Independence Day is a combat flight simulator video game based on the 1996 film of the same name. The game was developed by Radical Entertainment and published by Fox Interactive for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.
The main objective is that you — the pilot — must take down four main generators of the alien mothership. The whole idea could've been done perfectly, but the game did not do it justice: you just fly around and shoot at things, similar to some of the games in Action 52. It's bland, repetitive and boring.
Abysmal controls. For example, if you fly near the ground, you hit the ground. Moreover, you can't even pick up a power-up easily.
The voice who tells you to take out the generators in the game never shuts up. He repeats the same sentence over, and over, as if you weren't trying.
Attacking the generators is pretty much frustrating:
Your plane keeps flying pass the generator. If you turn around, the generator disappears from your POV without any warning. You can't spot it from a distance, it has to pop up spontaneously, and once it does, there's not enough time to react to and shoot it.
Shooting anything with bullets is near-impossible. The only weapon that inflict some sort of damage are the missiles.
Average graphics for 1997 standards. Some things in the levels appear randomly without any effect, the bullets look small, and the explosion effect looks primitive.
The stages you can play are Las Vegas, Moscow, New York City, Paris, and the mothership, but all of them are just the same.
Every challenge is the same, as all you do is fly around, use your radar to locate your targets, lock on, and destroy them with your heat seeking missiles, which is too repetitive.
The game is pretty short, even for a PS1, Saturn and PC game. It can be beaten in less than 1.5 hours.
The game has a password system, but it is beyond horrible: Instead of a freely scrollable table of symbols like in most 8-bit/16-bit games you've played, there's a rolling wheel consisting of all the possible characters (letters and numbers). If you want to select a character, you have to "roll the wheel" to move the cursor to that character and select it. It is too slow to scroll through the characters, making input password unnecessarily tedious.
Not to mention, the game was released on the PlayStation, which is an advanced console that is capable of storing game data to memory cards. With this feature in mind, you don't have to beat a PlayStation game in one sitting. Yet for some bizarre reasons, this game doesn't make use of this feature to help you backtrack your progress, but instead forces you to input the password.
The physics in this game don't make any sense at all, especially with the collisions with obstacles. In most flight simulators, as well as real life, crashing your aircraft into anything would instantly kill you and it would be Game Over. Here, crashing your plane into things will just cause it bounce off the obstruction completely unscathed instead of blowing up.
The game lacks music of any kind.
Good Qualities
The sound effects are pretty good, that would make you want to listen to them if you don't want to play your own music.
The game cover is pretty cool, with the night themed buildings and sky, and 2 motherships shooting together. Basically, it looks like it wants to fit the Star Wars theme too.
Unlike the console versions, the graphics in the PC version looks good.
This game/console belongs to the "High Level of Shit Contamination" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.
Independence Day received mixed reviews. Aggregating review website GameRankings gave the Microsoft Windows version 53.67% based on 3 reviews, the Sega Saturn version 52.50% based on 2 reviews and the PlayStation version 49.00% based on 5 reviews.
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"What were they thinking?"