Star Wolves 3: Civil War

I bought Star Wolves and then I thought clearly the universe is so expansive, so let me keep playing. After seeing the reviews for Star Wolves 2, I decided to jump directly to Star Wolves 3 because it supposedly continues where original Star Wolves left off. This game really adds to the RPG element of wandering around and choosing to engage missions whenever you please. However, a good RPG really needs a solid story behind it. Although I can clearly see the makers of this game has a grand vision of the Star Wolves universe, but there's nothing that pushes the story forward. The attempt to give character background might as well be none. There's no character development to build them up. Without a story, you're just moving from point A to point B, occasionally point C to grind. Having multiple paths really increases the replayability of the game. But the same lack of story and background really takes it away. Overall, I would still recommend it to people, but for me, I kind of lost interest in the game mid way through.

Well, even now that I finished several times the game it is hard to give a proper opinion. If I want to be synthetic : PROS + Visually nice and readable. + Runs on modest machines. + Somehow very addictive : you want to try different ways of solving the plot, different teams, different ships... + Story sometimes intersting, you want to know what's next. + Cool design (even if many ships are... weird... to the least) and simple interface. + Some dialogs are funny. CONS - Controls are not that good, depending on the interface you are on the effects will be different. You'll find yourself often doing something you DO NOT want todo. - Team AI are insufficient and hard to cope with in complex or demanding situation. Mates often just do stupid things. Some options are lacking (distance of defence, aggressivity, WAYPOINTS, the list is simply too long), which means you'll spend hours in modifying manually who is doing what, even for very simple combat plan, or even moving because your mothership is stuck by threee asteroids and the algorythm that manage paths is junk (you can lose lots of time with that, even in 8x mode). This is in my opinion the second biggest flaw of the game. - Many dialogs are too much verbose. - Sometime it is game over with no choice, you don't know why. Not often but boring. Doesn't help to build funny complex plans. - No trading for real, if you want to play something like Epic, this is not a good choice. - Globally the story is not that much interesting and very directing and closed. It is hard to just wander in space with your full team (hard to get before the end), increasing their experience, getting money and equipment, fullfilling side quests : there is VERY few of such :( Really the biggest problem on this game. - QWERTY (or Russian !) keyboard only. Not areal big problem since there is few controls, but it do not help ;) I'm sad to put only 3/5, as I'm pretty sure the devs do really have what it takes to make a quite perfect game !

This game is the direct sequel of the original Star Wolves, the 2nd game saw very limited distribution and is generally acknowledged as the weaker of the series. You own a mothership "base", which you fly around the star systems in the game. Combat is the RTS part where you launch fighters from your base. They are not directly controllable - this is where (some of) the RPG elements come in: you select targets and trigger skills, but it is up to each pilot how well they fly their fighters. The other RPG part is the story, which sees you go through a branching plotline culminating in several endings. This is no save-before-final-battle-then-pick-a-choice crap, the choices you make during the course of the game change which storyline you end up on. Completing one ending is less than half of what's available, so replay value is good, and for a $5 game, fantastic. The series is ambitious, but unfortunately the writing isn't up to par. Turn off the skeptical part of your brain and enjoy a simple Star Wars type fantasy, don't expect indepth intrigue. As one of the few modders of the game, I got a chance to dig through it - outside the engine, everything is LUA scripts. There was actually supposed to be a 4th game and they got as far as some engine upgrades, but ran out of funding - I wish the devs weren't so obsessed spending money on engine upgrades, should've concentrated on improving the story and characters. The series could've been a cult hit, not the niche curio it turned out to be. Despite budget limitations the devs at least attempted something new. At $5 I strongly recommend this game - take a look at some youtube videos to see whether you can tolerate the gameplay. The game isn't too deep, you can see how most of it works from videos. This could easily have been a AAA game, given budget for better writing. If you're comfortable with VNs or CYOA books the branching plotlines here are perfect.

First of all, if you're not familiar with the first Star Wolves at least, forget about this game. The developers expect the player to have a firm grasp of the game mechanics, as the difficulty ramps up tremendously after the first couple of hours. The main issue is that the game is both very linear yet open-world. There is an on-rails main story, which takes you from place to place in a fairly stringent fashion. At the same time, the game expects you to farm XP and loot in between those missions, as otherwise you'll soon be met with overwhelming odds during the main storyline. Essentially, you're supposed to be rocking end-game weapons and perks about two thirds into the game, and if you don't, you're pretty much at a dead end. Accordingly, you'll be wasting a lot of time looking for hidden caches (which give you end-game gear for free) and shooting pirates, just to become strong enough to survive the main missions. Without that padding, SW 3 would be a very short game. Pacing is all over the place: While you start with tier 1 fighters, you need to ditch those ASAP lest you get pulverized by one of the many poorly balanced encounters. Unlike in the first game, difficulty is all over the place, and some of the RPG dialogue choices will pit you against entirely insurmountable enemies. Furthermore, if you don't do EXACTLY as you're told, you'll often be greeted by a game over screen or your ship randomly exploding. There may be different story branches, but within those, everything is on rails. Compared to the first Star Wolves, the combat engine has gotten worse. Ships and weapons have been rebalanced, resulting in your ships randomly going from full shields and armor to destruction in a matter of five seconds. Perk trees are the same for almost all pilots, abilities are almost exclusively of the damage-dealing variety, and the lack of voice acting makes it difficult to build a relationship with the pilots. Lastly, the story ending is a total letdown. Skip this.