Star Wolves 2

Summary: I completed the pirate route in 10,7 h, of which 3-4 h were dealing with a save-corrupting glitch, triggered by collisions with a trade station during AI docking. It adds a new alien species (Precursors+1) and an insane amount of glitches and bugs. The last 50% of the game was dealing with glitches, including cutscenes not automatically ending and mission progress not kicking in until I touch a portal exit. Trying to keep the game working and not glitching out, is a big chunk of the end-game challenge. SW2 < SW1 < SW3 Also, the new jobs are ultimately mandatory as the missions do not give you much credits. E.g. maybe a couple 100k's when even the half-equipped end-game requires millions. The job system is obvious MANDATORY padding. You need to spend hours doing those 500k FedEx missions until you can be sure the credits will not run out. You can spend 4 mil equipping your Mothership alone if you are an autist and hate yourself enough. The story mission content is kill quests. It gets old fast. The overall feel is that you have seen this content better in SW1 and later in SW3 that scrapped pretty much everything SW2 added into it. The game keeps crapping out in various ways that makes you want to have five extra layers of saves so that you can roll back if it breaks completely. It sometimes does -- you'll have an empty quest page, most likely because you went into a portal while the critical mission dialogue was waiting to kick in. To be fair, I liked the design of Matarice (?) ship -- FIVE heavy guns. That is some fire power. The worst part of the game is the slap-in-the-face independent i.e. pirate path ending. El, now named "Al" (Bundy?), appears and detonates a super bomb (that you were hauling), exterminating all human life in the galaxy. No end boss fight, nothing. You just lose, practically bad end. All that equipping of Gen 4 fighters, all wasted effort. These El/Al/SAM endings all suck. Total anti-cliffhangers. Don't buy this for story. DON'T!

Pros: - new story - stil good overall concept - jobs system, that allows to level up and get additional cash Cons: - Lots of bugs as if the game was never tested. Corrupted main quests events can completely block the game or cost you hours of playing. Jobs are broken, trading has issues and old bugs from 1st game are still present. - AI of ships is inept. Many ships (including yours) are destroyed by being blocked by neutral objects, such as spacestations or colliding with each other, regardless of your pilots' skills or your orders. - Lack of new content. Besides the mediocre story, few new weapons, ships and enemies that is basically the 1st game. Overall opinion: In this state playing is frustrating, boring and repetitive. This is basically 1st game but with a lot of unfixed bugs. Without patches it is not worth playing (1/5). With fixes it could have be 3/5.

The game concept is basically a copy paste from the first game. This includes very clunky controls, abhorrent navigation path-finding and revolting way how ships take turns ( I mean really, it cannot be done worse than this). This all is placed in a terrible, uninspired story line. Developers did close to bare bones minimum effort to add new features. Well this is unfair, brace yourself. The "real new" feature is that the player get a star map and possibility to freely travel from system to system. Whow, I know. Revolution;). However, the reality is that all systems are similar to each other, empty with some junk floating around and featureless to great extent. After some 10h one just begs to finish the game before falling asleep... . On top of that there is the voice acting for characters that is so utterly bad that it became at some point funny.

This is an example of why old games aren't necessarily good. The graphics are distracting in their simplicity but, worse, are the unintuitive controls that the tutorial fails to explain. Never mind the archaic 4:3 screen. Far better to play an engaging and visually rich space title like Rebel Galaxy and avoid shovelware like Star Wolves even on deep discount.