Freespace 2

This is one of the best space sims I ever played. The controls are smooth. The atmosphere of the game is tense. The missions sometimes frightening serious.

This is a really good spacecombat game. You get a briefing for the battle, then depending on your rank you might get to choose your ship and loadout and later your squads ships and loadout. Then the BATTLE starts. This game has really really good battles. You can only fly smaller fighters and bombers, but the battles has cruisers, destroyers, titans...you will see huge bams going off, you will see flak defence fire. And you are in the middle, part of a bigger battle. But you can influence it in a lot of ways. Run interceptors and catch enemy torpedoes so your capital ships win. Or fly air superiority fighters and get those enemy bomers. Or fly a bomber and disable enemy capital ship components. Or make your squad bombers and protect them with your fighter.... But its not all allout battle, you can have scoutmission in a nebula where you can see anything. Or you get invited to a blackop mission behind enemy lines. Or you are stationed near a civilian structure and have to make sure nothing goes wrong! But you know what the best part is?This game went open source, there is a fanproject that you use that updates the graphics quite a lot. And there are countless of total mods with new storyline and everything. btw, this game is perfectly fine with mouse and keyboard, at least the open source project version is.

Some friends kept telling me to play this game and i did. Three times. Each time not really impressed. As you can guess i haven't finished it and probably never will as i find this game somewhat underwhelming. The combat works well enough, as it should since its prettymuch the only thing that this game has, but i find it a little too slow, too "compressed". The playerships are awfully slow. A WW2 era bi-plane will outrun those space superiorty fighters. Weapon ranges are also VERY short and the damage not very high thus i very often ended up ramming enemy fighters in the rear, blasting away with lasers and missiles until they turn into debris. Speaking of missiles most of them seem kinda useless, especially the one that require a lock, since you often already destroyed your target with your normal lasers long before they get that lock. And if they do... their homing capabilities are kinda very bad. The story is just kind of there but doesn't do much. Some kind of rebellion because they don't like yellow aliens. Another bunch of red aliens appear and shoot at everyone. Your faction reacts instantly and blasts them to where they came from. Which is a pretty good idea to do so thumbs up for that one. But generally it just kinda passes by, just like some 'meh' food that you felt slide over your tongue and wonder what it was since you didn't taste anything. The briefings just sound like cool stuff but there isn't really any meat in it. Speaking of sound. Its pretty bad. I muted the music not too far in and the big beams have recieved the worst possible soundeffect that is way louder than everything else. It's a solid game without too many flaws. Thing is it doesn't do anything really good either. It is just forced into the shadows of more advanced and better produced game that were released around the same time like X-Wing Alliance, Starfleet Academy etc which far outshine Freespace 2 in many many ways. For me it just feels like a low budget production.

Excellent game, literally the best space flight game I have EVER played! I have never found a newer game which came close, which is why I just bought this again through GOG. Modern games may have better graphics, but as many of us GOG users know; it's not just about the graphics: it's about the experience! The escort missions and dogfights in this game are epic fun!

It's pretty funny that so little of my time with Freespace 2 was actually spent playing the stock campaign included with the game; this is thanks to the multitude of high quality user-made campaigns that have been released for the game since its source code became available to the community. This isn't to say that the core game isn't worth playing; it is, and the space-sim mechanics are second only to the X-Wing games.