Star Wolves 3: Civil War

Being a pro-gamer who spend a ton of time playing games and buying additional items for them from sites like https://www.yesgamers.com/, I do understand the mentality and liking of people when it comes to choosing a game. What I don’t understand is why people like a game like Star Wolves 3. And I don’t mean that as a judgmental thing or a joke,  I mean it as a simple true statement.

Star Wolves 3: Civil War is a game I have trouble categorizing. Sci-Fi-RPG-RTS is probably the best description I can come up with. Core game control is just like your typical RTS game – pointing, clicking, and enough keyboard shortcuts to confuse even the most anal retentive computer freaks.

I was recruited to write this review because I’m a fan of the RTS genre. And I acknowledge that the RTS genre is often considered on the boring side by your typical ADHD suffering age 12-17 gamer types. But despite my status as one who enjoys such things, this game bored me to pain, and it did so FAST. I’m not going to get into spoiler level details here, but let me give you the rundown of why this game hurt me so very much.

First, what little voice acting I heard was no good. Both fortunately and unfortunately there isn’t much of it. Fortunately because like I said, it’s not good, and unfortunately because the alternative we are given is a tornado of text that presents itself as more of a huge daunting homework assignment to read than it does as a game play element.  I mean, by the time game control was handed over to me, there were already six or so documents sitting in my Sci-Fi-RPG-RTS inbox, taunting me, torturing me with the knowledge that I had to read all of it to have any hope whatsoever of understanding what in the world was going on in this game.

Second, every few seconds the game makes you read from one to around ten paragraphs of spewed out generic text about what you should do next. There barely even seems to be a story (particularly early on) and what story there is just isn’t very compelling.

Third – nothing exciting happens in this game, ever. Let’s face it: Gamers are a spoiled lot, and even those of us weird enough to enjoy the Total War games expect the occasional bells and whistles in our games.  I never felt rewarded by any of the game play I encountered. Combat was clunky and unsatisfying (and by the time I got there I was already far to bored to care).

Fourth – A large portion of what one does while playing this game is nothing. You set a course and watch the blank space background while you fly there. When you’re lucky, the game interrupts your flight so you can read more text that I just don’t imagine you will find interesting.

There is more I could get into, the tortuous, generic class and leveling systems, the various screwy default system configurations that make getting started a bit tricky, the fact that the game resets your play speed back to the lowest setting every time anything happens – but if you’ve read this far I think you know enough about what I think about this game.

If you think you would like a game that offers up a ton of reading, a complex leveling system, lots of  space travel sequences, and doesn’t feel the need to reward the player for putting up with such things with any fun action, cool sound effects, or even a reasonable default setup, then you belong to the rare minority of gamers who might enjoy Star Wolves 3.