Digging Up A 1999 Fossil With Freespace 2, Have You Tried It? It’s Excellent.

Freespace 2 is a space combat simulator game from way back in 1999, it may be old, but it has an official open source engine and you should really give it a run. It’s a real blast from the past, and a game that has stood the test of time surprisingly well.

I remember playing Freespace 2 as a teen and simply falling in love with it, the mix of intense space combat mixed in with cutscenes, interesting missions and now being open source and still developed is fantastic.

In 2002 the game was officially open sourced by Volition, this then spawned the FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project and my love was found again. You can actually install the launcher directly from the repository in Ubuntu if you search for “Freespace 2” in the USC, it’s likely to be found in other distributions too. The name of the launcher is “wxLauncher”. Alternatively you can use the Freespace 2 installer located here. You do need a copy of the game data linked below.

I recently bugged Samsai enough to buy it on GOG.com. Now I know buying a “Windows game” is a big sin, but for playing it on an open source engine from a site that supports Linux is fine in my books.


Samsai had this to say about the game

I never really got to play Freespace 2 before buying the game after Liam’s recommendation, so I didn’t have any nostalgia for the game. I was initially a bit sceptical but Freespace 2 was positively surprising to me, regardless of its age.

Naturally Freespace 2 won’t win any modern beauty competitions but on other areas the game shines brightly. The missions are well thought out and feel realistic with some interesting twists that will turn routine missions into a fierce battle for survival. Missions can also have multiple outcomes which affect the missions after that in some ways.

Another quite surprising finding was that the battles actually feel like battles, which is quite interesting considering there are only about a dozen of enemies on the battlefield simultaneously. The missions are cleverly designed to hide this fact and new waves of enemies are warped in just at the right moment so that the fight will continue basically uninterrupted. In all of the missions you will be flying an interceptor, a fighter or a bomber of some kind, but the missions have plenty of bigger capital ships for you to defend and destroy. These capital ship versus capital ship fights were in my opinion one of the best parts in the game because it’s where I truly felt like I was just a tiny part of a huge battle.

The game also makes sure that you don’t get bored by throwing all sorts of missions at you. First you might be escorting a group of transports and next you are attacking a supply depot to create a distraction or a bait. You even get to fly some optional stealth missions as part of the Special Operations Command. The game also doesn’t try to “storify” these missions too much, you are ordered somewhere to complete a task and you will complete that task. Not that there isn’t a story here, there most certainly is, but the story follows the war that is raging all over the place and not some personal vendetta of a single pilot or some other stuff like that.

In addition to the low-ish level of graphics there was another sign that said “1999” pretty clearly and it was the control scheme. Freespace 2 obviously attempted to be more of a simulator than a casual shoot ‘em up. Nearly all of your keyboard has been bound to some control or another and you will have to use quite a few of those controls to complete your missions properly. There are keys for various targeting modes, engine controls, power allocation controls (to redirect power to and from shields, engines and weapons) and communication controls to do a bit of strategizing on the battlefield. Luckily the game doesn’t expect you to know the whole control layout immediately and guides you through them in very good tutorial missions along the way. However, if you happen to have a keyboard that doesn’t use the US or UK layout you might need to rebind some of the controls to keys that actually exist on your keyboard.

As you might imagine, a game this old doesn’t really take that much resources to run, unless you mod the crap out of it of course. It ran just fine on my R7 370 with RadeonSI and it probably wouldn’t be much worse if I tried it on my Intel HD Graphics 3000 laptop. There were some crashes though so the stability wasn’t quite perfect. However, I didn’t lose too much progress in those crashes and there were only a couple during my full playthrough so I don’t mind them too much.

Overall, I found Freespace 2 to most likely be the best space game I’ve played. After getting used to the controls it was a blast from start to finish and offered just enough difficulty for me to have to work hard to complete the missions but not too much to make me frustrated. Apart from a couple of technical issues, such as flickering cinematics and occasional crashes, the experience was smooth and fun. My second playthrough is already in progress. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.