Descent: Freespace - The Great War

aka: Conflict: Freespace - The Great War, Conflict: Freespace - Wielka Wojna, Mahabarata
Moby ID: 721
Windows Specs
Buy on Windows
$7.99 new on Steam

Description official descriptions

As a pilot in the Gallactic Terran Alliance (GTA), you've known the Vasudans as the enemy for a long time. But things are about to change. An unknown menace, with technology beyond both ours and Vasudans, are destroying both sides. And now, old enemies must unite to fight this common enemy, and the dissenters and traitors on both sides.

Descent: Freespace is a space dogfight simulator. The game features a vast amount of weapons, missiles and bombs, as well as large capships. It also has online multiplayer. Take fighters and bombers on attack, recon, escort, and sweep missions against enemy capships and fighters and bombers. Defend your own capships and other assets. Your rating and performance is noted after every mission, with suggestions (if applicable). You can call in reinforcements (if available), and your wingmen actually do fight intelligently, as there can be dozens of fighters flying about.

Spellings

  • 自由空间 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

79 People (76 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 29 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 74 ratings with 6 reviews)

Fast and addictive; a great space shooter.

The Good
Freespace is fast, very very fast. And I mean both the in-game speed feeling, aswell as in display terms. I played it on my old system, a P200MMX w/Hercules Thriller gfx-card and 64MB memory, and it blew me away. Not only did the graphics display perfectly (without any noteable glitches), they were also very nice to look at. The AI is decent aswell, as in if you blow up a capital ship (a cruiser, for example), that ship won't be there to bother you again. Another thing that I loved (after getting used to it), was the very simple yet elegant cockpit HUD-display. It gives you all the info you need, without cluttering the screen or reducing the size of your view-point. Rather refreshing, in this genre. On top of all this, Freespace comes with a very good and easy to use editor, allowing you to create your own missions in no time.

The Bad
It takes time to get the hang of it, maybe a too much time for those not a fan of the genre.

The Bottom Line
If you're looking for fast and furious space-based action, I can heartily recommend this game.

Windows · by faceless (438) · 2000

An excellent and complex space sim.

The Good
The battles are hectic and nerve wrenching. The battles get big at times. Really big. When you add a couple of the capital ships into the mix (which are usually around 10x to 50x the size of your ship) and the battles get insane. You can direct your fellow pilots with ease and the enemy ships are brutally good at weaving and dodging your shots at times. Unlike most flight sims I have every played, you actually have a good chance of hitting the enemy with your missiles, too. The graphics are not the most advanced at the time, but if you have an accelerator then they are pretty to look at.

The Bad
Some of the babysitting missions can get a bit frustrating. The game feels a bit too short. The accuracy and power of the capital ships can get to be disturbing. The final mission will take you more then a few tries to complete.

The Bottom Line
This is simply put, one of the best flight sims I have every played.

Windows · by Gene Davison (801) · 2001

Watch out, Wing Commander!

The Good
Excellent cockpit and graphics, cap ships that makes sense, LOTS of multiplayer options, lots of missions, full mission/campaign editor,

The Bad
Gets repetitive after a while, plot is old and stale, doesn't add much to the genre (refinements only)

The Bottom Line
Freespace is a new chapter in space combat sims, in the spirit of Wing Commander, but doesn't add much to the genre, if at all.

The graphics are noticeably better, at least as good as Wing Commander: Prophecy, the latest Wing Commander game, and supports more 3D accelerators. The missions are also better designed with more interactivity. You can tell wingmen to attack specific parts of the ship, and maybe even call in reinforcements (if available). You can configure loadout for the entire flight, both you and your wingmen (up to 11 of them). You can win awards and citations and promotions. You even get suggestions in the debriefing about your performance.

Freespace is very customizable. ALL the keystrokes can be remapped, and the cockpit HUD can be remapped/moved as well, even chosee from three different colors. There are also five different levels of difficulty and plenty of other config options to suit.

Where Freespace really shines is multiplayer, as you can play free on PXO, the free Freespace gaming service. Signup is as simple as Battle.net and action is just as furious, with random ships and missions possible. If you have the bandwidth, you can even try voice comms.

There's also Squad Wars, where the server keeps track of individual battles that affect an overall campaign map, which in turn generates more individual battles to be played out in MP games.

The full mission/campaign editor (FRED) is very powerful and user campaigns and mission are plenty. If you tired of those, there are even mods and total conversions for Freespace that converts the crafts and weapons and ships to vessels from other sci-fi universes.

Freespace, however, is merely an evolutionary title that made the old features better, but didn't really bring anything new to the table. Story-wise it couldn't match Wing Commander (yet), and it's hard to imagine what the next breakthru feature would be. Freespace is about as state-of-the-art as you can go... And is worthy of your money if you like this genre, but just be warned that you have seen all this before, in one way or another.

Windows · by Kasey Chang (4598) · 2001

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Trivia

DVD version

The multi-lingual DVD edition of Freespace was bundled with Creative DVD drives. Not only subtitles, but all the videos and speech were translated to other languages.

References

The section in the Freespace manual explaining how to create pilots and manage the pilot roster has a sample screenshot featuring several pilot names. One of those names is "BlueHair". This is a reference to the Wing Commander series, one of Freespace's inspirations and also one of its rivals. BlueHair was the semi-official nickname of the player character in the first two Wing Commander games.

Title

Freespace was renamed to Descent: Freespace to avoid "same name" issues with a disk utility. However, in Europe, the Descent series had never sold perticularly well, so the publishers decided to rename the game to Conflict: Freespace in that region, thereby avoiding the Descent association. Subsequent Freespace titles don't use either of the prefixes.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • April 1999 (Issue #177) – Runner-up as Best Space Sim of the Year

Information also contributed by Terok Nor, Virgil and WildKard

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  • MobyGames ID: 721
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by faceless.

Amiga added by Martin Smith.

Additional contributors: Xantheous, Kasey Chang, j. jones, JRK, Virgil, CaesarZX, Patrick Bregger, Plok.

Game added January 10, 2000. Last modified January 29, 2024.