Independence War: The Starship Simulator

The Good
The different perspective: driving a corvette instead of a small fighter, ability to remote control other vessels (you'll need it in some of the missions), many special challanges (the "catcher" one is great), as is the one that you have to crash onboard, decent story and cut scenes. Good graphics even without 3D acceleration support.

The Bad
Many of the missions have "infinite respawn" where you HAVE to destroy the mothership while under attack from the defenders, which just keep on coming and coming no matter how many you kill. Some of the missions are more like puzzles than war. Lack of mid-mission save means you have to repeat the easy parts to get to the "challange", damage control seems to be just a bit too easy.

The Bottom Line
Independence War is a space sim that has you driving a corvette that actually obeys the laws of physics, and a great story to go with it. As the war goes on, you discover a conspiracy that will lead you to make a critical choice... This game is different from the normal space shooters, with less fighting and more thinking. On the other hand, the infinite respawning enemies detract from the effectiveness of the game, among other problems. It is almost a classic...

The Good
I heard a lot about iWar before I found it while walking about in a used book store. I jumped at the chance to grab it and looked forward to getting home to play it. I had heard it was one of the only physically realistic space combat simulators, and as a hard-core simmer I was excited.

In some ways this game is good. Although it only support 3dfx for accelerated graphics, on my middle-of-the-road machine the graphics were still excellent even without any acceleration.

The depth of the game is likewise interesting. Differences in mission outcome do indeed effect future missions, but this seems to be a limited branching tree.

The Bad
Good as the graphics were, the physics was terrible. As it turns out the "physically realistic" review turned out to mean "can fly sideways". The fact that the ship can turn about at something on the order of several hundred gees was overlooked, as was the fact that it could repair itself from almost total destruction to fully working in a few moments.

Worse, although I'm a big simmer, I found the game utterly confusing in combat. Every time all I saw was stuff flying about and it was unclear who was who. Ship's weapons couldn't hit targets, and this drove me up the wall.

And finally missions are sometimes dependant solely on "random" outcomes that can't be understood without watching a small TV show within the game. For instance in one mission I needed to do something, but that something was explained while I was in combat, and that was that - I had to play the whole mission over again to figure out what to do.

The Bottom Line
Good try, but not a home run in my books.

The Good
Everything. It's unfortunate that Ashely didn't share my inthusiasm. As for the graphics, if you're play with a 3D acellerator, they can match or top modern day computer games. The flight being like a "Bulky Y-Wing" is because it's realistic. If you were to really fly a spacecraft that large, it wouldn't handle like ships in other games. As for the weapons, there are more than one. The stations do prove little use, but if you need to see the damage of your ship, a breifing document, weapon selection or things along that line, changing stations is useful. This fourteen-minute intro video was actually VERY interesting and I had to watch it multiple times as I played the game to figure things out that I hadn't been able to before. It also had superb graphics that toped some modern-day videos. As for the combat, it gets back to the control: This game is going for realism. If you were to be shot by a laser cannon in the right spot, you should be sent drifting. But the good part of that is that you can get up again and fight. If you look at the Engeneering station, you'll see that the Dreadnoght CNV-301 has four repair crews whom you can dispatch acordingly.
Sorry to gang up on you, Ashley, but maybe if you picked up the instruction book more than just to take it out of the box, you might have discovered the magnatude of this game.

The Bad
Very complicted controls; almost every key on the keyboard has one or more tasks. For some people, the plot may be a bit to deep (but I like it). Not much more that's bad, but if you're into realist sci-fi games and are willing to take some time to study the controls, it's a great game.

The Bottom Line
It's an interesting idea indeed. And I think that Partical Systems\Infograms did a GREAT job on this game and deserve two (or more if humanly possible) thumbs up.