Freespace is an excellent space fighter sim, only really outdone by its successor at the end of its era. If you enjoyed the likes of Star Wars: X-wing or Tie Fighter, you will enjoy this game as well, and perhaps find it familiar, and it could be considered a must have for any would be spacefighter jock. Combat is fast and intense, though still fluid, but there are occasional breaks in the action. While most of the missions are standard fighter on fighter search and destroy or escort missions, there is some mission variance within these bounds as well as a couple other types of mission including a couple that don't fit into the standard mold (for instance a scouting mission in a flying junker that WILL break down at the most inopportune moment). You can customize your loadout to fit your playstyle and the upcoming mission by choosing between several fighters and bombers for yourself and your wingmates to take and choosing the weapons they will be carrying, and once in a fight you can shunt power around to focus on speed, attack and defensive capabilites along with commanding your wingmates and (ocassionally) calling in reinforcements. The missions are, for the most part, great, and they are glued together by a reasonable, albeit not exceptional or particularly original, storyline. The voice acting is reasonable, and the sound effects and music are good, though suffer some from compression required of older games that ran on systems with much less storage available. Graphics are obviously dated, though not distractingly so, and as such an old game, you will be playing on fairly low resolution. The Silent Threat expansion, on the other hand isn't nearly as good. While the presence of some community made missions is notable, overall, the missions are extremely standard held together by a fairly flimsy story. Unfortunately, even given the praise, I have a hard time recommending Freespace itself. Not only does Freespace 2 improve on everything Freespace did right, Freespace 2 hosts an excellent modding community through the Source Code Project on hardlight.net who have built upon the Freespace engine in the form of Freespace Open. FSO not only sports an improved game engine, but also graphical and sound improvements. The Freespace campaign is available for FSO as Freespace Port with the graphical improvements of FSO including new models and textures, some updated cutscenes and the original soundtrack remixed by Freespace's composer, Dan Wentz. Also on offer is Silent Threat Reborn which takes the bare bones story of Silent Threat and improves on it, expanding it with new missions and improving the existing ones. Beyond that, of course, is the great gameplay of Freespace 2 and the plethora of fan campaigns for it as well.
