Descent: Freespace

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Review: Descent: Freespace

For starters, Freespace offers a fantastic single-player campaign. As the game opens, youre a rookie pilot with the Galactic Terran Alliance (GTA, the good guys). The GTA is locked in a long-running war with the Vasudans. While these two are busy beating up on each other, a third power, the mysterious Shivans, joins the fray. This new force is so powerful that the GTA and Vasudans must unite in a desperate bid for survival.

Sure, it sounds like Wing Commander: Prophecy, but the campaign unfolds at a splendid pace and really conveys the sense of tension and mystery that the Shivan threat presents. The 29 missions (not including the four training missions) outline a fairly believable (albeit accelerated) military campaign that culminates in a memorable last-ditch effort to halt the Shivans once and for all. Its one final confrontation you wont forget.

Elements of the campaign vary based on your performance. For instance, if you succeed in taking out a cruiser in one mission, it wont be there to cause trouble in the next. Many of the missions will seem familiar to Wing Commander and TIE Fighter fans: patrolling waypoints, inspecting Shivan freighters and capital ships. Most of the others are fairly original, including protecting your carrier on a mad dash through an asteroid field by picking off the asteroids in its path.

Best of all, a sense of urgency lingers throughout as the Shivans brush aside GTA and Vasudan forces at nearly every turn. The enemy AI is quite good, as are the difficulty settings, which should suit novices and aces alike.

The game also includes a phenomenal mission-editor. Its so powerful, complete, and intuitive, it ranks as the most impressive mission/leveleditor Ive ever seen.

The graphics are pretty stunning, too, with or without hardware acceleration (though youll want a well-equipped Pentium II to run the software-only mode on the highest detail settings). With a Voodoo II card installed, the game ran beautifully, with only occasional stuttering during large battles. Particularly impressive is the use of scale: Small ships look and feel small, while space stations and capital ships are absolutely enormous. Never have I felt so insignificant as when a Lucifer-class destroyer came bearing down on me out of subspace.

Multiplayer performance is the one area where Freespace comes up a bit short. Despite impressive features (12 players over LAN or Internet, various deathmatch and team settings), the game just doesnt run very smoothly over a dial-up connection. Even over a 128K ISDN line, I wasnt always able to find a playable game on Parallax Online (Volitions free online-gaming service at www.parallaxonline.com). However, Volition appears dedicated to ironing out the multiplayer issues. If it can smooth out the problems with a patch or two, Freespace will be just about perfect.

Even with its multiplayer issues, this game is easily the best thing going in space-combat sims. The graphics are excellent, the story is solid, and the single-player gameplay is outstanding. The great mission-editor pushes Descent: Freespace to the top of the space-combat heap.-- Michael E. Ryan / GamePro