Independence War™ II: Edge of Chaos

Unfortunately I can't recommend this game at any price because there's no way to customize the controls. This is an unforgivable mistake for a space flight game.

I-War 1 was a take on the Freespace formula of linear, scripted missions to form a narrative space combat campaign. The difference being you were now controlling a corvette instead of a fighter, while (mostly) obeying the laws of Newtonian physics. It had some significant stumbling blocks (some horrendously unfair difficulty in parts, plus a near crippling lack of checkpoints when restarting long missions), but I overall enjoyed the experience. A good story and some well thought out mission design. I-War 2 takes that and turns it into an open world Elite/Privateer experience with a terrible story about cartoonishly evil corporations and rescuing the princess (no, really) before completely giving up at the end. The story is something to be suffered through and only be worth it if the gameplay was really, really good. It isn't. No thought was put into making the open world system work. Hostility triggers are broken. AI traffic is broken (your best option for pirating is to simply wait by warp gates until the AI of 2 cargo ships inevitably crash into each other to explode and spill their cargo everywhere, which you can scoop up without triggering the police). The economy is broken, to the point that there is no system of currency and all transactions in this far future interstellar society are done on the barter system. Each purchase requires specific items to be traded, and you have to luck out picking up exact items to trade. It's not commerce, it's a crafting system. And a terrible one. In essence, I-War 2 is all the bad of I-War 1 with none of the good. The story missions are padded out with broken open world grinding filler, and the story was written by a 12 year old. Avoid.

The best space opera single player ever (multi available) . Work very well on Win 7 64. Interesting free goodies but more mods would be appriciated (location point, ...) . The last website with mods for this games is closed.

Doesn't even make it to the opening cinematic. Let alone the main menu. Mouse pointer on a black screen. Non functional.

The original Independence War is known as one of the best space sims ever. The use of a Newtonian physics system for flight and technologies that seemed possible set it above the rest of the genre which always seemed to dissolve into an arcade shooter. The downside was a steep learning curve and a game that was hard to master. Edge of Chaos maintains the tradition but adds an open world. It's epic story is aided by space combat that holds true to the original's flight model, but has been made more approachable for the general public.