Forum Overview :: Reviews :: I-war1: Good, I-war2: Bad

[quote name="FA-BI-OH!"]I-war 1 was an enjoyable "realistic" space combat sim. Don't worry about the realism part, it mostly just means that you're piloting a large cross between a capital ship and a fighter (corvette) that must obey the laws of intertia, although even there you have autopilot systems that adjust for them (and even THEN you can shut them off if you want to coast or "slide"). It manages to feel like it's as close as you can get to actual space combat without dipping into the dreaded anal retentive flight sim. Dogfight elements are added in thanks to the unique shield system. The shields in the game are energy projections that only cover about a 4 square meter area, one for the top and another covering the bottom. They automatically rotate to face your selected target. Your mission is to maneuver your 200 ton ship to keep your shields facing the enemy. Target what you think is the current threat then try to dodge the others.Good damage model where instead of "full strength until you suddenly explode at 0% health" you have ship systems go offline as you get damaged. Your horizontal thrusters may go offline, engines lose power, weapons sluggish or offline, etc. Take a crippling barrage and go spinning out of control praying that your allies can cover you long enough for your damage control (which you can control and prioritize) can get you back into the fight. Mission design was superb. Does a great job of making them all unique instead of just variations of "kill everyone". I guess it would be the space sim equivalent to Call to Duty, the missions are heavily scripted, but they lead to such fun situations you really don't care. There are a lot of "puzzle" objectives, most work, a couple don't. Strikes the perfect balance of putting enough competent AI friendlies with you so that they play a signifcant part in the battle and make you feel like part of a larger conflict without letting them do all the work for you. Gives you a great loadout of interesting and varied weapons for each mission and never stiffs you by not giving you the loadout you need for the mission (unless it's intentional to make you come up with a creative puzzle solution). Best of all, you don't have to spend dozens of hours running boring cargo missions to save up enough money for these gadgets. The taxpayers have your back. Why the hell do people think Privateer was so fun? Get jumped by the same 4 pirates at every single jump point until hour 20 where you could buy the best ship and best equipment so you could focus on the main game and realize that it's still not as fun as the original Wing Commander. Story? Decent job. One of the best intro movies ever (an epic 15 minutes!). Keeps the characters as blue collar crewmen and doesn't try to make them into retarded stock sci-fi cut outs. The only real complaint is the lack of in-mission saves or checkpoints. This gets especially annoying on difficult missions that start off with a 10 minute event that you must sit through before any combat starts. Die on the tricky combat and sit through the unskippable in-mission "cutscene" again. I-war2 manages to chuck everything good about the original right out the fucking airlock. A sophomoric "corporations are BAD!" plot, a lame boring intro, Sci-Fi channel original movie caliber one-trait characters, tons of weapons but only one worthwhile, absolutely ridiculous counter intuitive puzzle missions whose solution has nothing to do with the hints the game gives you, the gayest cargo collection and economics model out of any Privateer game ever, console-ized interface, dumbed down "hull percentage" damage model with the old "perfect health until sudden death" system, AI allies that are either do the entire mission for you or are totally useless, retarded AI and scripts that breaks most strategies into how much you can exploit glitches (wait until a freighter gets stuck at a jump point and watch as all the escorts jump in and get destoryed as they ram into the freighter and other freighters ram into it and suffer the same freight and dump their cargo. Sit and laugh and more and more ships jump in and you have hundreds of loose cargo containers floating around, all from doing nothing and letting the AI kill itself), gay gay GAY missions with a high chance of the scripting breaking them (the worst was when you have to follow bandits back to their homebase, but all neutral and friendly ships open fire on bandits so the bandits would get destroyed by ambient ships when they tried to use jumpgates, which forced you to gun down every friendly ship in sight in order to protect the evil hostile bandits long enough to track them back), the actual missions are usually braindead easy while the TRAINING missions are extremely difficult to near impossible (there really isn't a single "real" mission in the game that's as tough as the training missions), and there's some retarded speed limit near space stations that you must obey during your SWASHBUCKLING LIFE OF PIRACY! Fuck I-war 2. I still have that never submitted long review I wrote 3 years(!) ago. Email me if you want it. Does the Deluxe version in include the "Defiance" expansion for the original? That one was okay, but was ridiculously difficult until the later missions became near impossible and not worth the keyboard bashing frustration. It did add in mission save points though, although half the time it wouldn't save in the parts you needed them to.[/quote]