Star Wolves 3: Civil War

This title is a tad better than the second part of the series but not my much. At least graphics are indeed improved even if the versatility of object is still pitiful. The abysmally bad controls are still firmly there so, there you are. You are in the world of pain and miss clicks. You must have some leaning towards sado maso to get through it. Off to the game. Again you can freely hop between systems (at least to these that are not made to mass murder you as soon as you jump in). You also have quick travel events to cut your pain of manual travel. Yes, I think you already sense it. The game is heavily scripted. Attacking bases will summon out nothing hordes of enemies. Special events will force you to loose fighters, diverting from the plot path will often explode your ship and so on. Just save often. The story is unfortunately again very much uninspired, and I got stuck several times due to the way how tasks are communicated to you. This time around we start as some free trader and the whole game pretend to not be a mercenary (even if you actuality do the mercenary job). You start with some crapy base ship and over time we get better and better and better base ships. Great at least not all the time the same. Some words to the skills and base ship. Ehhhh... . Your pilots have again diverse skill trees , but.. . now you actually cannot just drop your pilots to the best ship you have. The pilot must level a certain skill to do so and the price for it is very high... . Effectively most of the game you grind to get pilots to fly better ships... . Your goal should be to to get the best ships with the best equipment (lasers & anti missile). Skills matter somewhat less. Anyway, pilots are scarce though out the half of the game so grinding is unfortunately needed to pull latecomers to some decent levels. Further on, you cannot change weapons and components of your base ship in space and now you need to dock at some station, incredibly annoying.

Summary: the only non-menial content in the game is the linear story line missions. There is no freedom, no impression of choice and the systems have nothing worth exploring besides breaking special asteroids for end-game weaponry. I really wanted to like this game. There simply is nothing to do in the game. 90% of the game is either doing travel-intensive story missions and grinding pirates to up the pilot levels to be able to fly fighters any better than rubbish. Even the end game fighters do not really hold up in the end game and you will be save-scumming a lot as random RNG tends to kill any of your ships at random. E.g. suddenly your ace pilot gets taken from 100 to 0 in less than a second. Saves saves saves. You need to save before every system portal jump as there is a 1% chance the game will hang during the area change loading screen. You'll be managering both the flimsy ships and the game itself. As a side note, the likes to F you in the A with choices. Thus it is mandatory to maintain multiple saves to sidestep beginner choice traps. Bottomline, there is nothing to do in the game. The branching storylines do not matter when nothing fun to do between the missions. Even the guns are simple tools of the usual "max DPS optimization" game. Most of the guns are useless considering short range fighting is a quick way to "arkancide" your fighters and make you want to reload. As soon as you realize the cheapness of lasers weapons, you will start auto-selling everything else. There are so many other games that do the Wing Commander or Elite formula better, even the other Star Wolves games. SW3 is hands down the worst of the series and also very rushed. To be fair, the music is over-average, electronic, relaxed stuff. Seriously, get Star Wolves 2 instead. This one has barely skeleton content. The vanilla game is frankly bellow average of the genre. Taking out the goods trading aspect really hurts in this game. The game is simply EMPTY. 1/10 fun factor.

regardless of the system requirements, it does not run on windows 10