Star Wolves

http://www.excalibur-publishing.com/starw.htm

http://www.starwolves.ru/en/about.php (description of ships and weapons)

Well, there is considerable quality in the actual FMV that starts the game off, facial renderings and lots of detail on the skin of the main hero show that some effort has been put into this. It's a crying shame that the vocal talent seems to be out of sink with the graphical talent on offer. The narration is choppy and unconvincing, banal would describe it better. Like someone reading something nonchalantly off crib cards. Some of the cast are caricatures of square jawed heroes and hairy, butch, but dull Russians (the game was developed by a Russian company!). You could summarise the introduction to the game (and the actual game itself) as enthusiastic effort, but lacks polish.

The game comes across as an RTS/RPG hybrid. More Homeworld in origin, but based around small scale combat, and personal development of a few key characters. Which is a nice blend really, it takes the middle ground between games like X2 (http://www.enlight.com/x2/) and freelancer (http://www.microsoft.com/games/freelancer/) and large scale conflict like Nexus (http://www.nexusthegame.com/) and Hegaemonia (http://www.hegemonia.info/). It's all about progression within this small scale team of pilots. The tutorials are quite slow but do deliver the information needed if somewhat verbose. From the outset though, you'll find the interface 'quirky' to use. It's not really bad, it just seems to be sluggish to respond and not very intuitive. Certain functions like altering the camera angles and zooming in an out are fine and adopt standard UI convention from many other games however, moving and attacking are a little fiddly and sometimes the game doesn't seem to register the command until you repeat it once or twice. I'm sure with more hours at the helm of this game, the interface will smooth out once you get used to its foibles - its just a bit jarring at first.

Graphical wise, the game looks good. The expected star patterns and nova and star flares are all there, the craft look convincing if a little over painted and colourful. They move and respond as they should in turning arcs and even bounce off each other convincingly, their vapour trails leaving corkscrews in the darkness of space. The initial combat is all about combining your mother ship and her firepower with your fighter wing (your hero and a wing man) and taking out roving pirates. Small cannon weapons pepper the darkness with blue tracer fire and missiles are suitably flourescent and visual when they impact. Turrets on the mother ship align themselves against the enemy, whilst your fighter wing will dogfight waves of pirates making runs as and when. It hasn't got the 'oooh' and 'ahhh' factor from Nexus, with a web work of colourful lasers and constant pounding rockets. It's more of a personal affair concentrating fire on small groups and working at the closer level, battle certainly is less of a light show and more of a matter of combining the specialities of your hero and his wing man onto the enemy. I started out with the hero specialising in basic gunnery and missile capability, whereas the wing man has a large discharge sniper gun and I set him off down the route of ranged bursts and electronic countermeasures. The choice to develop the pilots starts right from the off, after the first patrol sortie. You are awarded experience points of sorts to spend in your chosen skill tree. There are four main skill trees to follow, based on gunnery, long range sniping, electronics and salvage.

I initially tried to place my mother ship in a 'safe' area in space and sent my two fighter crew out to battle the pirates jumping in through a captured portal. However, my fighter wing had major problems making any progress against what seemed to be a much more agile pirate ship. There was a pirate trainer transport stationary in an asteroid belt, presumably mopping up ore, so I could concentrate my fire on that and easily destroy it, but even with my long range wing man, we couldn't quite pick off this pirate fighter who was circling us and chewing away at our shields. I guess the ships and weapons available to us were just not up to the job. So it was time to call in the mother ship to add her firepower to the mix. As soon as she lumbered into weapons range the pirate had trouble with her four mounted turrets blazing and my fighter wing. Job's done. Had to dock the fighters with the mother ship to restock with missiles then I went the rest of the mission in the mother ship, un docking the fighters as necessary.

Missions start as soon as you enter an area, and the initial mission was a patrolling/killing pirates simple sortie that resulted in some money and another area to jump to. On the Mother ship after the mission you can trade equipment and spacecraft and buy more arms and special system equipment (if you have the money). No doubt the key to the game is kitting your fighters and mother ship out with appropriate weaponry and using the most appropriately trained pilots to fulfil the missions objectives. I bought a speedier fighter craft, and fitted it with a remote repair module, in the vain attempt that it could repair shields of the main fighter during combat. I have yet to try that out. In the next area there seems to be two more missions leading on, and presumably this fork is where I have the choice to take the story either way. So it looks that branching missions is the mechanism by which the game takes a step away from the more conventional linear progression.

During the game, the music that accompanies the action, is quite odd. Sort of Cowboy in space music, with howling rock guitar sometimes and steel guitar other times. It reminded me very much of Enterprise, without the singing. Perhaps a spaghetti western in space, sort of thing.

Overall, from just having had a couple of hours play with the game (including tutorials), I would have said its an interesting attempt at bringing the scale of space conflict down a notch, personalising it, and flavouring it with some RPG touches on the characters you use. The ham fisted vocals and underplayed visuals (compared with Nexus) means its probably going to remain an enthusiasts curiosity than gain any wider appeal. The awkward UI will go against it right from the off, plus the awful cheesy voice talents. However its obviously a labour of love for the developers and it does have that interesting niche appeal that could make it a staple in the space fanatics diet. I'm certainly looking forward to see how the RPG elements play out in completing the actual mission objectives, and also see whether the more money and power and ships you acquire it scales up without losing the personal touch.