Star Wolves

It runs smooth, it looks pretty darn good for an older game, and it's easy to control! The docked star is just for the voice acting. What is there is very poor and it's inconsistent. I'd prefer to have more acknowledgment from my fighters if they've engaged an enemy or are taking damage. Instead, apart from the mothership (which thankfully make monotone updates) every other character that speaks basically has one grunt sound when you select them and that's it. The weird space guitars are strangely soothing. All told this game is an almost zen experience when you set in lengthy courses through pretty galaxies and occasionally stop at nav points to recover something or fight pirates. You can speed up the game and pause it thankfully! This is more of a command game than an action game, and I like that. You spend as much time outfitting your ship, spending experience, gathering clues from stopovers at stations as you do strafing enemies. It's nice and intuitive and has a very good (if long and fairly routine) tutorial thankfully. User friendly is a good description. There's not much story (you're basically just going on privateer missions) and some things are a bit esoteric (I purchased something and it just vanished from my inventory once) but if you like more moody and chill space sims where you send your fighters out to get business done than snap up the rewards with your tractor beam, this is spot on.

Well this game has potential, and if it was full working/fixed it could have a 4 stars rating, but its ruined by some major bugs and overall it really lacks of decent programming. Personally playing this i feel it like it was an alpha build, the game seems interesting but not tested/fixed properly. The good aspect of the game is an interesting gameplay similar to homeworld with a mix of rpg, not very deep but enough for this kind of game. The menu, the abilities and controls are quite good and overall the game is promising, but sadly its a bit unplayable. The missions are all played in small sandboxes, its all heavily scripted so if you play twice the same mission you will experience exactly the same events, if you see at point XYZ an enemy ship coming up after 40 seconds, a next time you will have the same, anyway beside the scripted linearity a bit annoying you can find usually hidden objectives and a lot more to do then what is requested to accomplish a mission. There are a good number of weapons/ships/upgrades to keep ppl interested in going on. Now the bad things, the 3d engine is very poor and the phisics are really unrealistic, you can find better 3d engines in games 20 years old, even on commodore amiga. Anyway, the main issues are 2: frequent game crashes (like 1 every 10 minutes as average) , and an incredible pathfinding bug that sometimes make your ships collide with objects in space and get blocked into them, like a static starbase or even you can experience a ship exploding while moving from point A to point B (this is not intentional as gameplay, its just a bug), so you are forced to babysit a lot your ships to be sure they will not suicide here and there. Also this trouble may prevent some of your ships to get involved in a fight as may happen a couple of ships cant get past an object and get in range of enemies, so sometimes you need to loose 1 minute just to try to move your ship out of an asteroid. After some time you get used and you can prevent your ships to get stuck into something, but i have to tell its quite annoying. Well, at the end even if its a "nice-price" game, and with many interesting aspects, this game is a bit too much bugged to be really a good game.

Having just played this game through twice in succession, I would strongly recommend it as a excellent value for fans of space opera, crpg, and/or tactical genres at the current price. This said, I would encourage any new player to move seriously through the tutorial and read the manual as Star Wolves expects the player to have a firm grasp of the controls, wing roles, & general tactical approaches from the first mission. Gamers who prefer a more casual or forgiving mission structure may find this game frustrating, but I think it will prove an excellent addition to the library of anyone with even a passing interest in the genre.

Summary: missions are varied and fun to play exactly ONCE. The music is top-notch, something to play in your car. The game design kneecaps a lot of good parts in the game. E.g. not giving you enough credits to buy stuff and not putting the needed items on sale in the first place. The game runs very smoothly, unlike the two sequels. Possibly the best entry point into the series. The late missions are less fun -- more demanding and less new and intresting, the final boss being outright stupid and uninteresting. If you like restricted map-based games, this is the best of the series. If you want to (arduously and slowy) travel intrasystem, pick SW3 instead. SW2 is a worst-of-two-worlds kind of deal. Honestly, the most fitting reason to buy and play this game is to be able to listen to its soundtrack. SW3 has a couple of particularly cool tracks and SW2 has ton of weird funky ones, though their average quality level is low. The soundtrack will outlast the ultimately repetitive gameplay. Basically, what you do in the game is destroy stuff to get credits and sellable junk to get bigger guns to destroy even more and faster. It has paper-thin variety in the big picture. You do get chances to argue with characters, though 90% of the time it will backfire horribly and cause you trouble, so it is not worth it. I have played both the endings. With MSF aka Empire, you steal a Star Crusher-- Hammer and destroy a star to wipe out AI capital ship fleet along with an entire system by blowing up its sun. WIth corporates, you steal the hammer, the corporations first pay you, then 5 sec later try to assassinate you and only then the AI nemesis comes for your humankind. The game tries to be about simplified fleet command with plot, though it fails horribly with the plot. Despite being probably the best entry of the series, it still is not something you just cannot wait to play. It is one of those games you gift someone to mindf**k them. An accident game. Hope it is a happy one.

An excellent sci-fi game with RPG elements. Good story, incredible soundtrack and graphical elements.