Descent
Freespace: The Great War
(Review as featured in APC October 1998.)
I hereby nominate Freespace for a 'Best Use of 3D Acceleration' award. It's also a damn fine space game, and its only connection with Descent is shared programmers.
| Descent Freespace: The Great War |
by Interplay
|
Many games drag 3D cards down through overuse of textures and complex objects; but everything in Freespace is so well optimised that amazing events become possible without noticeable slowdowns: spaceships that are several kilometres long, displayed in awesome detail; epic battles between vast numbers of craft; scary aliens, believable AI; massive explosions with real debris; terrific audio; a mission editor; and multiplayer combat in space.
Slick programming also means the game is highly configurable. The amount of features in the cockpit HUD and settings on the options screen will please tinkerers and simulation fans (despite the unrealistic space flight model). Patch updates can be downloaded online from within the game itself, and the mission editor is quite usable. In fact, Interplay will include some user-designed missions in its upcoming level pack.
On the downside, Freespace's plot is linear (unlike a Wing Commander game, where the player's actions affect the storyline) and the cinematics are predictable. APC also experienced problems with the sound, which dropped out during cinematics on two PCs.
The only character development is your own, which makes this single-player game a lonely trek through a world that is supposed to be full of comrades. One solution is to keep reading the professionally written Freespace fiction, which appears weekly at http://www.interplay.com/ freespace/ (or you could submit your own). Successful play over the Internet requires way too much bandwidth, which means it's hard to find players and you'll find yourself wishing for a LAN.
Freespace has a superior engine and better mission design than any rival space sim. It's a thrill to play and therefore a worthy purchase for space fans; but it doesn't quite manage to suck the player into the main plot.
by Simon Vandore
