I-WAR (1) was one of my favourite games ever, I-War 2 i never finished, even after three attempts I aways gave up. The reason is that the game does not have check points or the ability to save mid-mission so if you die or fail you have to start again from scratch at your base and this can involve travel time of up to 10 or even 15 minutes to get to the actual mission start point. Now some fights are brutally difficult, but that's sort of OK, if you're skilled enough and patient enough you can usually survive after maybe one failed attempt, but where I draw the line with this is the puzzle missions and knife edge stealth missions. Some of the puzzles are far from obvious and will either kill you or fail the mission if you don't figure it out first time. Basically it is virtually impossible to figure out some of these puzzles without repeated attempts and with a 10 minute lead time to get back to the location this becomes, at least for me, unplayable. This is also true of some combat missions that require a very specific approach to succeed that is only vaguely hinted at by your adviser. Some stealth missions require you to take a particular route at less than a particular speed. You can of course throttle down to 1ms, but then you can also watch paint dry. Which is a pity because in all other respects this is a fantastic game, totally engrossing. It's almost worth buying just to do the first act or so because there the missions are relatively near your home base and quick to get to and you can really enjoy the amazing space combat, travel and story lines. All that would need to be done to make this a must play for space fans is to put checkpoints into the missions.
