A wasted opportunity. "It could have been a champion."

Pro: Amazing potential

Con: Provox hired a incompetent and zero-experience novice to do the high-level game design, destroying the game in the process.

It's just criminal to take a game with so much potential and just torpedo it in such an obscene manner. What's really amazing is how much effort went into the game on the basic stuff -- engine, art, etc. -- and how little effort went into directing this to a great gaming experience. In the grand scheme of things, it takes relatively little money to hire a good writer/designer, compared to the rest of the investment. If only they had done that, this game would absolutely sing. As it is, it sinks like a stone.

The game really does not play well. There's a lot of unpolished and apparently untested aspects of the game. For instance navigation is very difficult/tedious. You cannot set waypoints or ride in tradelanes, autopilot doesn't work, and it takes like 5-10 minutes (in real time) for the jump drive to recharge. So traveling from point A to point B is about as tedious as sitting there watching a large file download from the internet.

It's difficult to believe that the game was betatested before it was released. The assumption would be that the publisher rushed the game towards the end, but that doesn't explain the horrible choices they made about the writing. Being rushed doesn't imply that you'll hire somebody who is horribly underqualified and incompetent.

They hired an incompetent 19-year-old student with zero experience to do the entire mission design and writing. He did even worse than you'd imagine. Here's the mission outline for the first two missions of the main campaign:

Mission 1:
Perform a dogfight against two ships. (highly difficult)
Perform a "scan" five times in a row. (highly tedious)

Mission 2:
Perform a dogfight against one ship.

Yes, that's it. Zero thought went into this. I'm not even going to get started on how bad the writing is. As another reviewer said, "A Saturday morning cartoon looks like Hamlet in comparison with the story." (Brett Todd -- gamesradar.com)

There's no tutorial of any kind, and learning how to deal with the command interface is awkward. And even once you get good at it, it's still awkward. For instance, every time you tractor in some goods (from a kill), you have to go to the inventory menu to select which ones you'll keep. There's no way to select "take all" by default. So every single kill essentially requires a tedious menu to deal with.

Some may believe that a patch will fix major problems, but the major problems are so major that this is exceedingly unlikely. They would have to rewrite the entire campaign, for example. That's not something one can simply patch.

The game is badly balanced. On discussion boards everywhere people are complaining that it's really difficult to win the very first battle. This is because the developers didn't try to make the game playable, let alone enjoyable. (From a game-design point of view, the first mission is supposed to show you how to play the game; it's not supposed to be a highly difficult trial.)

From a "bare simulation" point of view, the game is playable, and a patch might even make it enjoyable in a very limited sense, although the stuff that *badly* needs fixing will never be fixed by a patch.

But even if the game becomes playable, I recommend boycotting the game. Developers need to learn that it's not cool to destroy a game with so much potential. -- That post-purchase concerns like "fun" are as important as pre-purchase advertising. The writer needs to be fired immediately. And the person who hired him needs to be shot at dawn.

Do not even consider buying this game until you have tried the demo! You'll easily see from the demo how badly the game is designed.

Thanks for the mini review. Such a shame. :\

oh well--- next!

breslin, so which space sim do you think is good, ad why?

Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos, for me, with few additional mods and tweaks it could be the best space sim. IMHO of course

Mission1 is about fighting pirates and to activate satellites. Mission2 is about to kill a betrayer. Mission3 is about to help a research ship near a anomaly (red hole) who is attacked by pirates. Then you have to activate communication/research satellites. Listen to the talking actors then you understand the story!

Yes, IWar2 is a great game!

@piper, I'm one of those folks who plays games as thoroughly as possible. My favorite non-sim game is probably Metroid Prime, as I like to do sequence-breaking and low-percentage runs, to see what's possible on the extreme.

To my knowledge, the best space-sim for this sort of thing is Freelancer. I've written a number of walkthroughs for pushing Freelancer to the extreme, which you can find on gamefaqs and elsewhere.

Normally for this sort of thoroughgoing-play to be really rewarding, the game has to be extremely finely crafted. Freelancer is certainly that.

Cool breslin, just wanted to hear your reasoning (you bashed Spaceforce pretty good).

For me, it's free play and that's why I didn't continue to play IWar2. I tried FreeLancer, got bored pretty quick. I just re-installed x3.

Sorry Guys but I've been playing this one for the last 3 or four days and I totally disagree with the statement about this being bad...

I'm really knocked out with the high degree of craftsmanship that's been done here...

The graphics are state of the art. And I personally think that the gameplay as well as the entire concept is outstanding....

But the fact is that I'm almost positive that this DVD needs to be run on a very good system in order to get the the demanding frame rates and the very sharp detailed graphis rendered in vivid colors...

I personally have a fairly high end system .. intel Core 2 Duo e6600.. Asus P5N32-E SLI 680i, BFG 8800 640,OC X2 running in SLI....

There's also been some issues with the Joystick's not working properly, and again I think this has a lot to do with the quality of equipment being use, I have a Thrustmaster Cougar that been modified using IJ's NXT.. So I've had no problems mapping the commands... so this is a lot of fun being able to lock on a Space Pirate and watching his ship go nuclear... LOL

I like the way that you're able to win credits and build your shpt is buy a new one all together.. So there's partially no limit to what you can do here as well as being able to climb the rank structure....

This reminds me of Jump Gate from some 10 years ago only about 100 times better... The only thing that I find truly lacking is a Multi-Player option, and that might just happen?

This game deserves a second look.. The game has improved since the Demo's release, and there's a patch that should appear sometime next week. So yes there's a steep learning curve, But if you've ever tried flight simulation this is almost as teckky and just as much fun...

~S~

Blaze

i'll possibly buy it in a year or two when it's dirt cheap, fully patched, and hopefully improved by user mods

the demo was annoying

Fair enough, but the statement was not "SF is bad," but rather, "SF was bad for reasons X, Y, Z." So to an extent, it sounds like you're disagreeing with the former statement, without really addressing the problems named.



If we're talking about high-level game-design, which is where I'm targeting my criticism, this game's "craftsmanship" rates "shockingly worse than mediocre." If we're talking about low-level game-design and graphics, sure I can agree with you.

I mean, the gameplay is a bit Frankenstein-ish, in the sense that it doesn't come together smoothly. The game is composed of a few good ideas individually, but combined in a way that doesn't make a beautiful whole. Basic combat is fine, but badly needs to be rebalanced, and the weapon system needs to be redesigned. So on a low level it's fine, but really wasn't worked up well. -- Which is odd: most of the work for any game of this sort is the low-level design. It's like the designers essentially skipped the easy-yet-extremely-important part.

And the graphics, while impressive to most folks who don't make a study of "state of the art," are actually nothing special by contemporary standards. Take a look at any modern space sim, and you'll see that SFRU doesn't really distinguish itself.

Some of what might make it seem graphically impressive is the modern equivalent of early-70's space-movie trick photography (OMG you can see the strings holding up that model! ROFL). For instance, the models seem exceptionally high resolution -- and they have this weird bumpy surface. You might not think these matters unrelated, but this is what's known as "parallax mapping," also known as "offset mapping." It's a technique for simulating more detail in a surface than is actually there. As well as introducing lighting variations it also distorts the texture as you look at the surface from different angles so that it really looks bumpy when in fact it isn't, which makes it seem highly detailed (in well-eroded granite), when in fact it is not.

That said, I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy the illusion. Please do! -- But you might not want to confuse it with a "high degree of craftsmanship."