This game is not your average space shooter where you just fly and blow up things in space. It uses Newtonian physics, so you will have to learn how to steer your ship in space and when to accelerate and decelerate. Just like in real space. :-)

This may not be for everyone and I can respect that - but I love the kind of realism this game gives me.

I also recommend playing this game with a controller or even better, a real joystick. That's what it was intended to be played with.

I-War 2 has its flaws. The missions are easy at the beginning, but after a while you will get lost without instructions. Also, the starmap is horrible and your pirate buddy Jafs is constantly nagging. All of these can be solved with mods or a bit of reading, though! :-)

The game may also have some bugs if you play it on later systems than XP, but these can also be solved.
(Edit- year 2022: Make sure to install the newly-released community patch that fixes two very massive mission script bugs!)

If you want a realistic simulator with awesome music from Christopher Mann and a cool story I highly recommend this game! But read my beginners guide first:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=444209295

This game is sweet, especially for its age!

Highly recommend playing with keyboard/joystick.

Important: You need to manually set your controls to keyboard only if not using a joystick. You can do this in the options menu.

I am extremely glad to see this game on Steam as well. I have played this many times since its release and each year I hope to play it at least once. I own several copies, on disc as well as digital. It would be great to see an I-War 3 project revitalised, because the series is too good not to have sequels.

While you don't need to play the previous games at all to enjoy the story (mostly unrelated to the prequels), I recommend all the games. They are space simulators packed with action and adventure. The campaigns are all great, diverse, and challenging. The story itself is quite nice: you are trapped in an ever-escalating war between Marauders, Corporations, and independents of the cluster. While employing diplomacy and weapons to get through it and make yourself a living, you get to uncover some other surprising mysteries of the universe. Compared to other space simulators, I feel that the quality of any I-War game in the series is much higher. I was not able to enjoy any other space-related games since playing the series. While I-War 2 may be difficult to master at first, once you do the gameplay is very rewarding to say the least. The game was very well built as well: it natively supported widescreen, at least 5.1 audio, and runs flawlessly on modern hardware. In short, my favourite game of all time.

The original game is amazing. Steam version has lots of unnecessary bugs. The game is available on other platforms. CD/DVD on start can be bypassed by creating a virtual disk from any iso (the game start fine after). Compatibility settings to XP and run as Administrator have to be set on game shortcut (see other comments). But finally the game crashes. In the end is just not worth it to buy from here. Steam quality check bar is just too low.

A great game that holds up very well. It's one of the rare occasions where you can play as a pirate in space. Unfortunately I witness some graphic glitches and stuttering if there are many ships on the screen. Maybe it's because of Win 10. Who knows. It's still playable though.

For those who own a boxed version: You can copy all language files over to the Steam folder and your game will be completely localized including video and audio.

Everyone who is spoiled by games like Freelancer should search for a file called "mouse.ini". With it, you can play the game with mouse and keyboard. That works surprisingly well with a mouse set around 1600 dpi.

Get it and enjoy one of the best space sims out there! If it's not too hard for you ;)

Such an all times great game!

It even runs perfectly on my Windows 10 new age PC in 2020, nineteen years after its release.
Ofcourse for an old game like this to run on a new PC there are a few hoops you might have to jump.
Not much on my case

Like
Game starts in low res and as soon as you choose the correct resolution for your monitor the screen reaches out of bounds and touches your desk :-p, you crash exit the game and then you restart just to find that not even the mouse works because as soon you move it it dissapears. Screen out of bounds, mouse dissapearing ... mess
well not..

this was an easy one to solve

Solution:
First
After instalation create a shortcut on your desktop to point to the game .exe "loader.exe"
Path in my case "D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos\bin\release\loader.exe"
In the target box of the shortcut use the path ending with the argument -ac iwar2.icGame -dl 3
so the whole target should display:
"D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos\bin\release\loader.exe" -ac iwar2.icGame -dl 3
in my case

and then make some very quick compatibility adjustments to the shortcut

Set it to "Run this program in Compatiblity mode for Windows XP SP3"
Check * "Disable fullscreen optimizations" and also "Run this program as an Administrator"
Click ' Change DPI setting button and and on that click both options given
click ok and then again ok and voila
there you have it.

The above should resolve the issues with choosing the correct resolution and any mouse dissapearing issues.

After that use your modified link to start the game and avoid the steam menu sellection as it will run the game "as is" with no compatibility settings that you just made.

I use 1920 X 1080 and it's top to bottom left to right, perfect

cons to this method: The game runs perfectly but is not measured by the steam site. (Minor for me) Will probably solve it in the future


And then (or maybe before) you focus your attention on the fact that the game asks for you to insert a disk or ales there is no single player mode and other cool stuff.

There I did some research on this. It was an easy fix too!
This game is heavily codely depended on the existence of a real cd/dvd player hardware device to play. But actually all the files and the videos are allready there installed in the game folder. But seriously it still asks for a play disk. Actually it doesnt care what kind of a play disk. Because it is allready patched and it just wants cookie

SO give it the cookie it asks for.

Solution
If you dont have a CD/DVD Drive to load any type of Disk into it in order for it to play run any iso emulator programm like WinCDEMU or your favorite emu and load any "iso" disk available in you pc. Like a linux Puppy.iso (my case).
All should spring to life when you run it again.
There will be a single player mode as all of the other game cool choices

Its good to have a joystick arround.

The game still rocks after 19 years.
The story mode is very ingaging

Must be one of the best space simulators I've ever flew. And still fly
The Newtonian principals in this game are amazing and even that I've tried many space sims I never got one to even compare with this old school space sim game.

The graphics are still holding pretty good minus the videos wich now might seam a bit outdated
Also there are tones of modification and supporting sites.

Seriously old school and mewbe space sim fans shoold buy this game.
I strongly recomend it
Its great and very cheap for what it is.

This was an excellent game back in it's day and would still hold up today if it didn't constantly crash in the mid game. Just like the original IWAR, it crashes when jumping through L-points, and there are no patches to be found.

Worse still, they failed to put a disclaimer in the sale option that you would be required to pay a third party for a virtual cd/dvd drive to play it. You can get temporary "trials" for one, but you can only use those for so long. They should have INCLUDED one in the software package for this game if they're going to charge any more than FREE for it... Borders on THEFT in my mind.

20+ years have passed since its release, but it's still one of the best space sims ever made.

One of my favorite games back when it was released. I bought this game hoping to play it again but it will not work on a modern OS (Windows 10). There is absolutely NO single player option unless you download a third party tool and ISO. Also, it appears that there is a bug in the second act even if you do get it to work. Really crappy...

it may say that i have less than half an hour in this game, but i have lost YEARS to this game.. it is extremely amazing for its time and even to today's standards still huge in my eyes for map size and playable area... if the company would msg me and say they were remaking this game id be one of the first to buy it all over again!!