Reviewed: March 5, 2005
Reviewed by: John Bowlin

Publisher
Alawar Entertainment

Developer
Ghost Software

Released: January 25, 2005
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone

5
6
4
4
5.0

System Requirements

So who is Alawar? Well this is my first Alawar game so I cannot really judge much about them based on this. They do have a lot of different shareware games - more than 40 - you can try on their web site. The games are budget priced so you don't have to worry about spending a lot. Plus you can try them before you pay, plus the games run on very modest hardware requirements.

Sea Wolves features:

• 3 episodes
• 22 different levels
• different types of sea weapons and special weapons
• more than 25 types of enemies
• compelling ocean environment and the intensity of historical naval warfare
• wonderful 3D graphics
• featuring dynamic weather
• impressively detailed ship models

Then you pick a ship, and of course, your ship determines how fast, tough, and well armed you are. Your choices are a really fast ship that has sucky armor, a really (painfully) slow ship that has great weapons and very good armor, or one that is kind of a jack-of-all-trades ship that does nothing great but nothing horrible either. But don't worry, how your ship starts out isn't too critical because as you gain experience, you get to upgrade your ship in Armor, Weapons, and/or Speed. Another important thing your ship choice determines is what it looks like on the screen.

The game starts off slow. You're thrown into a tutorial every time you start a new game, regardless of whether or not it's the first or the 100th time you've played. You drive your ship around either by clicking with the mouse (bad idea, slow) or by using the arrow keys. The forward arrow key makes you go ... forward. The backward, well I bet you can guess that one too. The left and right keys turn the ship, you will be using those A LOT. The turn-speed on these ships is not exactly rapid, so you need to plan in advance when you need to turn.

You will wander around the maps and collect coins, which if you save up enough of them will grant you bonus lives. You'll need those bonus lives. Trust me. You will also find that your way is impeded on these great seas by... walls? Yes, someone has managed to wall off half the ocean and put a gate, and of course, the only way through these gates is to find the keys. Colored keys. Red ones, Green ones, and Yellow ones, oh my! There is some type of really thin excuse for a story going on here, but in reality what you do is hunt keys, open gates, find a big castle, and blow it up. Then go to the next map. The only thing that changes from all of this is how hard it gets. And it gets hard. Trust me.

The one really cool feature that this game offers which is quite a bit different than other shooters is the way the guns work. Your main firepower is to the left or to the right, because you have more cannons in those positions. So typically the goal is to move your ship alongside the enemies or turn your side to them so that you can blast them. And the cannons fire in an arc, and the longer you hold the fire button the higher they shoot and the farther the cannon balls go. So if you need to shoot something further away, you hold the key longer and when you shoot your fire goes high then comes down in an arc.

The bad thing about the guns is that you usually just "spam" the fire buttons and blast anything nearby. The keys you use to fire are W for firing the front guns, A for firing the left guns, and D for firing the right guns. You cannot shoot things that are directly behind you, so you had best turn and fight rather than try and flee.

After a few missions you will get some new abilities. Like one mission gives you some anti-air missiles and starts throwing airplanes after you. The airplanes are highly annoying. You have basically no control over how the anti-air missiles work and it just feels like random chance if you happen to bring down a plane. And sadly, they can dish out a lot of damage to you while you are frantically wailing on the anti-air button (S) to try and shoot them down. And planes can come in DROVES so that you're desperately trying to shoot them down when they can hit you with impunity. Not fair.

Another weapon you'll eventually have at your disposal is the sea mines. You can lay these little mines along behind you as you move around. This does come in pretty handy since it gives you a way to flee from ships and actually hurt them somewhat. The problem is that by the time you get this ability, the enemy ships are so darn fast firing that they can easily out-damage your mines.

You can pick up various power-ups as you move around this bleak looking ocean. There are power ups for health, and there are some that give you super-speed and things like that. You'll need every one of these you can find, so grab them all. One nice feature is the mini-map which can give you a hint as to where the main castle is. However, it won't tell you where you need to go for the keys and unfortunately it also doesn't show the power-ups on the screen. There is also a radar that will show you where the enemies who are relatively close to you are. This can be important since sometimes the enemies can be shooting and killing you from off screen where you can not even see them.

Occasionally, you will come across a port where you can save your progress. But not nearly often enough. You might play for a good thirty minutes and not find one. The good news is that when you finally beat the main castle on the map and move to the next map, it auto-saves your game. So the ports are mostly for mid-mission saves, but the strange thing about them is that many times they are positioned near the beginning of the level, so are pretty much useless. And you can only save at a port one time. No going back after a hard fight and resaving the game. This game would have been more fun if it had save-anytime feature, but as it is, there's just too much repetitive annoyances when you run out of lives.

One other bad part about saving is that you do not refresh your health when you save. The only way to get more health is by picking up the non-replenishable health power-ups. So you, like me, may find yourself in a situation of no hope, you have no health, you've got almost no lives, and the game is too hard to make it on such few resources. At this point it's pretty much game over, regardless of whether or not you were enjoying it or not. I made it to ship level 15 and maybe map 6 or 7 (not sure, didn't count them) before I got hopelessly stuck where there were tons of enemies that were faster than me, shot at least 4 times faster than I could shoot, and could stay out of my gun range. My save game was such that I had 1 life left and maybe 10% of my health bar... At that point, it just wasn't fun anymore.

Make sure you have loaded the latest drivers for your video card. When I first started playing the game, my screen was butt ugly, but then I saw some screenshots on the Alawar web site that made me think maybe something was wrong with my setup. So I went and updated my graphics card drivers, and the game looked a LOT better after that.

Overall the graphics for this game are better than most shareware titles, but still not quite up to the standards of most full retail games. For a budget title, though, they are pretty impressive and they definitely do not detract from the game playing experience.

The one really bad thing about the sound though was the music. The music was not too bad in and of itself, but the volume was way too high and with the music on you couldn't hear the otherwise great sound effects of the cannons and crashing airplanes and such. Nowhere in the setup screen is an option to adjust the music volume, which is a pretty important missing feature. So what I ended up doing was converting some of my U2 MP3 files to OGG (Ogg-Vorbis, the open-source music format) and then I replaced some of the game's music files with U2 songs recorded at an appropriate volume level. Well that was fun for a while, but eventually I even got tired of hearing Bono's voice over and over, so I just deleted all the music files out of the music directory. That got rid of the music and didn't crash the game, and I was able to play in peace and quiet. I used my MP3 player to listen to whatever I wanted to in the background.

If the game had variable difficulty levels it might be more fun. Also I could have tried restarting the game and choosing different ships/skills to see if maybe there was an easier combination, but after three failed attempts, I just got tired of repeating the same four or five missions. My first ship was ultra-fast, taking the +speed character and the fastest ship and spending all of my experience on speed. The ship was just too crunchy and although I was able to get away from most ships okay, the airplanes were another matter. A handful of planes could easily take me out before my seemingly random anti-air gun could take them out.

The second attempt was using the slow ship that has tons of guns, and that actually worked out a bit better. I used the +armor character and pumped up armor at every level up. That ship could take a ton of damage and keep going, and I thought that it would be the winning combination, but I eventually got to the point where I just couldn't kill the enemy ships fast enough as described above. On my third and final attempt, I used the +armor character again and the "well rounded" ship and spent my points so that I had a very balanced ship. I got slightly further than with the "tons of guns" ship but still couldn't make it through to the next level.

This would have been a really cool multiplayer game, but there is no multiplayer support, so no added value there. There are 22 levels so I guess I can say I saw about a quarter of the game (three times!) and it took me maybe 10 hours to see that much of it (three times!). So I would estimate that there is about 40 hours of entertainment here, if you are a better action gamer than I apparently am.

The graphics are above par for a shareware title and the sound effects, not including the music, are pretty good. Overall I can recommend that people who think they might be interested in this type of action game go to the Alawar website and download Sea Wolves and give it a try for themselves. Its worth a look.