The year is 2367, thirty two years after the Great War. Or at least what YOU thought was the Great War. The seemingly endless tide of Shivan capital ships, bombers and fighters with super advanced technology was nearly overwhelming.
As the Terran and Vasudan races finish rebuilding their decimated societies, a disturbance lurks in the not-so-far reaches of the Gamma Draconis system. Your nemesis has arrived... and they are wondering what happened to their scouting party...
The game continues on the story from Descent: FreeSpace, once again thrusting the player into the role of a pilot fighting against the mysterious aliens, the Shivans. While defending the human race and its alien Vasudan allies, the player also gets involved in putting down a rebellion of those elements of Vasudan (Hammer of Light) and Human (Neo Terran Front) forces which don't want to cooperate with one another.
Freespace 2 includes the FRED2 editor available in the instalation directory of the game.
Age requirements: ESRB Everyone (Animated Violence, Mild Language)
Minimum system requirements: Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended), 256MB RAM (512 recommended), 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended), monitor capable of displaying 1024x768 resolution, Mouse, Keyboard.
I'd never played the game until buying it from GoG, but remembered hearing many people fondly reminiscing about it over the years. After all these years, could it possibly live up to the hype...?... full review
Oh my god YES!
The Aliens, the explosions, the collosal starships, swarms of small fighters nipping through space lit up by glowing capital ship beam lasers and flak-cannon fire (now I know where the new Battlestar Galactica got the effect from!), clusters of missile trails weaving after their prey like schools of piranha...Freespace 2 offers the most wonderfully realised and breathtaking space combat ever coded. Your fighter/bomber handles like a dream (even with a mouse!), and in no time at all you'll be defending freighters and attacking cap ships with gleeful whoops of joy. This game cannot be recommend often enough or highly enough; simply UNNMISSABLE,
PS: As a default install she looks fine, but you have the option of bringing her graphics into the 21st century using the FS_Open Modding project, which can be found at www.hard-light.net. New models, new textures, and all running beautifully at modern resolutions!
Probably the best space simulator out there!
(by
Belua)
Ah, the space simulator. Unfortunately, it's an almost forgotten genre in our time, hardly being held alive by the occasional game being released every few years, e.g. Freelancer, X3 or Darkstar One. Still, it's one of my favourite genres, and the Freespace games are probably the best representatives to ever exist - at least if you can live without trading and flying around in an... full review open universe.
Freespace 2, like its predecessor, takes the more linear and action oriented approach to space simulators, which is exactly what makes it great. Sacrificing the freedom to drift aimlessly through an oversized universe makes room for something that more recent space sims often fail at: telling an interesting and exciting story during and between the missions. Speaking of missions: they are fun, they are diverse and, maybe most important of all: they make sense. Unlike some other games, it's not like "there are bad guys at point A, go shoot them". You'll find yourself patrolling sections of space, checking out unknown structures, escorting transport ships which carry prototype technology that you might be able to use at a later point in the game, defend important ships, attack strategic positions or vessels of the enemy and so on. This may not sound revolutionary, but Freespace manages to make you feel that your mission is important and to make you understand why they are.
Another important thing is the preparation phase of the missions: You not only get your briefing, but you are allowed to chose what kind of ship and weaponry you want to take - restricted to things that are available at this point in the story, of course. But unlike many other games, most of the time you can't just chose THE best ship or THE best weapon. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages: You get primary weapons which damage the hull or the shield of the enemy, for example. Or missiles that destroy only the selected sub-system (e.g. engine, weapons, communication systems) of the enemy, which is especially important in missions where you have to disable large battleships without destroying them, or where you just have to prevent them from fleeing.
The same thing is true for ships: there are fast and agile interceptors, which in turn have weaker shield or hull or don't have as many slots for weapons as the average attack fighter. Taking on a big one? Take the slow bomber with heavy shield and extra missiles. Also, you can make the same choices for the other fighters in your squad.
The list goes on, both in weaponry and ships, those are only examples. The point is, there's a certain tactical depth added to the game by this, offering different strategies for achieving your objectives.
Combine all that with perfect controls and you have what, in my opinion, makes this game (or better: this series) stand out and so fun to play. On top of that, it's one of the games that has aged rather well, visually, so you won't have to put your nostalgic glasses on to protect your eyes when you play it today. Considering that it's only $5.99, it should be illegal not to buy this game - unless you own it already.
If you have a joystick, you need this game.
(by
Voa)
Freespace 2. Leaving behind the legacy of the claustraphobic Descent series which inspired it, this game leaves you really in the agoraphobia wastes of space, with floating jetsam, flotsam, and pulsing ion clouds. It also rears it head back with a good few years of control fine tuning and brilliant game mechanics already under its rather sizeable belt.... full review
The campaign mode is epicly long and more than enough to keep someone happy for a ages at a time (not to mention numerous fan-made campaigns; shorter but oh-so-good), the missions are difficult in places, but it's a rewarding difficulty; sure, you'll fail the bombing runs about five times near the end of the game, but that one time you get it right, you'll see a three kilometer flagship go up in billions of amazingly rendered particles of debris and smoke (And for a pre-2000 game, the graphics looks astonishingly tasty). And the scaling is awesome too; the three kilometer long flagships really ARE that huge. I could recount tales of weaving through a flagship's flak fire, beam turrent blasts and sizeable missile armaments, all in the pursuit of a single fighter craft, in a desperate dogfight, but it's really something that one has to experience for themselves.
As I mentioned in the title, this games yearns for a joystick's control; for the most part, everything that can be done by the keyboard (weapon swapping, shield dispersment, and counter measure launching) is all easy to do and easily becomes second nature very quickly. With a mouse, the game is playable, but to truely play the game, a joystick with as many buttons as you can manage will make the experience that much more enjoyable. It's one thing to push the after button on the keyboard and shift the mouse upwards; it's another entirely to hit the trusters on you stick and slam it backwars in a desperate attempt to dodge the screaming missiles behind you.
The range of ships for most of the missions might irk some (usually only 2 or 3 are available) but this is explained by the story; usually you won't be able to access the highest level weaponry, simply because it isn't there, and there's no way it could get there. As payment for this, there is an amazing amount of weapons and ships available throughout the game, and paying attention to the breifing and selecting the right weapons will make all the difference. Taking that extra load of fire-and-forget mass warheads might make it easier to deal with the fighters, but taking along a "spotter" for your captial class ship will make the mission overall a lot easier...and more fun (there is NOTHING quite like telling a cannon three times the size of your ship to blast an enemy warship to tiny bits of space fluff, in my opinion).
To close, this is an amazing game; before playing this, I never was all that into flight-simulators, or even flight combat games. After playing this, I feel in love with it. This is a game you need to own, especially at this price. If you haven't already done so, scroll back up there and hit buy. Do it. This is a classic game that does almost everything right, and deserves to be played.
GTLC)
Belua)
Voa)