Ladies and gentlemen. Friends and countrymen. Freespace 2 has eaten the bomb.

I spent last night in sci-fi decompression mode. Work has been hell as of late and we finally shipped software yesterday. In a mood of celebration and rejuvenation, I spent the evening watching Trek and Galactica, and finishing the space sim that I started two weeks ago.

While the ending was a bit lacking and incomplete (more on this later), I come away from Freespace 2 a happy camper. Freespace’s sequel was smart enough to stay faithful to the tried and true - a great space-sim experience. After some tweaking, the controls were smooth and unfrustrating. The graphical update to Freespace to allow playing at a 1024×768 resolution looked beautiful on my monitor. I enjoyed the updated content and the audio in the game was better than most. And the prospect of continuing to play the game using community-generated content is pretty exciting.

On a scale of ten, this game gets eight and a half stars. In terms of a gaming experience, it hit all the buttons. As a storytelling experience, it missed a few things.

Gameplay

The smartest things that Volition did when developing Freespace 2 was to stay completely faithful to the original’s experience. This game is a space-sim and it has no illusions that it’s anything else. You go up in your fighter/bomber and blow the hell out of Charlies in the deep lonely expanses of space. There’s no point in the game where you have to leave the cockpit and fight villains on foot, nor are there any minigames. In the official version of the game, there are forty missions and while your objectives in each differ, you are always the pilot of your spacecraft.

Where the Freespace franchise excels is in how smooth it is to make that click from being a gamer sitting in front of a PC to becoming a just another pilot in the Grand Terran-Vasudan Alliance. Volition struck the right balance by including enough complexity to make the game interesting, but not too much that it becomes absurd. There are three major types of controls: flight and navigation, weapons and shield, and communications.

The flight and navigation controls includes aiming, targeting, velocity, and evasion. The game begins with an optional training mission that walks you through these before sending you off on the initial missions. The controls are rich enough to include options like “match my speed with my target’s”, but are also fundamentally simple enough that if you master the basics - go faster/slower and use the afterburner - you’ll do fine in the missions. Gameplay is greatly enhanced if you use a joystick with a throttle to manage these controls instead of the keyboard. After a few missions, this part of the flying becomes purely routine and instinctual.

The weapons systems in Freespace are also simple yet rich. As a pilot, you have three types of weapons available for use - cannons, missiles, and missile countermeasures. Before most missions, you can customize what weapons are loaded on your ship if you’re looking for an edge for that mission. If you know that you’ll be taking out a capital ship, your best bet is to use specialized subsystem-destroying cannons for disabling your target and use special high-yield missiles to finish the job. If your mission involves dogfighting, you can load your ship up with faster shield-penetrating cannons and quick lock homing missiles. The number of weapon combinations you can choose makes the game and combat much more interesting.

In this game, your craft also sports a shield system. Instead of one uniform shield for your craft, the shielding is split into four sections. If you’re taking fire from the aft, those shields will collapse while the fore shields will work just fine. Because of this, the game also introduces a bit of shield management. The strength of the four sectors can be customized, so you can reinforce your rear shields if you’re being pursued or you can charge up your front shields if you’re taking a capital ship’s weapon systems on head-first. Volition could have made this overly complex, but it’s simple enough that it becomes second nature.

The communications controls consist of targeting and wing command. The targeting system allows you to select targets (friends or foes) and track them in battle. The targeting system shows you the health of your target, the subsystem being targeted (if applicable), and the distance between you and them. The wing communication allows you to command other fighters and assign them tasks. If you’re on an escort mission, you can assign individual fighters, whole wings, or all fighters to protect your target. Likewise, I found it effective in dogfighting to assign targets to my wingmen instead of having the computer AI pick their own. With a few simple commands, it’s relatively simple to take out an entire wing of fighters or bombers by directing the action. Unfortunately, while the AI is great at dispatching small craft, it becomes absolutely retarded when you attempt to use it to assist you in systematically taking out a capital ship.

Audio

The sound in the game is nothing spectacular, but it’s not bad. It hits the right point where it sets the mood, but does so in the background - not distracting you while playing. The sound effects work well and the voice acting isn’t too bad. While I wouldn’t rush out and buy a CD containing the soundtrack (if one existed), I do appreciate Volition’s thoughtfulness in crafting the aural environment in a way that supports the game play and doesn’t end up overwhelming the game.

Graphics

Freespace 2 is an older game, but given its platform, it stands up well graphically to modern games. The graphics easily excel those of modern consoles, while when compared to a PC game, it’s not too bad either. Part of this is due to the fact that space sims are not as complex graphically as other genres and it star fields look as good as they ever will. The fighter ship models are detailed and well constructed, but I believe that the capital ships could have been more complex and been a bit more interestingly constructed. Details like turrets and flak cannons appear blocky, though this is not noticeable until you’re flying right on top of them.

One of the interesting new features in Freespace 2 is the introduction of the nebula cloud fighting environment. In these stages, combat happens in the thick of a nebula and its like flying through fog to locate the bad guys. Volition built the nebula environment in such a way that makes you feel like you’re flying through clouds, and not simply abusing the fog effects in 3D accelerators. The only problem with this new environment is that it’s overused. It seems like a third to a half of the missions are spent in the nebula.

The weakest part of Freespace 2 graphics are its cut-scenes. The cut-scenes themselves looked good and went well with the rest of the game, but Volition used a really bad encoder to compress them. In far too many scenes, the blockiness of low bitrate encoding really distracts and pulls the gamer out of the game universe.

Storytelling

One of the most outstanding traits of the original Freespace was its storyline. Freespace’s storyline dealt with human expansion in the cosmos and the introduction of an alien force intent on stopping that expansion and paring humanity down to its sustainable place in the cosmos. Seen from the perspective of the humans, the mysterious Shivans were intent on wiping out mankind simply because men aspired so highly. The last game ended with a climactic battle where a handful of fighters were responsible for stopping a Shivan juggernaut from finding Earth and destroying it. In the end, humanity wins, but not without destroying the only route home.

Freespace 2 picks up thirty-two years after this. There is a decent plot about a human insurrection seeking to change the political order and ally the humans with the Shivans. There’s a thread that starts to question where jumpnode (wormhole) technology originated. There’s also a thread that addresses the lost Earth and humanity’s quest to find a way back to the mother world. Freespace 2 is ambitious in all of this and during most of the game, it delivers a great story.

The problem is the ending. The game ends in the middle of several unresolved major plot arcs and it ends in such a way that makes you wonder what the point of the game was, and why all these unresolved arcs were introduced. I had the same feeling at the end of Freespace 2 as I had watching Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator”. When the end came and the credits rolled, I was asking myself, “That’s it? Where’s the rest of the story?” While I’m dissapointed in the abrupt ending, I have to cut Volition a bit of slack. Given Interplay’s financial meltdown around that time, it’s clear that the Freespace team did not have the time or resources promised to complete the game. They patched together an ending and shipped the software.

In the years since Freespace 2’s release the engine of the game has been open-sourced and the game has one of the more active game-modding communities around it. While I lament the fact that I will probably never know the “canon” ending, I can enjoy others’ attempts at finishing the story.

Conclusion

In the end, I really enjoyed this game. It sucked me in pretty easily and kept me in the game universe duking it out in space for some time. I started and finished the game in two weeks, which may suggest that the game is a bit too easy. However, in the end, I have to say that Freespace still is the top franchise in the space-sim genre, beating out more robust franchises such as the Wing Commander series and LucasArts’ Star Wars games. The game engine aged relatively gracefully over the past half decade and I’d like to see others take the ball and run with it. Should the producers of Battlestar Galactica decide to expand their reborn franchise into the gaming world, I’d hope that they speak with Volition first and bring the Freespace team out of retirement to resurrect this genre of game.