Unlike Mass Effect 3, which wimped out and provided an altogether corny (and overly-familiar) explanation for the Reapers' motivations, Freespace 2 never robs the Shivans of their mythic power through rote exposition. The resulting alien onslaught feels like what the Reaper invasion from the much later Mass Effect 3 should have been, a relentless tide of superior alien vessels inexorably advancing for motives that can barely be comprehended. The pacing then ramps up as events in the nebula trigger a renewed contact with the Shivans.and the discovery that the Shivan fleet from the first game was, at best, a minor scout force compared to what is really out there. These elements introduce a genuine SF sensawunda to the game which was wholly missing from the original title. The nebula is a fun setting for missions, forcing the player to adapt to the changing circumstances. This gives rise to a huge number of missions set inside the nebula, with the player having to fight off enemies they can barely see. Early missions revolve around a civil war between the Alliance and the Neo-Terran Front, but this becomes complicated by the discovery of a massive alien superstructure, which can generate jump nodes leading to a remote nebula. Controls are also more finely tuned than previously.
There's also been a rebalancing of weapons, shields and armour across the new roster of fighters, making them more entertaining to fly. Capital ships are also defended by massive flak barrages, which are again hugely impressive (and, I suspect, a key reason why the relaunched Battlestar Galactica employed the same technology in its CG space scenes). It was overwhelmingly impressive in 1999 and, now upgraded with much better models and effects, it remains so in 2020. Capital ships now tend to be bigger and they are equipped with massive beam weapons, huge stream of continuous energy which can literally cut lesser vessels in half. The big changes become more obvious once the game starts. Each mission opens with a briefing about your objectives, with you able to jump straight into the action with a pre-prepared ship or you can select your ship and weapons loadout yourself. The game is similarly divided into campaigns, which is each subdivided into missions, for 35 missions in total. It controls exactly the same way, even down to the keybindings and functions being almost exactly the same, and the structure is similar. Freespace 2 was such a masterpiece that it rendered all other space combat games completely pointless.įreespace 2 at first glance is identical to its predecessor. There is another explanation for why the genre crashed (beyond other ideas like the declining popularity of joysticks as game controllers): after Freespace 2 the genre had nowhere else to go. Space games since this time - including the recent mini-resurgence spearheaded by Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky - have focused on trading or exploration over narrative and combat. Even the latest game in the perennially popular X-Wing series, X-Wing: Alliance, fared badly that year and very few new games in the genre have subsequently been released ( StarLancer was a notable exception in 2001). The game also had the misfortune to come out during the Great Space Combat Crash of 1999, when the entire genre effectively ceased to exist. Freespace 2 was rushed out of the door when publishers Interplay started having major financial problems and was released three months early without any publicity whatsoever.
#Shivan freespace series
Freespace had been a late but successful entry to the space combat simulator genre, selling and reviewing well and with its laser-like focus on gameplay winning over gamers tired of other series in the genre becoming far more obsessed with story and FMV cutscenes.
As the Alliance military struggles to recover the three systems and end the war, it also discovers an immense alien megastructure in the Gamma Draconis system, through which an even greater threat is waiting.įreespace 2 was released in 1999 as the sequel to Conflict Freespace: The Great War and its expansion, The Silent Threat. However, a new civil war has erupted: Admiral Bosch has formed the Neo-Terran Front and established a new state, encouraging Polaris, Regulus and Sirius to secede from the Alliance.
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