Is there anything as cool as a dogfight in space? Lasers pew-pewing their way into the infinite void as giant ships float in place in front of giant starlit gas clouds? I'm sure there is, but while FreeSpace 2 is filling up my vision, no there isn't.
Another joystick controlled space combat sim, this one is more chilled than past offerings. There's still plenty of buttons to target various opponents, cycle through weapons, alter your energy balance and what not, but you don't have to worry about that darned Newton fella and his physics. They're present but relaxed. You want to stop in the middle of space? You can stop in the middle of space, no need to calculate a week beforehand.
It sounds great - let's warp in.
Fun Times
After a video that shows off how wonderful space combat can be to look at, we get a video of a desert wasteland full of skeletons, which was a jump I wasn't expecting, especially when the next thing we see is a futuristic ships innards which doubles as the menu screen - one of those 'where the hell is the option menu? Oh, it's this guy looking over a computer screen, of course it is.' type of menu.
There was the intro to a plot, evidently, but I don't know what it said. I do know that before we get into the meat of the story, we ought to learn how to pilot these spaceships.
Piece of cake.
Right, on to the missions themselves, and if my memory serves, we are part of a union or alliance or something, and we're dealing with a guy who is up to no good. We're also dealing with some rebels as well, so we've obviously got a few folks who don't like whatever it is we do in space.
It's all explained in the mission briefings, complete with little schematics and maps - not a whole lot of use, but something to look at. Not that I could read much with tiny text on a stretched monitor, but hey - it's flavour. Follow the objectives mid-mission and you're golden.
Frustrations
I would love to tell you what the first mission is about, now that I'm finally in space, but I can't even read what's going on from my screenshots, so you'll just have to do what I did and oogle at all the pretty space colours.
In a genre so reliant on both a useful HUD and a good first-person viewpoint, finding out where to put anything that isn't of immediate use seems tricky, and having to have that information then not get in the way of anything else is trickier still.
I know why there are subtitles, but I've no time to read them, nor the eyes to be able to pick them out. Even the 'Objective Completed' indicator is hard to read, but at least it's in the middle of the screen.
Further Fun Times
In a nice touch though, your HUD is very customizable, down to the RGB values of various elements, should you favour looking at a certain set of colours over another. Hard to know what works best until you've been into space a few times, I suppose.
The controls might be on unusual buttons, depending on your set up, but there are a number of useful options that allow you a more hands-off approach, notably in the form of Auto-targeting and Auto-matching of speed.
Target a ship to track it around your HUD and it'll give you a familiar 'shoot here to make sure you hit' marker to help you place your shots. If you're all flying about at different speeds, however, it won't be a fun dogfight at all, so hitting the match speed button (or setting it to auto-match) allows you to focus on your target and chase them down until they start smoking, and then stop exploding.
Further Frustrations
All this speed matching and focusing on a single target can indeed lead to dogfights where ships twist and turn and try to outdo their pursuers, but when that doesn't happen, I often found myself so far back from the action that it was like looking out the window of the Executor (oooh, should have used that one for the X-Wing post...).
Don't get me wrong, it was cool to see lasers and rockets flying across space from this vantage point, seeing the battle from afar, but I want to be in the thick of it, making a difference. It seemed my wingmen were much more important to the fight than I.
The second mission started with the enemy essentially being able to lock onto me and show me what a real fight is within seconds, fly screen flashing in all the alarming colours of red before my hull blew up.
Your shields can take a beating and recover - and I think you can even call in supply craft to replenish them, though I may just be thinking of ammunition - but your hull is one and done. Lose that and you're a corpsicle.
After another bright red start to attempt number 2 - which comes really quickly thanks to quick start options - I get further into the mission and have to investigate an unusual looking asteroid. It's unusual for the fact that it has a hidden base on it, with ruddy great big guns.
After a positive start to my time with FreeSpace 2, I was dying repeatedly in the second mission. I'd later learn that after five deaths you get the option to skip the mission entirely. You presumably don't get to know what happened, but at least you could progress through the story, which is a nice touch.
I didn't test that, though, as I just blasted my way through the mission, limping home with fire billowing out of my ship.
Further Fun Times
It's here where FreeSpace 2 picked up again, as mission three had us chase down a giant ship that warped out in front of us, and then a few more trying to pull off the same trick. Destroy them before they reach their objective. My kind of mission.
Eventually, we were joined by a giant ship of our own (I really ought to follow the mission briefings and in-mission radio chatter to know what they're called), and the two duked it out with their own much more useful armaments.
This is when it's cool to sit back and watch the battle from a safe distance: when an opponent knows that there are more important targets than the player, and so doesn't shoot the player. That's attention to detail. That's worldbuilding. That's the one reason I want to keep playing FreeSpace 2.
Final Words
That's where I left it for the day. The debriefing screen has a load of stats from the mission, where I racked up an impressive 1 kill. I don't even know where that happened. I could have sworn I got a few more. Must be a lot of kill-stealing going on with my wingmen.
It was only after the fact that I found out about mission skipping and couple that with the ease of getting your ship up and running, FreeSpace 2 makes for a really good starting point into the genre. It can't rely on using ships seen in the movies to give it a headstart, but it presents a world and sticks you in it as best as it can.
Missions will see you fly in different ships with your own personal load-outs, once you've unlocked the different ships and weapons through story progress, but you'll also be put into specific ships to perform specific missions from time to time too.
It is, certainly to my memory, the easiest game of the space combat genre I've got into, and I know there's a bit of depth in it for those of you who like every button on the keyboard to do something too. Maybe not every button, but more than you need at least.
I am going to find the time to fly in FreeSpace 2 again, and I recommend you try it out yourself.
Fun Facts
Instead of having the source code to FreeSpace 2 gather digital dust, the developers released it just a few years after the game's release, which has allowed fans to mod, improve and build upon the game to this day.
FreeSpace 2, developed by Volition, first released in 1999.
Version played: PC, 1999.