equally impressive Interdictor. That’s the Star Destroyer with the weird bumps on it that you have seen. The ship comes equipped with Grav Well generators and crazy powerful tractor beams, which slows down the nippy Rebels to a crawl. It’s a bruiser of a cruiser that allows you to control the field of play like a pro.
Overall, the new waves of models for Star Wars Armada show that the game is going to continue to grow and innovate. As a strategy game, there’s plenty room for new tactics and ideas, and Armada looks set to be around for a long time to come.
STAR WARS ARMADA: WAVE 3 AND 4 / DESIGNER: JAMES KNIFFEN, CHRISTIAN T. PETERSEN / PUBLISHER: FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
