More Star Wolves, without frills or apology. Either you 'get it' or you don't. But, CAREFUL with the difficulty setting.
There's nothing earth-shattering here. The mildly interesting story is plainly presented, and the campaign (especially early on) develops slowly -- as does your advancement -- and your team takes its sweet time growing and progressing. Experience points accumulate at a snail's pace. Resources are adequate, but you won't be able to just run to the nearest trade station and hop in a level 5 ship (besides which, you now need to earn the "right" to fly high-end ships, by allocating experience points to a specific branch of piloting perks).
But If you like the tactical game play of Star Wolves; if you like a challenge; if you like outer-space environments -- you'll get all those things in Spades.
Clearly, though, SW3 is based around the same engine as the original Star Wolves (SW1) -- in fact, many of the entities and game concepts are recycled without even a pretense of alteration. There are some new gadgets added to the original array, but the overall appearance hasn't changed much, although there are some notable variations and improvements in outer-space scenery. Character sheets, layouts, and 2D art are pretty much the same as always. SW2 and SW3 are basically large expansions -- with the very significant "free roam" aspect added. Yet, for this game, I don't really mind the recycling: SW1 looked good, they took something that was proven and stuck with it and, to a degree, refined it. It's a tactical RPG not a FPS, and it plays well even on an older computer. It wasn't broke, they didn't "fix" it, and it holds up well.
Game play is an improvement over Star Wolves 2 in many ways. SW3 is stable, with no inexplicable performance issues. The galaxy is large and filled with endless confrontational predicaments. The campaign is coherent and long, within a loose free-to-roam framework. The battles are tough, sometimes teeth-grindingly so.
SW3 adds some new ships, but also leaves out the gun-bristling overkill ships from SW2, which omission I found disappointing. If it was a balance thing, they could have easily altered the specs and/or hard points, but used the models nonetheless. The more ships, the merrier.
You do get several opportunities to change to a different mother ship, and this is a decent feature. And you have the ability to upgrade your mother ships' "firmware" and therefore have built-in improvements to ship characteristics.
As I mentioned, the battles are extremely difficult. I am playing on "hard" because that is the setting at which I got through SW1 and SW2. In SW3 "hard" means "some missions are impossible." There were a couple missions earlier in the campaign where I almost quit, but finally managed get past these without applying the invulnerability cheat. However, after stubbornly refusing to cheat for a long time, it eventually became inevitable. For example, there is a mission in which, on the "hard" setting and under ordinary circumstances, the mother ship is "alpha-attacked" coming out of a portal (re-entering "known" space after leaving the precursor system) and is summarily obliterated in around the time it takes to launch all your fighters. Even using the instant shield-recharge perk (polarization), there's no way to avoid the mother ship's destruction within five or ten seconds. It's either cheat or quit the game. There are other situations where you're ambushed with impossible odds upon exiting a portal. In one instance there's dialog leading to a cutscene of you being attacked, and if you let the cutscene play, either your mother ship is totally wasted ***before the cutscene ends*** or your mother ship is severely damaged with at least one of your fighters destroyed and the remaining ones near death -- yes, before you are handed back control of the game. In this example, you can avoid instant death by hitting ESC and terminating the cutscene, but figuring that out is not my idea of "strategy." And then after bypassing this, you're still left to fight maybe three- or four-dozen mostly high-end ships using your three pilots who have as-yet mediocre skills -- a pitched battle is one thing; this amounts to a leg-broke guy with a BB gun fighting a tank squadron complete with infantry support. These are BASIC PLAYABILITY ISSUES that should have been ironed out BEFORE releasing the game -- and involving mandatory missions smack-dab in the middle of the campaign, for crying out loud -- and there's just no excuse for releasing to market in this state where there are "impossibility spikes." It is the primary reason I didn't give it a score of 8 or 8.5.
Anyway, consider long and consider well before playing on "hard," because it is truly a challenge, and you cannot change the difficulty in the middle of a campaign.
SW3 could be a little mod-friendlier, in that most modifications do not "take" without starting a new game. I am finishing up a pretty heavy-duty mod for SW1, and to activate modded items, changes in AI squadrons, and so forth, all you have to do is enter a new system. In SW2 and SW3, though, apparently some of these "generator" scripts and xml spec sheets do their thing only at the start of a new game. I might try adding ships and changing the composition of the AI flight groups here in SW3, but it's a real pain if you have to start from the beginning to activate the changes; sort of mucks up the tweaking and troubleshooting process.
(If anybody has any advanced insight into modding SW3, please PM me. I do not need basic tutorials as I am well versed on the Star Wolves scripts and specification xml's and object files and so forth; but if you have some real insight into implementing SW3 mods, a way to apply mods to previously saved games, or any other great advice, please send me a message.)
That's it. If you like the formula of Star Wolves, don't mind reliving it, and want to fly around the galaxy hunting for equipment and tactical situations, SW3 delivers. If you're looking for something completely different, go elsewhere.