FreeSpace 2: Sci-Fi Sim of the Year Edition

Review

by Alec Norands

You're in the middle of a dogfight. You ordered your wingmen to take out one of a freighter's engines so you can have time to pick it off. An alien ship screams by you and as you spin around to track him -- missiles getting closer and closer to locked -- you realize he was just a distraction. There's an enormous, gargantuan ship at least 800 times the size of your own looming into view. It's definitely the Gulliver, not you. It charges up its massive beam weapons. You try to dodge. It literally cuts the escorted destroyer behind you in half. You stop. A question hits you: am I playing a game or am I inside a great Babylon 5 episode?

Surprisingly, it's just a game. After the seemingly Coke and Pepsi stand-off of the Wing Commander and Star Wars space flight-simulator games, Interplay and Volition sneak in and one-up all of them with Freespace 2: Sim of the Year Edition. As expected, the story takes off from the first one. Thirty-two years after The Great War in which the bickering Terran and Vasudan races united to stave off the deadly Shivan invasion, everything seems peaceful. Both races are battered and bruised, cut off from their homes, and simply trying to lick their wounds. However, there is a rumbling in the nearby Gamma Draconis system: the Shivans have come back. And if it took every last Terran and Vasudan effort to destroy the earlier Shivan flagship -- The Leviathan -- there is now an armada of those vessels on approach. Things are not good.

So that's the premise that you are forced to tackle. A seemingly unstoppable enemy has returned, with a hundred times more power. You have to help the Terran and Vasudan alliance (GTVA) stop the invasion. With recon missions, bombing runs, or escort cover. With one tiny fighter at a time. Did somebody mention that there's also an extra rogue element of a rebellious Terran faction (the NTF) adding diversionary trouble to boot?

With so much backstory, it would be easy to get lost in all of this, but the game seems sure of itself enough to hold it all together. There are effective cut-scenes and mission briefings to move along the narrative. Plenty of in-game developments to keep you interested. Not to mention countless, frantic battles within the actual game to keep you away from being over-confident or bored. This is a tense, smart, thrilling, impressive game on so many levels that one can't help but wonder why upstart developers don't raise the high water-marks more often.

After one gets through the setup (which is easy and smooth, apart from not detecting this reviewer's joystick very well) and reads through the briefings, one immediately notices something right off the bat: this is a very, very pretty game. While flash can mask a lack of substance, here all the top-of-the-line graphics suit the situation or object. The beam weapons shoot across the sky with stunning danger. Hitting an enemy's shields shows fantastic 3D absorption. Nebulas are eerie and suspenseful (you can literally run right into a huge enemy Capital ship without realizing it), even when they are used in one deeply mean side-mission where they kill your navigation. Nice, smaller details are used as well: the aforementioned nebulas freaking out your H.U.D. systems, nearby stars flaring your view when pointing your ship at them, specific points of flaming damage on the bigger ships, etc. Speaking of the H.U.D., it's wonderful. Fully customizable by size, colour, importance, and so on, one need never complain about what they see and what they need in a H.U.D. ever again. The game just looks extremely well "executed."

How is the gameplay? Well, as for the ships, they are well done with enough variety to keep one testing them all out until a favourite is found. In general, the Vasudan vessels are quick little buggers, although about as strong as a Maytag box. The Terran vessels are more lumbering beasts, but can store up the armor and weapons to pack quite a punch. As far as actual value goes, one can choose the lighter, faster ships, but these seem more for the players with either finely-honed reflexes or amazingly responsive controllers because casual flight-sim players will have enough difficulty trying to focus in on a single enemy at a time. On the default difficulty level (which still has missions ranging from dead easy to frustratingly hard), the heavy assault ships (i.e. the Erinyes) seemed to fare the best overall. Enough speed to get out of dense firefights, enough firepower to take out enemy fighters as well as huge Capital ship sub-systems. The in-between ships such as these seem to work best for the average player.

The weapons are also great to use. Not just because you can scream, "Got one" at your monitor like a smiling idiot as you use them to take down your enemies, but also because they look really nifty. The laser weapons glow like piercing darts, the huge warheads fling out of your ship like a nasty, snarling predator, and the swarm missiles are -- apologies -- just plain cool. You can watch full missile trails from the spiraling weapons of destruction. Sometimes you just fire them off without a lock just to see them spin about. As for actual effectiveness (for shame), most players will want to stick with the guns with high rates of fire and small power drainage ("sniping" with bigger guns is too much for this poor reviewer), and try to stock up on as many lockable missiles as they can (swarming or not). Overall, from the design to the ships to the weapons, the game is extremely impressive on every angle.

Be warned, though: here come the grievances. The in-game objective red herrings are refreshing (how many times in a war are all events predicted with 100 percent accuracy?), yet it also serves as one of the first flaws one notices in the game. It is indeed exciting to have almost all pre-planned mission objectives shot out the window with unexpected new events, but since this happens in nearly every mission, you tend to ignore all briefings after awhile and just wait to see what really happens while flying around. It's as if the game designers knew a good tactic to keep you on your toes, but quickly destroyed its own effectiveness with overkill.

There's another problem along these same lines. The missions themselves are entertaining and tense, yet by the time the game is over, you are nearly exhausted with the lack of diversity. There are only a few recon missions (the best being the one where you have to command a stealth fighter to study a new Shivan warship up close), a few go-all-out-and-destroy-big-bad-muthas missions, and about 20 other escort missions. Let's be honest: escort missions are now becoming much like the "find the blue key" repetition that is the plague of far too many first-person-shooters.

Escorting a ship in a mission is no easy task (if you thought repelling bombers was tough, try repelling the bombs themselves). Which isn't a bad thing. It's just relied upon so much that one is yearning for a unique objective whenever a mission is completed. While one has to expect the basic challenges of a ship-to-ship premise to be present, the dependence on this one aspect is definitely a detriment.

The story also falls in on itself by the end. Not because the plot developments start to wane (they don't, there are enough nice surprises), but because the pay-off is so low. Much like the cheeky anti-climax of a game like Half-Life or Full Throttle, after such a wonderful, engaging, top-notch setup, you are only given one of two things: a rushed ending that comes far too soon, or another "cliffhanger" ending teasing you to "tune in" to the next installment. Here, Freespace 2: SOTYE essentially falls into both traps. The amazing potential seems forgotten by the time the game ends.

To add another "yet" to a "yet," none of these complaints can take away from some of the sheer kinetic thrills the game offers. Even when the mission types become predictably unpredictable or plain repetitive, the actual battles are terrific fun. There is little beating the energy inside you as you're soaring next to the hull of a monstrous enemy Capital ship, dropping a bomb, and then spinning around to lay waste to your bogey with a barrage of swarming missiles.

Even when you flee from the main battle to rearm, it's a delight to see a massive battle going on. Tiny fighters scrambling with each other, huge Capital ships pummeling each other with their devastating beam weapons, and yourself realizing you gotta jump back in the thick of it once your rearm is complete. It's a feeling that you're definitely a part of something larger that is extremely addictive.

Which speaks quite a bit about the feelings when you manage to help take down some of those enemy Capital ships. Not only is it a feeling of vindication when one of the huge ships goes down in a gorgeous blast, but it's also a sign to get out of the way ASAP. Because the bigger the ship, the bigger the explosion, and the bigger the fallout will have on your ship.

Destroying a Capital ship and then running away is like taking out The Death Star time and time again. Even on top of tall that, in the aftermath of the explosion it's just as entertaining to watch the explosion as it is to fly by huge pieces of the dead ship's wreckage that are just crackling with dying energy. So many of these exhilarating moments attached to one objective. It adds up to the game's overall feeling of, "I helped do that." This feeling never gets old.

So with this special "Sim of the Year" version, the package does try to keep you more interested in these kinetic thrills than the lackluster campaign finale. A slew of extra missions (covering a lot of loopholes in the campaign -- one even letting you play the nasty NTF), great fanboy ingredients like desktop wallpapers/sounds/music files, even an updated (and rather tough) mini-campaign to spice things up.

This special edition is more what the original Freespace 2 should've been like since it just feels more complete this way. Which proves the final point: despite some of the flaws still carried over, Freespace 2: SOTYE is a worthy candidate on most gamer's hard-drive, and one that will instill a lot of fond memories once it's finally (and sadly) relegated to the bookshelf.

It's a game that puts you in a galactic war and it rarely takes you out of the illusion. Yes, while Babylon 5 might have finished its original run years ago, one might be better served reliving those memories not by watching the show's reruns over and over again, but rather by just getting a nice cold drink, taking a deep breath, and firing up your hard-worn copy of Freespace 2.