ahead to intercept. As it escapes, your wingmates grumble
that command deliberately allowed the ship to flee, before
you’re forced to deal with an ambush by rebel fighters.
DAREDEVILS IN THE DETAILS
As the game goes on, missions become evermore
interesting. In the middle of the first act, your faction
unlocks a subspace node to a distant nebula. The
following mission sees you exploring its purple haze as
part of the Suicide Kings – an outfit of daredevil pilots. In
the next mission, you return to the nebula to destroy a
vast alien ship known as the Ravanna, blind-firing
powerful warheads at it while needled by enemy fighters.
Freespace 2 also has a knack for mid-mission twists – a
signal on the radar revealing a rebel cruiser lost in Shivan
space, or a massive allied ship emerging from subspace to
turn the tide of battle when all hope seemed lost.
Curiously, some of the game’s best missions are
optional. While the campaign is mostly linear, it offers a
brief side-story that sees you go undercover as a rebel
pilot. These missions are filled with natty twists and turns,
such as your co-agent springing an ambush on a rebel
convoy without first warning you, forcing you to suddenly
fight the wingmen you were flying alongside mere
moments ago. In this way, these missions effectively
generate an atmosphere of paranoia,
where you’re never quite sure what
exactly is going to happen, or the
extent of the rebels’ knowledge about
your true identity.
For the most part, Freespace 2
plays just as well as it did 20 years
ago, though there are a few areas
where its age is understandably on
show. Some of the audio is quite
scratchy, particularly cutscenes and
briefings. Moreover, the heavy-
handed tutorials betray the game’s
age. If Freespace 2 was made today,
these would be carefully woven into
the campaign itself, rather than
suddenly pulling you out of the story
for a lecture in advanced targeting.
Finally, while Freespace 2’s plot is
enjoyably twisty, its approach to
storytelling is rather cold and
impersonal, leaving little room for
character development. There is a
reason for this – the game wants you
to buy into its highly militarised
fiction, which is why most of the
story is told through briefings with
gravelly voiced officers talking in
sci-fi jargon. This element succeeds,
but the game otherwise fails to imbue
much personality into its cast,
particularly the player character andAS THE GAME GOES ON,
MISSIONS BECOME
EVERMORE INTERESTING
their wingmates. Ultimately, while
individual missions are excitingly
structured, the story lacks the same
colour as the brilliant combat.
One final point. It’s crucial to note
that Freespace 2’s state of
preservation is owed largely to the
community, which has created a huge
range of mods, visual enhancements,
and other support tools that ensure
the game runs well on modern
machines. If you plan to play
Freespace 2 yourself, I recommend
that you download the Freespace
Open Installer. This includes support
for higher resolutions alongside a
whole bunch of other inbuilt mods
like better quality cutscenes. You’ll
also need to download Java and a
separate Windows executable to get
it running, but it’s worth the effort.
Freespace 2 deserves its reputation
as one of the finest space sims
around, remaining every bit as
thrilling and elegantly crafted as it
was back in 1999. Having not played
it in years, I wasn’t prepared for how
fresh, immediate and exciting the
experience is, which is a testament to
Volition’s talent as a studio, and a fine
demonstration of how great design
can withstand the passage of time.EXTRA LIFE
DIARY I MOD SPOTLIGHT I REINSTALL (^) I WHY I LOVE
This may look cute, but spaceships only
do this when very distressed.