FreeSpace 2 may not be the most original game ever released, but it has been faultlessly designed with a view to making gameplay king. Watching your wingmen form up alongside and pummel fire into the still sparking hull of your foe, you almost feel as if you are playing the lead role in Star Wars, Battlestar Gatactica, or any one of a number of sci-fi films where space combat featured heavily. Buzzing around the hulking cruisers, flak guns track the enemy ships with human precision, while you slip through their jutting structures to line up your next target. It's close-up-the-arse action all the way. The style of FreeSpace 2s action is much like that of a WWII dogfight simulation, only without the effects of gravity. Woe betide any fighter that gets in the way of these weapons. Even more impressive are the assaults on Cruisers, Destroyers and Juggernauts - massive behemoths sporting beam turrets that can cut through the hull of the bigger ships like the proverbial knife through butter. When you shoot down your first missile - no doubt more due to luck than skill - you'll whoop for joy. Bomber attacks on your capital ships are a particular highlight, shooting down slow bombers as they unleash their ordinance. You could be sent to escort a supply convoy to a jump node, when, unexpectedly, a huge battle group appears. As the war wears on however, new equipment and machinery become available, and more specialist squadrons require your emerging talents giving you the chance to fly Vasudan ships in special operations.Īlthough the mission structure is pretty linear, the sorties themselves are incredibly varied. In your role as rookie fighter pilot, your job is to hold off the fighters and take out a few bombers. On starting the game, the war against the NTF hangs in the balance. Unfortunately, some human xenophobes see the alliance as a threat and have formed the Neo-Terran Front (NTF), waging a pseudo-civil war against the Alliance with a view to splitting the two races apart. Since joining forces to defeat the Shivan incursion in the first game, the Alliance has miraculously managed to survive the three intervening decades, exchanging technologies, ideas and cylindrical meat products. Set 30-odd years after The Great War, FreeSpace 2 sees you flying again for the Galactic Terran-Vasudan Alliance (GTVA). Of course, once completed, the question is whether you would want to try over again? I'm not sure I would, but maybe that's just me. Even a game that could take you months to complete would be hard pushed to provide the same level of relentless chair-bound agitation. Five days may seem like a relatively short life-cycle for a game, but it's the intensity of those five days, the sheer unadulterated excitement that takes hold throughout the 40-odd missions that makes FreeSpace 2 such a joy to play. Like its relatively youthful predecessor, itself barely a year old, FreeSpace 2 is a punishingly addictive game. I don't know if I can go through all that again. During that time, my palms have poured sweat, my eyes have run dry and the coffee machine has popped its Colombian clogs. I say 'semi' because just two minutes ago I completed the game after five hard days of incessant dogfighting and capital ship assault. Still, I managed to find the room from somewhere and now the game, sequel to the best space combat game in living memory - if you've yet to reach the grand old age of two -has taken up semi-permanent residence. Needing a massive 1.5Gb on full install (I wouldn't have it any other way), it's ironic that a game calling itself FreeSpace leaves you none at all. Now, just a few months later, I'm having to hunt down the smallest of text files to fit the next game on. At the time I naively thought it would take years to fill its cavernous 10Gb hard drive. It was only four months ago that my coffee-stained, ash-strewn desk found itself supporting a brand new PC, a machine that now, thanks to the ever-increasing demands of PC gaming, is prematurely approaching early retirement.
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