This game should be superb. It should be one of the best space-sims available, even 13 years on after it's release.
The programmers of the main game code itself, the graphic designers, SFX people, music writing people at Particle Systems were geniuses.

Shame about the lower end programmers who just scripted the missions. These donkeys could not even manage
10 PRINT "BUGS! BUGS! BUGS! CRASH!"
20 GOTO 10
Without at least 30 fatal errors in their code.

This game's single player campaign is LAUGHABLY poor quality - and you will hit many unsurmountable bugs (The Dagda System bug for example) after about 15 - 20 missions. The game has NO "single player free roam" to speak of, and multiplayer servers seem non-existent anymore. I can find NO modding tools or community still alive neither - even though some relic mods from it's heyday do still exist. This single player game is pretty much all this game has, and that is utterly broken - or it was for me anyway!!!!!

PS/ That stupid "free flight" mode where you just charge about like a headless chicken under constant building up in intensity attacks - which you can barely survive more than 2 minutes on - IS NOT A "FREE ROAM" MODE!!!!!

I was even offered a refund my GOG when I first contacted customer support over this Dagda System crash bug - but I declined it, with the possibility of checking out a well known I-War 2 mod called "Torn Stars".

I wish now I had accepted their refund offer. This "Torn Stars" is UTTERLY boring and a waste of time IMHO. At the rate you make profits it would require 1000s of doing nothing but to and from trading runs from simple metal and ore mines and processing stations that will buy the ores..... and once you've spent several years doing that you find that almost ALL of I-War 2's juicy weapons systems and ship gadgets are NEVER available to buy!
"Torn Stars" only uses the basic ship systems and weapons you'd find yourself with on the first few tutorial missions in the single campaign. And you can only buy and fly just the Tug, Patcom and Corvette ships..... if it had ALL the weapons, gadgets and ships in the game - even right up to the Cruisers it would have been a different story!
And no, you can't buy any of those big freighters neither - so how you meant to carry cargo then, you ask? Well, you have to hire a freighter as a wing man! The whole system is just ill-fitting and works poorly, the programmers of Torn Stars were really trying to ram a square peg into a round hole, expecting to get I-War 2 to do something the game engine was NOT capable of. An impossible dream you could say.
Torn Stars could have been a winner. But no, you'll just spend years slowly gathering cash, and then find there is nothing new to spend it on.
Utterly pointless!!!!!

IMO this game has nothing to offer I'm afraid, just move along and look elsewhere. (And not to I-War 1 neither).
It was all promise but nothing delivered.

Of course, maybe you might not, on your system, encounter the same bugs in the campaign as I did - even so - once you've completed this campaign - that's it - nothing more to see or do.

If you really must buy this game - wait for it to be on a strong offer! DO NOT buy at full price!!!!! And even when cheap, it's at your own risk!!!!!

Feel free to read through my many other rants and raves on this forum - and please try not to be swayed by the many over optimistic comments about IWar2 that abound in this forum. Many of the other posters won't like me saying that..... but please keep a skeptical mind at all times about this game, don't get bewitched by it. I believe you'll be disappointed severely if you buy it.

Sorry, but I find your rant out of proportion, if you hate a game so much it's time to move on and play some other games or try a different hobby.
The worst is that with the damage you have done you scared away people who if they would have played it would have liked this game.
Stalker has (a lot of) bugs too and I still find it one of the best games I've played as is I-War 2.

Another thing, Thorn Stars is a mod that people made in their free time and which you can download and play for free. I'm sorry to hear that it didn't match your standards and your peptalk will certainly motivate modders all over the world, but please give those people a break, they deserve every bit of respect for making this.

For an utterly broken game - as described - I've managed to finish it three times on three different PCs, including two laptops.

Nowhere does the gamecard promise free-roam gameplay, and yet it's there. I do it at least once every playthrough, traveling wherever I want in those systems I've unlocked at that time.

I hope you get more enjoyment out of whichever title you choose to play next, but for the majority of players this game is not as you describe it.

I'll add my own experience to the pile. This is by no means a perfect, flawless game, but it is very well designed, and a lot of fun.

It's also pretty hard for some people. Be ready for a challenge. Or maybe you can act like a sputtering weirdo and make lots of posts on the internet about how bad you think the game is?

Also JMayer, I think you misunderstand the free roam mode. At the end of the game, a mod included by GOG allows you free roaming across the universe. It's not going to be like Freelancer or Elite, but it's essentially all the freedom of the base game without any campaign stuff.

The challenge mode that you're having such a hard time with is the one where you survive against waves. It's not fantastic, and it's not mean to be, it's just an arcade game where you unlock better ships as you play. It's pretty easy to hack the file and unlock those ships right away as well.

Also, from what I can tell, the online multiplayer was never terribly lively, and I don't think you can fault this 15+ year old game for not having a massive community of people for you to play against. You'd have to get some friends to play with, for sure.

I concur. It has some bugs, but much fewer (and farther between them) than the first I-war and its expansion. Fortunatelly the Dagda mission crash never happened to me (other than the stuttering five-sec-per-frame flight home), but I got an ugly show-stopping encounter in Picking up the Pieces (where you have to defend the LOR platform and the salvage ships of the destroyed station). The convoy flew toward a jump point, and then just hung there, without jumping through. Obviously some trigger event didn't happen and I had no idea what to do next.

So I restarted the mission (a few times in fact, because it was freakin' hard to defend all those ships and getting them to the jump point safely) and then they jumped as they should.

Even weirder was the Big Jack mission, where the target ship dropped just one piece of loot, while Jack demanded three. I replayed the mission a few times and found out that number of loot pods is quite random. If you get three (not sure if you can get even more perchance), you're set and can finish the mission. Otherwise just restart and try again.

If replaying the buggy missions doesn't work either, google for the mission trigger events or use a walkthrough.
Some events are explained here:
http://www.i-war2.com/faqs_2.htm

Anyway, though I did knock off a star in game's rating because of those bugs, this still doesn't mean the game is utter crap.

IMO it's still a big bucket o' fun and well worth the monies you pay for it on GoG - esp. if you get it on sale, like I did, heh, heh. :)

This is my second time playing this game. The first time I got to the second to last mission before giving up due to the difficulty. Yes, this game is frustrating (buggy and simply hard), but it is still a lot of fun and is one of my all time favorite games.