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

Flight Physics
   Unlike practically all other recent real-time space action games, Independence War accurately models 3D maneuvers in zero-gravity and zero-friction, with translational and rotational inertia. Ships' computers do usually automatically compensate for inertia, but this is done with actual thrusters modeled and visible on the ships, and they certainly can't compensate immediately for high-speed maneuvers. Fortunately, auto-pilot controls are also available for maneuvering in relation to other ships, and for docking with them.

   Aspects of the flight physics that aren't so accurate include gravity fields and atmospheres. Gravity fields simply aren't included. Particle Systems' Stephen Robertson wrote in a message-board discussion that "Orbital Mechanics were originally in several of the missions (including two that were pulled before release) and were found to confuse the player, and make the missions even more difficult." He feels that gravity would complicate more than it would add to this design, and he has a point. Certainly new computer navigation assistance would be in order. It's not a conspicuous or problematic omission, but some scenarios do take the player close to planets, and I feel gravity would be a nice addition to this game that prides itself on its realistic flight physics. Similarly, atmospheric effects have been abstracted - instead of gradually becoming more dense with proximity and speed, contact with an atmosphere simply destroys any ship. Again, realistic atmospheres would have been a nice touch, and this abstraction makes at least part of one scenario a little silly (in which you have to watch out for the atmosphere of Earth's moon). However, these omissions don't really mar the game's overall excellence.

Combat System
   Ship versus ship fighting is Independence War's main course, and it serves it very well. It's rich fare - if one ignores the manual's warning and jumps right into combat, it will seem just like confusing wholesale slaughter. However, experience reveals that understanding of the game's technologies, tactics, and the situation at hand are the proper utensils for the more difficult situations. Scenarios that seem impossible at first are made possible by understanding and a clever plan that makes sense.

   Weapons systems include particle beam cannons (PBCs), various types of automatically- and manually-guided missiles, mines, drones, and shielded (or unshielded) ramming. Not a huge amount of variety, but the details of their performance in different situations keep things interesting. Your ship usually has two PBCs, one facing forward and the other backwards, that can be fired either manually in rapid-fire mode, or in less-frequent but more powerful blasts that are automatically aimed by the computer, and which can cover a fairly large arc on each side of the ship, allowing one to face in one direction (for shielding and applying the main thrusters) while engaging enemies in other directions. Missiles have longer range and can track a target in any arc, but they can be shot down, evaded or spoofed. Some missiles carry special payloads that can tag an enemy ship for long-range surveillance, disrupt enemy ship systems, or generate a large field that prevents Linear Displacement drive System (LDS) travel (with which one could escape a battle). "Ripple" targeting mode allows you to keep multiple enemies busy with salvoes of independently-targeted homing missiles.

   Defensive systems include shields, missile-spoofing flares, and LDS drives. Shields are limited to covering certain areas of a ship, and can only track one attacker at a time. They can also be amplified briefly in anticipation of an impact. Missile-spoofing flares are launched to present a target that incoming automatically-guided missiles will believe is your ship and hit instead of you.

   LDS drives provide speedy escapes and also by their nature make a ship almost impossible to damage. They never seem to be rendered unusable even by the most extreme damage - damage to them simply renders the ship unable to move quickly with them, which means a crippled ship can engage LDS to effect repairs while almost immune to attack. An LDS Interrupter missile will end this sanctuary, but the AI often doesn't have or use LDS Interrupter missiles, and I've never seen it use LDS to protect itself from destruction except by flight.

   Ship types range from small fighters and ships smaller than your corvette to much larger and more powerful destroyers, cruisers, transports and carriers of various types. It may be almost impossible for your ship to destroy much larger and more powerful enemies without tricks or special weapons, but your ship is faster and more maneuverable, and you are rarely expected to try. Occasionally it is possible to fly other ships by means of Remote Log-In.

   Tactics involve such elements as surprise, strength in numbers, special weapons, understanding and effective use of weapons versus defense systems, and various maneuvers designed to match your weapons to your enemies' weaknesses. For instance, since shields can only track one attacker at a time, paring up with a friendly ship to attack the same target can overwhelm their shields, when a single ship might be unable to do significant damage. Conversely, when engaging multiple enemies it makes sense to angle your ship so that your attackers are facing different shields, rather than all attacking you through the arc of one, and so that they hit you in front where your shields are more capable. Players must develop new tactics and solutions to unique problems as the campaign progresses, since new technologies and situations appear in practically every scenario.

   One part of the combat system that I feel could easily have been better is the damage and repair system. It's almost very good. Your ship's systems are interdependent in interesting ways, and their operation and location within the ship are modeled. They can take different levels of damage which affect ship performance in logical ways, and your ship has four damage control teams that you can manually reassign to work on damaged systems in whatever order you choose. Readouts show system power, damage and function levels, and time estimates for repair.

   Wait - the damage and repair system sounds excellent, right? Well yes in theory, except for three points that go a long way to limit its realism and its interest in practice, spoiling what would otherwise be a very interesting aspect of play. First, heavy damage very often takes out every system on the ship, and the effects of the damage are usually that the system does nothing until repaired, except the LDS drive which usually allows you to coast in invulnerability while your crew repairs the ship, a trick the AI never learns. Second, damage to most single systems is repairable in a matter of seconds, and all damage is completely repairable in a matter of minutes, no matter how many times you damage everything (unless the ship actually explodes). Third, the damage control interface involves dragging a sluggish mouse pointer from the system you want repaired to the repair team you want to use, which often takes almost as long as it does for the crew to repair a system. One wonders how the repair teams manage to sprint up and down the 162-meter hull, examine the damage and get their tools out so fast, and where all the spare parts come from.

   Realism aside, these aspects of damage and repair mean that damage management rarely comes into play in an interesting way, and it's almost never a concern for more than a minute or two. That's really a shame, because with a little tweaking it could have added some interesting challenges and variety. This is one area which Atari's classic Star Raiders did better, offering damage that would only damage specific systems at once, with different effects on performance that would have to be worked around for some time until repairs could be made.

AI Strengths & Weaknesses
   Independence War's programmed ship captains (AI) are quite good - up to a point. After all, they can fly realistically-modeled spaceships, form battle formations, evade and conduct attacks, and destroy human players on equal terms - until the human learns good tactics and maneuvers. Enemy ships come with different levels of AI ability, from minimal competence to very skilled. Even the best AI captains aren't nearly a match for an expert human, although admittedly the human probably died numerous times to acquire his skill, even while learning to fly his ship in peaceful space (and crashing into test obstacles, ships or space stations). The AI simply never uses the tactics that an expert player learns. However, this allows the player to fulfill his role as hero of the game's story - if some AI captains aggressively used missiles, and zoomed in like a hornet on the player's rear shield for a blast of rapid point-blank PBC while keeping their own shields forward, the game would be much more difficult. Nonetheless, the scenarios do provide ample difficulty even to skilled players thanks to a competent AI combined with special situations, difficult odds and, occasionally, very difficult scenario victory conditions. A sporting expert player can also increase the challenge of fighting the AI by playing by its rules - sparing or no use of missiles and no LDS escapes.

   The friendly ships' AI sometimes seems far worse that the enemy ships'. They occasionally crash into your ship or other friendlies, often fight incompetently, with little enthusiasm, or not at all, and show very little (if any) initiative. The player often leads several friendly ships, but the orders one can give them are rather limited: Report Status, Join Formation (with the player's ship), Attack Target, Defend Target, Formate with Target, Halt, Retreat, Dock with Target. These can only be given to all of your wingmen at the same time; they can't be told to each do different things. Nor can you have them engage enemies at will - in fact it seemed to me that ordering them to defend a ship just had them float around it while ignoring the ships that were destroying it. Accidentally damaging a friendly can cause your wingmen to all suddenly attack you - usually, giving them another order will stop them.

Speed of Action & Situational Awareness
   Battles take place somewhat more slowly than in typical shoot-'em-ups, but not by much. Thanks to 23rd Century technology, your 162-meter-long, 8,520-ton ship maneuvers very quickly indeed for its size and mass. This isn't a shoot-'em-up, however, and the game provides enough time to think (which in this game you do need to do), usually, if you already know your tactics, the controls and displays, and you understand the situation. When you're first getting used to the game, it's all chaos, confusion and a screen filled with too much information at once.

   Even once you're used to the game, moments of heavy or unexpected action can be a little overwhelming. Aside from the detail, complexity, and speed of some of the situations, the game interface isn't particularly well-equipped to help you sort through a complicated situation, as the contact list quickly overflows. The list is filtered by type, with all ships and space stations one filter type, and sorted partly by range, very quickly - which means that a group of ships can quickly shuffle slots, sometimes making it impossible to calmly read the list or select particular ships. There's never enough time to use the damage control console effectively except when your ship has been disabled so that there's nothing better to do.

   With experience and patience, however, you can learn to read the chaos. Motion lines give a good feel for your movement vector, and colored trails make other ships' movements comprehensible at a glance. The numbers and symbols on the heads up display will eventually be helpful rather than distracting, and perhaps you'll even master "the orb" (a 3D radar displayed as an orb with colored radiating lines).

Learning Curve
   Independence War does require a lot of learning and practice - of piloting, instruments, ship types and technologies, and finally tactics and battle experience. This is a challenging game, requiring much learning in little steps. The training missions are very helpful. Experience, knowledge and skill make all the difference in difficult space battles. So much so that some missions will seem impossible at first until you learn tactics that work, and learn to recognize situations that suit the tactics you've learned. An expert player who returns to formerly-challenging missions will find most of them fairly easy. While this shows that the game system has depth, some players may not like having to lose repeatedly to gain the experience needed to overcome some of the early difficult missions.

   The main way to play Independence War is its single-player campaign. Well-designed unique scenarios take full advantage of the game's rich detail to present a wide variety of different situations that require both intelligent and skillful solutions. They include high-quality mission briefings and cut-scene animations. They also tell a good story along the way, which involves much more than simply fighting enemies. Missions include salvage and rescue, testing new weapons, laying mines, negotiation, exploration, and investigation of various unexplained phenomena. The story and its episodes are full of unexpected developments and adventures, beginning with your first assignment.

   The campaign includes several possible story variations, which lead to different scenarios later on, depending on what the player does during play. Although you play the game in present tense, at the conclusion of many scenarios the character you play says a few words about what happened in past tense, sometimes alluding to events to come. So the game's story is not a simulation but a re-playing of the adventures of a hero, with some room to choose your own path to glory. While the scenarios offer many chances to try different approaches and make different decisions during play, the game can only tell a limited number of stories. Therefore, some events can't be avoided, even if you replay the scenario with foreknowledge, because they are just part of the script - most of these take place in cut-scene animations.

   While all of the campaign scenarios I've seen were well-conceived, there are several that in practice can easily be aggravating, because they require the player to do certain things in a certain way, and that way isn't necessarily obvious, logical, or reasonably easy. The most common is a mission objective (save a certain ship or base, for instance) that isn't really necessary to the future plot at all - but if you fail, and you must try again and again until you succeed (unless you enable a cheat mode described in the readme). In the way one measures a puzzle game's difficulty, this rigidity adds a lot to the challenge. It also increases the steepness of the learning curve, and the frustration factor, and it makes the meaning and measure of your success somewhat irrelevant, since it doesn't record how many times you failed missions (or even died) while trying to complete them in the required way. Some of the scenarios also suffer from lack of instructions on how to perform certain actions, or have some elements that aren't so well done, but in general they are quite good.

   Another play mode is "Infinity Battle," a stand-alone scenario that provides quick, gratuitous, copious violence. Gradually, large numbers of enemy ships arrive, as do a few friendly ones including a re-supply ship with more missiles, if you can get to it before it's wiped out. Your mission is to destroy all enemy ships, which is supposed to be impossible.

    Players can also ignore their missions and fly more or less where they want to. However this isn't completely supported by the game universe. Sometimes a few incidental ships fly around in the sectors where your missions take place, and a cheat mode will allow you to plot capsule drive jumps to systems besides the ones you've been ordered to, but you won't find much going on besides what's in each mission's script.

    Independence War has no multiplayer mode. Particle Systems plans to include multiplayer in a sequel.

    Another kind of option is Arcade (as opposed to Simulation) mode. This dumbs down the game to make it more like a shoot-'em-up, so I'd recommend it only to those players who are convinced they don't like the complicated flight model and thought-requiring combat system.

    Particle Systems has released documentation on their web site that details how to write new scenarios, modify ship statistics, and edit old scenarios, so that should lead to some new scenarios. There is no editor program; scenarios are written in a delicate and complicated text scripting language. The documentation includes a legal assertion that if you distribute a scenario or an editor program that you make for the game, then you can't charge for it, and you are giving Infogrames and Particle Systems the right to modify and sell your work as they please. So as with all such work, if you have something else in mind, you should sort it out with those companies beforehand.

   Independence War is an extremely well-done space combat action adventure game with a very good story and scenarios, excellent effects, and an interesting, convincing space flight and combat system. It's not for everyone - the game requires patience, skill development, thought and understanding. While it's far more realistic than most recent sci-fi games, it's still an artful compromise between authenticity and accessible fun. Like all games it has some weak points, and it doesn't do everything everyone might want it to do, but it does so many things so well that its shortcomings are almost not worth mentioning. I highly recommend it.

The Independence War Web Page has the latest patch and two demos.

All screenshots captured exclusively with HyperSnap-DX by Hyperionics.

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