Independence War: The Starship Simulator

The Good
The graphics were quite good and full of nice touches. Some examples are, the fact that space is dark (although you can make it lighter in the options menu), the unobtrusive lines that tell you your direction of movement, and the trails left by other craft which tell you their direction of movement. I also liked the neutral backdrops with the planets looming over most of the on-screen action.

<hr />

The fabled "Newton-ish physics" rocked. I loved the way they worked this. Instead of the "point-and-go" physics of most space sims (in which you have absolutely no inertia) you have mass, which means you have inertia and because you are flying a corvette, not a fighter, you have a lot of it. Once you're going 1000 meters per second in one direction, it gets hard to stop. Although some gripe about this, I found true depth here. You can do many things with your mass and inertia that you simply can't do in a game like X-Wing.

Some examples:

-You can circle-strafe. By matching a large cruiser's speed and turning off the computer-assist (which tries to keep you going forward), you can use your lateral thrusters to circle around the enemy and make yourself hard to hit, as well as give you a constant target.

-You can get off more rounds in a pass. You get going towards an installation and turn off the computer-assist. Then you just kepp your nose pointed at the target, as your inertia keeps ou going.

-You can ram. Because you have a large amount of mass, smaller ships will crumple when you ram into them at high speeds. The usefulness of this is accentuated by your sheilds, which can be turned on in a single large burst, making you practiacally invincible for a second.

And before anyone complains about the speed of acelleration and turn, as well as other physics related gripes, please realize, this is the future. Just because our space shuttle can't acellerate that fast, doesn't mean that ships in 2500 can't.

<hr />

I liked the high speed travel model. It was a lot of fun just cruising past moons in NAV training 2, by using the LDS drive (which moves you at speeds from 1 km/s to nine-tenths of the speed of light.).

<hr />

The planets exist! You can run into them!

<hr />

It was a fun game to play, in my opinion, and that recommends it by itself.

<hr />

It has a great intro. It's a 14 minute long, 3D rendered monster, that I have watched more than four times. It is, basically, the entire first disk, minus the install.

<hr />

The FMV is spactacular all the way through.

<hr />

It's complex. There are a lot of things you can do with your ship, or you can leave them all alone, and still do well. For instance, you can have your engineering teams fix your weapons systems first, if you need to shoot back, but your guns are damaged, or your LDS

The Bad
The scripting is carved in stone. While this makes it easier to keep the story in flow, it makes some missions rather difficult to win.

<hr />

No multiplayer.

<hr />

You can only fly the corvette, although you can fly some others by remote control at certain points.

<hr />

The interface, although bare-bones simple, is a bit vauge. Also, the red "back-up" arrow disappeared when I used my Voodoo 2.

<hr />

There's no 3D support other than 3Dfx (that I know of).

<hr />

Weapon accuracy seems a bit low sometimes

The Bottom Line
A great play. Although not without its share of flaws, it was a heck of a lot of fun, and I'd recommend it to any simmer, or gamer in general. I really wish that the original X-Wing had had a physics model like this, because I found so much fun and depth in it.