Granted, Star Wolves 2 isn’t that hard. The ever-present quicksave and quickload functions mean you can easily recover from disaster and try something different. And your run-of-the-mill enemies, such as random pirates and enemy faction members, become easy pickings once you’ve upgraded your fleet past a certain level. The same is true even for supposed toughies like the Aliens, Angorians, and the Bezerks. But in the beginning, when your offensive and defensive capabilites aren’t that developed, surviving is literally a struggle.

Luckily, we have just the info you need to make life as a space-faring mercenary a little easier.

Fooling the Enemy Into Submission

Basically, the enemy AI in Star Wolves 2 has only one principle: attack the nearest ship until it’s destroyed or out of radar range. There’s no retreating for computer-controlled players in this game. They concentrate on the first enemy ship they encounter, a trait you can use to your advantage in two ways:

Using your mothership as a tank. No matter how much you upgrade your fighters, your frigate will always deal and take more damage. Befitting it’s capital status, it can actually win over several enemy fighters all by itself. You can maximize this by sending in your mothership first. The enemy will concentrate on her, while you direct your fighters to attack individual enemies as a group, killing them off one by one. In other words, use your frigate to distract and take the brunt of the enemy’s firepower, and your fighters will survive long enough to take them out.

Luring the enemy into an ambush. Ok, so the first tactic didn’t work. The enemy simply dealt too much damage for even your mothership to bear. Here’s where having a fast fighter comes in handy. Once you know where the powerful enemy is waiting, line up your fighters and mothership far away from the opponents, keeping them close to each other. Take your fast fighter (preferably piloted by a character with a high piloting skill, which makes it harder for enemies to hit them) and manuever it towards the enemy. Once you see the bad guys react to your fighter’s presence, redirect it to a point behind your waiting fleet, making it pass through your other ships. The enemies will pursue. Since they’re concentrating on your scout, they won’t pay attention to your mothership and the other fighters—even as they fire unopposed. You will severely weaken the enemy force, even destroying a fighter or two.

Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

The other aspect of winning battles in Star Wolves 2 is to equip your ships with the best possible equipment. Keep on building your cash reserves, diverting from the main storyline to take up inconsequential (to the plot) missions of you have to—so that you have enough capital to upgrade. Make sure your fighters’ weapons match their respective pilots’ abilites. If a pilot is an expert in lasers for instance, that’s what you should put in his weapon slots.

There you have it! As long as you manuever your ships to deal maximum damage to your enemies while minimizing your own losses, as well as fight with state-of-the-art technology, you’ll have no problems beating Star Wolves 2. Bet you can even finish the game today if you put your mind into it.

In Star Wolves 2, your dreams of becoming a fleet admiral come true. Like the prequel, Star Wolves 2 puts you in control of a frigate—complete with its own supporting cast of fighters! You’re the leader of a space-faring mercenary group (known of course as the Star Wolves) traveling around the universe looking for and accomplishing freelance missions for money. Eventually you’ll get involved in a galaxy-wide conflict, casting your lot with one of the major factions. The choice you’ll make determines how the story develop, and what the ending will be.From a production value standpoint, Star Wolves 2 is a mixed bag.

The graphics are obviously inspired by Homeworld, but there’s nothing wrong with copying what works. The explosions are big and beautiful. Laser beams cut through space. Missiles streak towards their target. A big part of Star Wolves 2 is space combat, and it’s great to see how it’s believably and interestingly presented. The cool rock soundtrack kicks in when you encounter hostiles, pumping you up for the battle ahead.

The game system is even more similar to Homeworld. It’s a true 3D environment, where ships can fly along the X, Y, and Z axes. This adds an interesting dimension (pun intended) to the gameplay. A useful tactic involves attacking the enemies from above or below, exploiting the fact that there’s minimal weapon coverage in these areas. Managing only a few number of ships (a maximum of 7, including your frigate) makes for an easier command experience, at least compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, of ships under your control in Homeworld. You can also pause the game at any time, taking a breather while you adapt your tactics to how the battle is playing out.

Star Wolves 2 differentiates itself by adding some RPG elements to the mix. The pilots have skill trees much like Diablo 2, with each new ability costing a certain amount of skill points earned as the player dispatches enemies or completes quests. Individual ships have weapon, missile, and system slots, which can be filled up with different kinds of items with their own characteristics and abilities.

There’s also a story to follow where many times you have to decide what to do. Some decisions change the way the plot develops, others make life a little easier for you and your crew. Exploring the results of each choice extends this game’s lifespan with a dose of replayability, if only to see the various endings.

Unfortunately, it looks like Star Wolves 2 was released before all the bugs were worked out. Crashes were very frequent, so much so that I had to run the game in windowed mode for easy recovery when the game hung. I had to summon the task manager many times to end the program manually. A very significant drawback, one that frustrated me to no end.

Originally a Russian game, Star Wolves 2 also suffers from poor voice acting and translation. The characters always come of as robots who have faulty English-speaking programs. It’s also a bit anti-climactic that once you get to upgrade everything on your frigate and fighters, the game suddenly ends. You wish you had more chances to unleash your ultra-powerful fleet on enemies.

Star Wolves 2 had so much promise, mixing the revolutionary RTS-system of Homeworld with some RPG elements that lets you specialize your pilots into specific roles. But Russian publisher 1C’s effort is hampered by bugs, and poor translation into English. I give this a 6.5 out of 10.