Best space-sim I've played since Tie Fighter
Upon loading the game, I was greeted with a slick interface. There are relatively few options, so setting my preferences and starting a game was easy. Starting a game treated me to a beautiful cutscene. By the way, the cutscenes in this game are breathtaking; they honestly look like something a hollywood animation group would release.
Gameplay is a little tricky at first, but if you have a joystick it becomes fairly easy after some practice. It takes a little practice to master the controls, but after you do it actually becomes a great deal of fun mastering your reletively large ship. Physics act in a realistic manner, so if you are going 1 kilometer/second and make a tight turn, your momentum will carry you in the direction you were going for a few extra seconds. This can put you at an advantage when engaging hostiles because it acts as a strafing mechanism, or it can ruin you if you are heading into a space station.
The storyline does an excellent job of keeping the flow of the game going, and it offers many hours of gameplay. The greatest attraction of Independence War 2 is the open-ended nature of the game. Upon leaving your hangar, you can choose to either complete a mission, or fly around at your lesiure. Some of the best moment were on piracy missions, where I would shoot the engines off of 2 fully loaded freighters and then engage their 6 corvette escorts. Very exciting!
Grahpics are amazing, even to this day. Flying through nebulae and literally dodging your way between planets and suns when youre doing your "hyperspace" thing is not only exciting, but very beautiful. I often found myself getting sucked into a bue-white star like a moth to the flame because they were so good looking. Sound is also great, with excellent dialog and weapon and explosion sounds.
One major problem that always sticks with me when I play this game is the difficulty of dogfights and navigation. In order to navigate to a plant in another system, you must access a starmap and then select the planet. Unfortunately, the game often doesnt tell you what solar system the plant it in. So, while it will tell you what galaxy to travel to, you will need to search through dozens of stars in order to find the specific planet or space station you need. Fortunately, there are some excellent aftermarket mods that help remedy this situation by creating an easily-navigated list of star system and planets. In addition to navigation, dogfights can be extremely hard. I often found myself resorting to a couple cheats (namely the god mode cheat and the destroy targeted enemy cheat) when I was close to dying. The problem is, there is no midflight save system (meaning you must return to base to save a game) so while you only have 5 minutes left, you really dont want to die 30 minutes into a mission so god mode becomes a really attractive solution.
Overall, if you consider yourself a fan of space sims, or even just a flight sim fan with an interest in sci fi, then this is a great game for you.