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Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: September 18, 2001


Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos (I-War 2) is an ambitious game. Like the little girl with a curl, when it is good, it is very, very good—and when it is bad, it is horrible. I-War 2 takes the flight sim aspects of I-War 1, puts them in an even prettier graphics engine, retains a huge plot, and also gives the player near-total freedom of movement and action. The closest analogue is Privateer 2: big plot, but freedom to go off and do whatever you please in and around it. Depending on what you want from your space sims, I-War 2 will either keep you engrossed for months, or have you fleeing in frustration.

Passing a star

The Plot

The game drops you into the role of Cal Johnston. In the initial sections of the game, you play as a 12 year old kid, whose father is murdered by a corporate executive. You escape to your pirate grandmother’s hidden base with the assistance of a personality construct of Jefferson Clay, who was a war hero several hundred years ago during I-War 1, and who has sadly lost some of his edge, though none of his savvy.

Soon, though, you get arrested and imprisoned, and the game fast-forwards 15 years——when you and four pals break out of jail, steal a tug, and head back into the piracy business. Major plots points are advanced with cutscenes, which are generally good visually and provided with good voice-acting. The small videos of your buddies speaking to you in flight are distinctly improved over the demo version, and while they aren’t great, they are not longer a detriment to the game.

Home Sweet Home

Physics

The flight model plants I-War 2, like its predecessor, firmly in the sim end of space games. Forget anything you learned flying other spaceflight games such as Wing Commander, X-Wing, or Freespace: I-War 2, like I-War 1, is Fully Newtonian Compliant™.

The ships in I-War have a lot of mass, thrusting produces a vector, and if you want to cancel that vector, you need to apply an equal amount of opposite thrust. While the game defaults to “assisted flight”, in which the ship automatically tries to cancel out all your thrusts after you finish applying them, you can toggle this on and off (or just temporarily disable it) for more complex maneuvers. The skilled pilot will find that it’s often useful to point your weapons in a direction other than where your ship is moving.

In addition to this Newtonian motion model, used for close-range maneuvers and for combat, most ships also sport an “LDS” drive, which allows the ship to blaze along at speeds approaching c. Some ships also have a “capsule drive”, which allows faster-than-light travel between Lagrange Points (points in space where the gravity of two bodies cancels each other out).

I-War 1 claimed to deliver “a fully working starship in every box”, and did a very good job of coming through on that promise. I-War 2 is just as good at creating a simulation of spaceflight. The modeling is good enough that you can feel the difference when you fly different craft, and when you add different reaction drives to them or try to lug around a cargo pod.

Lagrange Point Traffic

All of this technology is backed by a lot of explanation. As in the first I-War, the explanation is not just window-dressing. Understanding how the systems work in the game can lead to success on the battlefield. The political background is equally detailed, with a large number of factions and alliances which all factor into the main plot.

Supporting all this background further, space is populated by lots of ships that are going about their business. Convoys of freighters, from small utility lifters to massive megafreighters, move from place to place, dropping off or picking up cargo as they go, while military, police, and corporate security vessels patrol around. If you want, you can simply follow them about, watching them at work. Better still, the whole thing looks gorgeous in a way the screenshots don’t entirely capture: the graphics are better in motion than in stills.

Two ships headed through the Lagrange Point

Yo Ho Ho!

Since the game puts you in the role of a space pirate, sooner or later you’re going to take a potshot at those pretty ships. You’ll have a wide variety of weapons at your disposal, and you get to fit out your ship yourself with whatever you can steal or trade for. Furthermore, the base you inherit from your grandmother includes the ability to build any fighters or missiles you can get blueprints for.

So you head out, choosing a likely Lagrange Point or station at which to choose your prey. If you’re close enough, you can scan the cargo containers, so you attack a cargo vessel with loot you need for your trades. Ambush the escorts, terrify the freighter into dropping its cargo, and call in your buddy Jafs to haul it away. Easy? No. Combat is not just pretty, but also extraordinarily dangerous. Make a wrong move, and the enemy will blow you apart. However, your success depends less on having the reflexes of a crazed weasel than on your ability to think tactically in three dimensions while taking into account the weapons systems and defences on your and your enemy's ships. It can be fast-paced, but the combat engages your mind as much as your hands.

Moving to engage Marauder corvettes

Gameplay Options

I-War 2 also sports multiplayer via Internet or LAN, with deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and bomb tag modes available. If you cannot find enough team-mates, you can add bots into the game. For those needing a quick adrenaline fix, there’s Instant Action, which drops you into space to see how long you can stay alive.

External view of a combat

Good News / Bad News

An excellent space-flight simulation tied to a deep, rich background, with great freedom of action and a reasonably good plot to boot – sounds great? Mostly, it is. There are, unfortunately, minor and major gripes. Relatively minor gripes are matters such as the difficulty of selecting destinations from the starmap. You have to switch through the listings of each system to find your destination, but there can be dozens of sites in each system! This often becomes very awkward and should have been better designed. The trading interface can also be awkward at times, especially when the listings pile up and you’re trying to figure out what other potential trade would need the same widgets you’re considering handing off for a given piece of kit. These pale in the face of the bigger gripes, though.

The Engineering Interface

The big gripes are things that may leave you hating I-War 2. Please be warned that I-War 2 is difficult. Not “barely made it through that mission” difficult, but “have to try this bloody mission for the thirty-seventh time” difficult. Moreover, you can potentially die in accidental collisions at warp points, terminating your mission suddenly and rather unfairly. I freely confess that in order to get through the game in time to generate a timely review, I made extensive use of cheat codes available on the net.

If you are not in a hurry, the difficulty may not be a problem, since the patient can develop the skills to defeat the game on its own terms. What’s much less easy to forgive is that the scripted missions are often puzzles, and the clues to those puzzles can be extraordinarily obscure. If you get stumped, you can turn to a walkthrough which can help you avoid a lot of confusion.

More confusion, ironically, is created by I-War 2’s freeform nature. The game spoon-feeds you through the first couple of missions, leading you to expect to be gently weaned into the wider world. Instead, after you get spoon-fed a mission to teach you basic piracy, you’re then unceremoniously dumped into the world to make your own way with little guidance, and some of that guidance is confusing. The game won’t provide you with more scripted missions until you’ve made a number of successful piracy runs—but there’s nothing in the game that suggests you simply need to Go Forth and Pillage for a bit in order to keep the plot moving. The frustrations of exceptionally difficult missions, obscure clues, and the lurches between “scripted missions available” and “no scripted missions available” drag I-War 2 down.

Jafs collecting cargo

At its best, I-War 2 is a superb game, and it often displays its best side to the player. Unfortunately, the frustrations of the game are equally real. If you loved Elite or Privateer, or want a spaceflight simulator, you’ll probably be willing to overlook I-War 2’s flaws in favor of its better aspects. If you lack patience with a steep learning curve, and are unwilling to be stumped by obscure missions or to swallow enough pride to use a walkthrough to help yourself, then steer clear. I-War 2’s freedom and simulation value come at a price.

Heavy corvette and ring planet

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