Independence War: The Starship Simulator

• Introduction
• The Nature Of The Tale
• Installation and Support
• Documentation
• Graphics and Sound
• Game Play
• Scenarios & Play Options
• Conclusion
• System Requirements

   Independence War is an excellent and unique space combat and adventure game created by Particle Systems and tested and produced by Infogrames Entertainment. It isn't another space fighter shoot-'em-up game like Wing Commander, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, or Descent: Freespace, that mainly offer repeated contests of flying skill in small one-man fighters with manually-aimed forward-fixed weapons and flight models that include unexplained speed limits but omit momentum and inertia.

    Nor is it quite what its subtitle, The Starship Simulator, might have you imagine. The game box tempts, "Command a sophisticated 8,520 ton Dreadnought class starship." Sounds like a huge, powerful, unwieldy vessel with hundreds of crew members. The historical HMS Dreadnought was a pioneer in size (17,900 tons) and firepower when it was launched in 1906. However, it turns out that in the game what we have is a "Dreadnaught* class corvette," a corvette being a small patrol ship near the bottom of the hierarchy of warship sizes. By comparison, in this sci-fi universe a destroyer is 220,000 tons and a cruiser 650,000 tons.

    (*Yes, the spelling is different in the game than on the box. The Oxford English Dictionary lists dreadnaught with an "a" as an antiquated spelling used for a wool lining used to seal ship hatches. Apparently in the year 2268 it will mean a class of relatively small patrol spaceships.)

    So in this game you command and pilot a relatively small, maneuverable ship. With little help from your three assistants on the bridge, the game requires you to pilot and control your ship by yourself, although the computer can help with basic maneuvers and aiming weapons. The game does include smaller ships than your corvette, and larger warships do turn out to be comparatively rare.

    What distinguishes Independence War from other recent so-called space simulations isn't the size or crew of your own ship; it's the detailed and convincing modeling of technologies and their effects. Players must learn to pilot with a realistic space flight model. More importantly, they must also understand the game's technologies and use tactics and intelligence to overcome the game's challenges.

    Not only is Independence War a unique flavor of space action-adventure game, but it also serves itself deliciously well, with mouth-watering eye candy, a good story, and space combat you can really sink your teeth into.

   Independence War isn't just about violence, but having fun with violence and death in space is a large part of it. Independence War isn't nearly as crass and unfeeling as many of today's computer games are. Saving others' lives is in fact a frequent goal. Ships can occasionally capture each other in special, scripted circumstances, but in general the fighting is kill or be killed, with mercy rarely begged or granted. One sign of appreciation for the horror of war in space are the floating bodies one occasionally stumbles across in the wreckage of exploded ships.

    The game is filled with slimy, corrupt, despicable characters with few morals. Much of the game's story follows your role as a pawn for the pompous Commonwealth government as it fights a vicious, bloody war with the unsavory Indies, humans fighting for political independence for Earth's outer colony worlds. The game requires that players wage mindless war for despicable power-mongers, but human corruption is a theme of the story, which turns out to have some conscience, even if along the way there's much pointless killing which inspires mainly sentiments such as "glad it wasn't me" and "nice explosion!"

   Installation was easy and without problems for me. A few users have had problems with particular hardware, but it appears that Particle Systems has solved all of these with patches or instructions at the Independence War Web Page, which also maintains news, demo, FAQs and a discussion board frequented by responsive staff from the design team - the way it should be. My install uses under 75MB HD space. Saved game size is negligible. The game comes on three CDs, and for those with enormous free disk space, there is a full install option. Regular install calls for very infrequent disk swaps. I think you can play through the entire game without ever having to return to a previously-inserted disk (that is: one insertion per disk). The exception would be alternating between playing the later campaign missions and the separate Instant Action mode.

   The 120-page manual, with clear black & white game images and other illustrations, provides a good and fairly complete explanation of installation, the game setting, game controls, techniques, tactics and technical information about your ship and its technologies. In comparison to many other games' excuses for documentation, it's quite well done, although the layout sometimes disoriented me, not all of the technology was fully explained (such as how to dock the Mini Service Drone), and one important piece of information was accidentally left out: how to read and use the energy allocation control called the Tactical Resource Interface. The FAQ on the Independence War Web Page explains this and other things quite well, however. The game also includes a color-coded keyboard map (good thing, too - almost every key does something different) and a full-color wall poster featuring a ship identification chart that shows the relative sizes of the ships and some statistics on each, from the 18-meter S-Fighter to the 2130-meter Powell-class mega-transporter. A little additional information on your bridge crew, technology, and other ships can be found in the ship's computer during play; the interface within the game is a very slow HTML browser, which one can avoid by reading the files with one's web browser, starting at C:\Program Files\Particle Systems\Independence War\psg\resource\text\docs\Home.htm

   As you can see from the screenshots, Independence War features many lush visuals, including detailed textures, lighting effects, fiery debris-filled explosions, laser blasts, missile trails, burning damage points, individual navigation thrusters, shield deflection effects, pretty planets, stars and optional dramatic nebula backgrounds. The package also offers an impressive fourteen-minute introductory animated movie that sets the stage for the game's story. Cutscenes of equal quality adorn the scenarios at dramatic moments. The game graphics are nearly as good as the animations. 3Dfx Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 cards are supported to good effect, but a first-rate software mode does quite well without them - it's less flashy but still looks very good and requires less processor power than the 3Dfx modes (most other games run faster with 3Dfx). My system just met the minimum requirements for 3Dfx but I had little cause for complaint - jerks and stalls were infrequent.

   Music is used unobtrusively in some cutscenes, to add drama and distinguish them from music-less play mode. Sound effects are generally quite well done, although I found the engine whine from nearby fighters grating (individual sound effect files can be removed or replaced with others). Dialogue recordings are fairly well done, but at times the actors don't seem to really know what their lines mean, and they frequently don't sound very serious or mature. At one point the actor who speaks for your character whines like a spoiled brat about his space ship being taken away, because he has to escort a scientific mission and needs to take orders from the lead scientist.

   Independence War features fast real-time action combined with an interesting, well-developed simulation of sci-fi space technologies that require understanding, clear thinking, and tactics that make sense.

Controls
   As the manual says, you can jump right into the "Infinity Battle" scenario right away, but you will die very quickly. Independence War requires skill and understanding, and one must begin by learning the controls, a few at a time. The seventy-six keyboard commands and realistic zero-gravity vacuum flight model will probably take some getting used to, not to mention effective tactics and fighting maneuvers. While the game can be controlled completely by keyboard, I highly recommend a joystick with a throttle and as many programmable buttons as possible. I used a stick with a throttle, six buttons and a four-way hat control. I assigned the hat to lateral thrusters (so I could thrust vertically and/or to the side while turning and pitching... other keys could be used to yaw and thrust at the same time, if I wanted to get the whole crew sick) and the six buttons to the keyboard commands I used most - this helped me quite a bit. Key commands can also be remapped by editing the game's KEYBIND.INI file.

   Very considerately, the game includes a series of fairly comprehensive training missions where an instructor guides you through the use of most of your ship's systems and various common maneuvers and tasks. These are well-done and worthwhile, and can be repeated or skipped altogether.

   Although they take some getting used to, and may not make sense at first, after some experience the controls become handy and usable under pressure. The flight mechanics may not seem entirely realistic at first, until you understand that the default thruster mode automatically tries to compensate against inertia to keep you moving forward at your requested speed. Enable manual thrusters for a wild ride and a new challenge (or to help perform erratic or unusual maneuvers).

   A small rough spot in the interface is the Virtual Bridge, which shows what your ship's bridge looks like as if you were standing there looking over your crew's shoulders as they repetitively try to look busy at the controls. While scenic, it has no practical use and there's no escape key except to use the mouse to click on a console, and my mouse would always first rotate my view to the Engineer's console before letting me click to exit. Also, launching a remote-controlled missile or engaging remote log-on to take over the helm of another ship also displays an animation to mark the change of reference, and this takes some time. However, I learned that these delays actually take no game time - the universe holds still while viewing these. Also, you never have go there unless you press the wrong key.

   A more important criticism of the controls might be that you have to handle them all yourself, with practically no assistance from your three bridge crew members, except when they deliver mission-specific scripted statements. It's part of the design that you play the captain, pilot, gunner and engineer, and it is usually more fun to do it all yourself, once you get the hang of it. It would be nice if they at least pointed out important non-scripted events that you might not notice, like imminent collisions or damage conditions. Another shortcoming, which fortunately hasn't been a real problem in my experience, is that if you take over a ship or missile with remote manual control, then your ship becomes uncontrolled - unable to fight back or run away if attacked.