Star Armada

Touchscreen devices should be the perfect home for real-time strategy games. They bypass the controller problem by letting you manipulate your units directly, using your fingers to drag, tap, and assess the battlefield.

Furthermore, space should be the perfect setting for an RTS. It's vast and probably full of terrifyingly tentacled alien beasties, all of them ready to devour your innards and colonise your world.

So it's strange then that Star Armada never quite clicks. It has all of the ingredients, but it's underdone, lacking polish and leaving you with a grumble in your figurative stomach.

The game puts you in charge of the titular armada and pushes you out into the endless vacuum of space with one goal: domination.

Every time you start a new conquest, six planets are randomly placed into the square patch of space you're trying to take over. You have to find them, build on them, and create a more powerful space empire before expanding into the galaxy, killing anyone who dares to stand in your way.

It's a simple RTS premise, and one that any fan of the genre will be perfectly comfortable with. The problem is, the game goes to great lengths to make sure that becoming the ruler of the galaxy is a time-consuming, frustrating experience.

The first problem comes when you try to find a planet to base yourself at. There's no zoomed-out view of the entire field of play, or any markers to suggest where anything is, so if you want to succeed you're going to have to send your ships out blind to try and locate a new home.

If you happen to blunder into a corner of space that's occupied by a vastly superior fleet, tough. You're just going to have to deal with getting wiped off the face of the universe quicker than you can say “that seems a bit unfair”.

When battles do occur, they're strictly hands-off affairs. You can set routines for your ships to follow, but they're hardly grand tactical plans. Numerical superiority almost always wins the day.

The vastness of the playing area often makes the game feel empty and dead, and uninteresting graphics do nothing to alter that. You'll spend a lot of your time looking at boring black spaces, waiting for your ships to arrive before moving them on to other equally boring spaces.

Star Armada does get a lot of things right. Its UI is easy to understand, and presents you with everything you need in an uncluttered and well-thought-out manner, and its control scheme is about as perfect as RTS controls can get.

It's the game underneath all the good ideas and design that's the problem. There's not enough fun, and not enough connection to the on-screen empire-building and conflict.

You feel less like a space general and more like a well-informed engineer, watching the progress of your people from afar, without enough power to intervene and therefore without much interest.