Star Wolves - Review
Brian \'Dhruin\' Turner, 2005-04-12

Space: the final frontier…while the famous line has nothing to do with RPGs, it certainly seems appropriate. Hidden among the hordes of fantasy RPG titles are a handful of sci-fi, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic and other settings but there are very few games that attempt to bring roleplaying to a true space-faring setting. Enter Russian developer Xbow with Star Wolves, a ship-bound blend of strategy and roleplay set in the 22nd century.

Star Wolves opens with a cinematic that sets the scene: the captain of a large transport, you are attacked by pirates not far from the journey's end. Hopelessly outclassed, the transport is destroyed and you escape with your life in an escape pod. Determined to have the upper hand in the future, the hero hooks up with his friend Ace to buy a refitted cargo ship and found a mercenary combat unit - the "Star Wolves".

Once play starts, Star Wolves is revealed as a strategy game with RPG elements that plays out like an RTS with small-scale skirmishes. At a glance, it's hard not to be reminded of Relic Entertainment's Homeworld with a more intimate focus but that comparison turns out to be shallow. Players control a small mothership and up to six fighter-craft in fully 3-dimensional maps, with combat forming the central plank of gameplay. While this is fairly conventional strategy fare, Star Wolves also features NPC dialogue, branching missions, lots of loot and fairly deep skill trees for your roster of pilots.

Players begin by selecting one of four skill-tree specialisations for the hero from Piloting, Armoury, Missiles or Electronic Warfare and buying some starting skills. The hero joins Ace and these two characters form the first two pilots in the squad out of a potential six. Before heading off on the first mission, you can outfit the mothership and the initial two fighters with some basic equipment such as guns, missiles and ship systems. At the mission selection screen, players can read short news items and messages that add to the Star Wolves' backstory before selecting one of the available missions.

At the start of each mission the mothership instantly arrives through a hyperspace gate at the appropriate system and the fighters housed therein automatically launch. Each system is fairly large, with various space stations and objects that can be interacted with spread throughout, along with suns, planets and asteroid fields that are purely backdrops to add atmosphere. Star Wolves uses an effective point-and-click interface and ships can be selected and given various commands such as Move, Attack, Escort or activating a special skill. In general, the gameplay involves travelling to different locations in the system (usually using an overhead system map that marks the known locations) and speaking to NPCs or undertaking combat with enemy ships to progress the mission objectives - then moving on to the next location to repeat the process. There's a good variety of missions, from simply killing pirates to escorting transporters to corporate espionage, often sprinkled with scripted events to keep things interesting

While this sounds straight forward, Star Wolves mixes this up with changing - and sometimes branching - mission objectives, along with some basic moral choices and a simple factional system. Three powerful and competing corporations, along with the Emperor's forces, pirates, Berserks and more, populate the Star Wolves universe and undertaking missions for one group can ultimately have consequences with another. For example, at one stage I accepted a mission from a pirate group to steal a prototype fighter ship from InoCo - a corporation I had previously avoided. Just as I met the pirates at the specified location, a distress signal came in from a research base under heavy attack by the same pirate group. Through dialogue with the lead pirate, I could ignore the distress call and continue to work with the pirates to earn their cash or help the research station - putting me in conflict with the pirates but opening up the possibility of getting the prototype ship for myself.

While the game follows an overall story arc, both the missions players choose to undertake and the decisions made during play have some impact on which factions will offer missions in the future, as well as when you will encounter new team members and some new technologies. This certainly makes Star Wolves less linear than most strategy games but in practice, there are only a couple of major branching points and the story hits the same major points regardless. Occasionally stations have simple side-quest, making it worth exploring the entire system - fortunately the game speed can be increased to make the travel less tedious.

It's a pity the story and dialogue are undermined by a dreadful translation and diabolical voice acting. It's hard to know whether the original Russian dialogue reached any great heights but the English translation is completely unnatural. Perhaps the script is word for word but it lacks the flow and nuance of a native speaker - I'll never forget lines like "Are you really wolves? HAR HAR HAR". Still, the storyline remains adequate to maintain interest while other elements shine.

At the end of each mission, exiting the required portal will send players to an intermission where players can apply the experience points earned to buy new skills, sell the excess equipment gathered so far and buy better gear to outfit the squad before choosing the next mission. There's a huge array of guns, missiles, shields, anti-missile defence systems, engine tunings, scanners and more to acquire. Each fighter type has a different number of weapon mounts and system slots (for items like the shields and scanners) and choosing the right mix of fighters and load-out is a critical part of the game. Likewise, the mothership can be upgraded with new equipment.

While these roleplaying elements add much welcome depth to the game, the realtime-with-pause combat is the heart of Star Wolves. The combat itself is quite simple: select a ship and right-click an enemy to attack. The ships will automatically attack, generally going on long strafing runs and then turning slowly to repeat. Unusually, the mothership is an active (and powerful) combatant, although losing it spells the end of the game. At the beginning, with only two fighters plus the mothership to control and low character skills, combat lacks interaction and can be slow-paced. With more pilots, skills and more difficult enemies as time goes by, combat becomes much more interesting.

Most of the character skills are passive but you'll gather a handful of special abilities for each pilot over the course of the game. These range from skills that increase the firing accuracy of the pilot to increasing the luck of the entire squad to being able to call in a squad of Navy fighters to assist. Most of these active skills only last 30 seconds and can only be used 2 or 3 times each mission, forcing players to use them carefully - although you'll sometimes be frustrated that this limited availability means you'll horde the abilities only to end the mission without using them.

Other tactical options include using the very limited number of missiles a ship can carry at the right time (or indeed, against enemies that aren't equipped with anti-missile defences) and allocating ships as wingmen with support capabilities such as repairing or anti-missile duties. While the larger battles can be quite epic, it's the package of developing pilots' skills, outfitting ships and making good choices in allocating the resources in battle that makes Star Wolves' combat ultimately quite satisfying.

Graphically, Star Wolves looks quite good and maintains a smooth framerate. The space backdrops are attractive with suns causing lens flares, planets, asteroids and coloured nebula, although it falls short of the best space games with no visible atmosphere or day/night cycles for the planets and so on. The ships themselves have interesting and varied designs, although up close the textures are fairly simple and there is no bump-mapping or similar advanced features. 2D art for the equipment icons and interface is sharp and well realised. Unfortunately, the sound in Star Wolves is lacklustre, at best. While the battle sound effects are good, the 80's guitar pop soundtrack is very repetitive and the limited voice-acting is simply awful. To be fair to the voice actors, the one male and one female actor have a number of roles to cover and obviously stretch themselves trying to invent variations but it will try your patience listening to the ridiculous acknowledgements from some of the characters.

Star Wolves is a challenging game and although the difficulty level is fairly well matched to the growing capabilities of the squad, you'll need to make sure you upgrade to new equipment when it becomes available. With a fairly lengthy campaign of around 40 missions and a couple of branch points in the plot, there's reasonable replay value in trying different paths and squad setups. I found the game stable and relatively bug-free, although I did have to restart two missions when the mothership and then a critical NPC ship got stuck on stations.

Star Wolves isn't quite the non-linear RPG the marketing text would have you believe but it is a very good strategy game with strong roleplaying elements that add depth and character. While the combat that is so central to the game starts out slowly, it builds into some exciting battles as the options increase through better character skills and equipment. You'll need to wade through an awkward translation that obscures the story and terrible voice-acting but if the idea of taking to the space lanes with a squad-based strategy with an RPG twist appeals, Star Wolves is well worth a look.

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