Independence War

"One of the greatest"

They don't make games like this anymore.

Set in a distant future, mankind has expanded beyond the bounds of Earth and into the stars, setting up entire industries and armies to insure their survival amongst the great unknown. However, every government has its malcontents, and this is no different; the Independent Navy, as they've come to call themselves, is doing everything in its power to make life more difficult for the Earth-based Commonwealth, and this is where you come in.

You are a novice pilot trying to find his way into the Commonwealth Navy, and the game starts you off on a mission which leads you to find the abandoned hull of the Dreadnought - a corvette-class fighter, owned by the famous pilot known as Jefferson Clay.

The first thing I would like to say - and warn you - about the gameplay is that the learning curve is STEEP. The game employs realistic physics, unlike most other space sim games of the era like TIE Fighter or Freespace. If you move forward, you'll keep moving forward, and this makes flying the Dreadnought a task in and of itself. Even getting from point A to B can be tough until one figures out how to compensate for the Newtonian physics, but this also makes combat a lot more interesting, as experienced pilots can pull off some pretty neat tricks that make destroying the enemy that much easier.

Besides the physics engine, though, the game uses almost the entire keyboard to control the ship. Or, I should say, almost every key on the keyboard serves some purpose in the game. It's tough to learn all the keys, and the game doesn't allow you to remap them without editing some text files.

For these reasons reading the manual, if you have it, is something of a necessity. The manual does an exceptional job of explaining the game to the novice, and even I refer back to it every so often, because everything you need to know about the game is in it. It's your Independence War Bible, as it were. Also, the "tutorial" missions ("training missions") are also essential, as you can play them again and again and they do a great job of teaching the new pilot basic maneuvers and what keys do what.

So, once you've gotten a little flight time under your belt, you can start the main mission string. The game advances one mission at a time in a linear fashion; for the most part, you can't digress from the beaten path, although there are a few instances when the game gives you an option of two or three missions instead of just one, though for the most part there aren't many chances to go a different way.

This is an example of how scripted the game is; indeed, you don't have much freedom to do what you want unless you get creative, and at times the game can be frustratingly linear. Add in the fact that you can't save your game in-mission, and you'll find yourself sitting through a lot of the same boring conversations again and again on the harder missions. It can be aggravating indeed, and this is one flaw I really do resent about the game.

Despite this, though, the programmers did a wonderful job of making the game FEEL less scripted. Watching neutral traffic enter and exit LaGrange points, even though they're scripted to do so, makes the game feel more random, as does the radio chatter heard in the background.

Even though the game feels exceptionally linear at times, it's hard to dispute that combat in this game is fun. It's tough at first, because flight is slow and combat is too, but once you know the ropes you can use the physics engine to your advantage and pull off some really cool moves. You can, for instance, use the lateral thrusters (which act to make the ship "strafe") to swing around and face the ship's back, and blast away. Or, you can put the ship in Unassisted Flight mode, which turns off the thrusters that help compensate for your momentum and will keep you moving forward until you apply backwards thrust, make a run at an enemy, and flip the Dreadnought so that you're facing his engines and fire. It's fun to experiment with the physics and make up cool new tactics...using them successfully is a very satisfying feeling indeed.

The Dreadnought is composed of four "stations" which you can switch between at a moment's notice, although 95% of your time will be spent in the navigational (NAV) station. For example, if you want to remote link to another ship or check out the thoroughly useless star map, switch to the command (COM) station. If you want to engage special missile firing modes and see your ship in 3D wireframe, switch to the weapons (WEP) station. Finally, there's the engineering (ENG) station which determines what gets fixed first as your ship gets damaged, and you can manually control the components under repair if you need a certain system online before anything else.

In order to make flight easier, there's a range of autopilots to choose from, such as Approach for getting to points that are far away, or Dock so you can dock to another ship (usually) to fulfill a certain mission objective. You also get wingmen in some missions, though controlling them is a hassle and it's really easy to forget that they're there. They're mostly useful just for taking some of the heat off of you in intense situations.

The missions themselves are very varied; this is one thing I really appreciate about I-War. A lot of missions have you destroying some Indie threat, but almost all missions have at least one very unique objective that keeps the game from getting stale too fast. For example, in one mission you have to fly a repair drone via remote control into a malfunctioning Comms relay; in another, you have to play "hotter-colder" to find an unmarked ship whose only source of identification is its heat source. The list goes on, and playing new missions is fun because it's likely you'll do something you haven't done yet.

There are a few missions that are notoriously difficult, however (the Megafreighter mission comes to mind), and could take you upwards of twenty tries to finally beat. There is a cheat that allows you to skip to the next mission, however, and it may be easier at times to just do that than to subject yourself to the same dirty defeat again and again.

The graphics for the game are, in my opinion, absolutely gorgeous. This game was made ten years ago, in 1996, but even today I think the lighting effects and detail is just outstanding. There are also some very pretty cinemas scattered throughout the missions, not to mention the jaw-dropping 15-minute opener, which sets the stage for the story in Independence War better than almost any other opener I've ever seen.

The story, by the way, is one of the things that helps this game get a 10 in my book. In the beginning the missions aren't really connected at all, but as you play through the game a coherent story appears and it's really quite impressive. Politics, backstabbing, and conspiracy theories abound, and I wish this game had been more popular because I think it could have generated some really cool fanfics.

All in all, Independence War is really the best space flight sim of all time. Unfortunately, this is a genre that seems to be dead today. In its Golden Age there were many that I believe deserve notation; the aforementioned TIE Fighter and Freespace, as well as X-Wing Alliance, Tachyon: The Fringe, and Independence War 2...none of them, however, were good enough to be called the best, save Independence War. I-War had the graphics, the intense and complex combat, the intuitive use of physics not only in combat but in passive mission objective as well, the ingenious story...it had everything.

It definitely deserves its place in history.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/06