Solar Winds: Galaxy

aka: Solar Winds II: Universe, Solar Winds: Episode 2
Moby ID: 10599

Description

Sequel to Solar Winds: The Escape, you play the role of Jake Stone, a bounty hunter seeking to save his people from destruction.

After being lead into a death trap by your Government, you managed to escape your solar system with the aid of a strange portal. Upon arriving at your destination, you were left waiting for a contact that would help you return home. Now, a year later, the time has come...

You will travel around the galaxy accepting missions in exchange for machinery to upgrade your ship, meeting many beings eager to help or destroy you. It's up to you to determine who you can trust.

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 67% (based on 1 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 8 ratings with 1 reviews)

Phased and Spaced Out

The Good
The game has a lot of flavour text in various portions of the game, giving a decent amount of lore and setting up the Solar Winds universe. Throughout the game there are decent opportunities to get missions and clear instructions on completing them with a quest list as a helpful reminder. Each time you complete a mission, there's a sweet reward waiting for you. The gadgets you earn to upgrade your ship help out and make the gameplay much easier. And for battles, you have a decent arsenal of photon cannons and missiles, plus shields for some good protection, especially against the more intelligent opponents and tackling more than one. Customising your ship gives a small feeling of ownership when you're in control.

The game is very well presented with the layout of the animated cutscenes, character portrait movements, console cockpit styled menus and the parallax scrolling as you move your ship across space. And the music. Oh! The ear-catching music. It's some of Dan Froelich's best compositions that fit the theme of space better than a glove. Some of those tracks are remixes derived from the game Kiloblaster. The mood of the game dynamically changes the tracks whether you're exploring, under attack or having a conversation. The accompanying sounds are not very much, but present to add to the atmosphere.

The Bad
While the basic controls to play the game are decent, the menu driven controls are not good. You need to press so many different keys to reconfigure your ship's energy allocation, missile types, weapon types and shield types. Mercifully you do have a tutorial to show you all you need to know, but a game like this shouldn't be so complex in order to fight your battles with ease. No matter how you reconfigure the ship, just stick with tailing an enemy ship and repeatedly shoot the rear until it explodes. That entirely defeats the purpose of all optional options. When you take damage however, you cannot repair your ship with reserve energy via reconfiguration, you have to wait for it to gradually self-heal, which takes more time during the gameplay. There is also tedium in the game when it comes to travelling between vast distances of space, where the stars look samey. You may also get lost if you can't remember the coordinates to travel to familiar locations. It would have helped to have a location list. Guess you have to do the old fashioned writing notes on paper.

In regards to the game's story, it's pretty short for just two episodes. Players would be more accustomed to trilogies. When you're assigned missions, you must follow them in one single specific order, because there are no branching paths and trying to deviate from the one path will make you unable to progress any further. Which begs the question, why make it possible to kill or capture the Titus scientist if you're not able continue from that point on? And while we're on the topic of short story, most of the planets that you see, serve no purpose other than to decorate the depths of space. You never get to interact with even a quarter of the locations across the universe. And your ability to explore deep space is restricted by deadly invisible barriers that stop you going far. Makes you wonder if there are any hidden secrets the game doesn't want you knowing about.

The Bottom Line
This isn't your Star Wars or Star Trek type adventure, but a pretty "Epic" adventure in its own right. The satisfaction of completing this game is short-lived. This would be worth the buy if it had more to offer such as Cruiser-class boss ships, a great deal more interaction and several different choices for multiple endings. As it is though, it's a game you can play and finish in the same day and never need to go back to. To be fair though, the year 1993 was a bit early for open world games. Might have sold better on CD with full voice acting for all the character dialogue. It was an interesting take on a space-themed multi-directional shooter with missions and objectives, but it's not complete without an RPG treatment. If you're the proud owner of this game, good for you. If not, don't be disappointed, there are better games in the Epic Megagames catalog.

DOS · by Kayburt (30257) · 2022

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Gonchi.

Additional contributors: Riamus.

Game added October 9, 2003. Last modified February 22, 2023.