Star Wolves
In the distant future, mankind has spread out among the stars. Interstellar travel is common now, enabled by the use of special gates that make travelling from star system to star system simple and easy. However, this does not mean humanity has entered some kind of golden age. On the contrary, planetside life for most people means total domination either by the Emperor of Earth or one of three megacorporations. Those who want to be free of imperial bureaucracy or economic exploitation have to head out to the edges of known space, where asteroid mining stations and freelance interstellar traders can still make a decent living. But with freedom comes chaos, in the form of ravaging pirates, hostile aliens, and rogue AI-controlled ships.
Our story begins with Hero, a trader who gets his vessel blown up and looted by pirates, and who swears to restart his life and get his revenge in the same movement. With the aid and financial backing of a few friends, he outfits a large cargo-hauler, the Star Wolf, with armor, shields, and weapons, and throws in a few starfighters to boot. The crew and pilots of the Star Wolf become interstellar mercenaries, making their living by protecting traders, hunting pirates, taking bounty contracts, and salvaging the remains of all who oppose them.
Star Wolves is a real-time strategy game with RPG elements. Story aside, essentially what you do is select a mission, fly out into space, blow stuff up, loot the remains of the stuff you blow up, level up your pilots, and buy shiny new gear for the Star Wolf and its fighters.
There are three games in the series:
- Star Wolves - original game, more or less linear, but still gave freedom in missions. Pair of people decide to became mercenaries and do contracts, and eventually became involved in war that decide fate of universe.
- Star Wolves: Empire's legacy - mod for first game that brings additional storyline and new ending. Made by fans, but recognised by publishers as good. Weren't translated to english.
- Star Wolves 2 - gave big universe that you were free to explore, with not much to explore. Strange plot. Was received poorly by the fans. Same heroes, somehow degraded back to green rookies, lost old ship and bought even older and crappier, with all achievements forgotten. Still trying to save universe.
- Star Wolves 2: Civil War (numbered 3 in west for some reason, resulting in confusion) - creation of above-mentioned fans, with official support of publisher by tools that were used to make original game. Exploiting oper-world system of second game, it was filled with ALOT of content. Follows storyline of "Empire's legacy", totally ignoring second game. Completely different heroes still get involved in preventing global chaos by trying to find out where Hero's convoy disappeared.
Tropes used in Star Wolves include:
- Adventure Guild: The titular Star Wolves.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: 3 of 3.
- Original Berserker AI
- EL, made to destroy Berserker eventually took it's place
- UEL, made with safe-locks went too far with trying to ensure prosperity of human race
- Back Tracking: Infrequent, but you do find yourself returning to certain special systems occasionally.
- Beat Them At Their Own Game: Berserks are most easily destroyed by blasting them with heavy weapons quickly, before they attack you in the same manner.
- Also Berserker laser kills them really fast, if you manage to install it.
- Beam Spam: A great way to quickly deal massive damage to a capital ship. It works well on fighters as well, at least until they develop laser-resistant shields.
- Call a Hit Point a Smeerp: Shields and hull integrity.
- Character Customization: Limited. Besides Hero, your crew members have predetermined classes with their own development trees, but you can customize them within those restrictions.
- Character Portrait
- Cool Ship: The Star Wolf. It's actually bigger and potentially better-armed than most of the vessels the Star Wolves company fights, and using it as a gunship is a pretty good tactic for players who are concerned about sending it in ahead of the fighters.
- Critical Existence Failure: No amount of damage to any spacecraft has any impact on it's performance until it blows up.
- Crowning Music of Awesome: Some very nice synth tunes in this series.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Given how the background is mostly empty space, this is understandable. Still, you generally can tell systems of different sectors apart.
- It Got MUCH Better at third game.
- Defeat Means Playable: How you recruit one of crew members.
- Dialogue Tree: In-mission conversations.
- Disc One Nuke: To some degree in first two games, major one in third game, where getting secret supply stash early in the game can give you extrimely rare equipment that is hard to obtain even in late-game.
- Enemy-Detecting Radar
- Event Flag
- Every Bullet Is a Tracer
- For Massive Damage: Missiles, anyone?
- Special abilities' description even state that character is targeting weak spots.
- Hard Mode Perks: harder difficulties grant experience bonus, and the experience is extremely important in the game.
- Hello, Insert Name Here: Hero is the default name of the leader-character you make at startup, but you can type in whatever you wish.
- Hit Points
- I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Averted. Actually, attacking civil authorities is a great way to get salvageable loot.
- But generally they are either too well equipped or there are too many of them or loot isn't valuable at that level.
- Infallible Babble: Newscasts always describe events that you're going to get involved in, if you aren't already involved.
- Irrelevant Importance: The Ancient skull in the first game
- It's Up to You: Played with. If you're working for corporations or civilians, they'll usually ask you to take point. The Imperial Navy, on the other hand, is okay with leading the charge as long as you provide backup.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Some classes of pilots can be trained to do this. Some fighters are BUILT to do this.
- Expect it to cost LOT of money thou.
- Mirror Match: The first Star Wolves has you run into a different group of mercs who are charged with killing you. Coincidentally, they're armed with a refurbished armed transport, exactly like yours, and fighters like the ones you might be flying.
- Multi Mook Melee: Averted. Although you're warned in places that you may be fighting an endless stream of enemies, it's never actually endless. Actually, there's a lot of money to be had by fighting off multiple mook waves.
- Multiple Endings
- Omnicidal Neutral: You can play like this, if you really want to.
- Palette Swap: Different factions could be using identical fighters, save for the difference in color.
- Point Build System
- Real Time with Pause
- RPG Elements
- RPGs Equal Combat
- Scratch Damage: With recharging shields, you may not notice the scratches, but enough weak enemies can still present a threat.
- Scripted Event
- Schrödinger's Gun
- Sidetrack Bonus: Visiting every possible location of interest in a system, even when they have nothing to do with your actual reason for being in the system, is the best way to get jobs and/or targets to blow up and salvage.
- Sequelitis: The second game. Averted with the Civil War stand-alone addon, which was developed by the independent Elite Games Team, and (hopefully) with the Ashes of Victory addon made by the same team.
- Space Navy: Every major faction has one, or perhaps more than one.
- Space Is an Ocean
- Suicidal Overconfidence: Those lowly pirates will never stop harassing you, even if the Star Wolf and its crew are quite obviously better-armed than the Imperial Navy.
- Title Drop: Since "Star Wolves" is the actual name of your company, you can expect it to appear a lot in the news as your reputation grows.
- 2-D Space: Averted, sort of. All mobile objects in the game can and do move in three dimensions. However, generally everything happen at same Z-axis. Also all ships will align up-down when idle.
- We Help the Helpless: If you're playing nice during in-game dialogues, the Star Wolves may find themselves doing an awful lot of pointless errands as well as system-saving adventures. Still, this is more rewarding materially than snubbing everyone.
- Walk It Off: Fighters have recharging shields and can recover HP as well if they're docked inside the Star Wolf. The Star Wolf can restore its own shields and hull if it has the right upgrades attached to it. Repairs can take some time, though.