Descent: Freespace - The Great War

aka: Conflict: Freespace - The Great War, Conflict: Freespace - Wielka Wojna, Mahabarata
Moby ID: 721
Windows Specs
Buy on Windows
$9.99 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)

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

A mediocre game at best.

The Good
I don't know why they insisted on making this game, especially when it's not from the original developer (Parallax). This game is simply pointless and no fun at all. There's nothing good about this game, not even ONE.

The Bad
Horrid and stupid AI which just screams "shoot the guy who programmed me in the head", lame previous-generation graphics engine (c'mon, with the likes of Unreal coming out in 1998, is this all you managed to pull off?) which runs a lot slower than it should, disgusting graphics and crappy sound effects.

The Bottom Line
Why?! Why in the name of God did they make this game?

Windows · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2000

Screw star wars

The Good
Well, I was getting EXTREMELY tired of playing those monotonous old Star Wars space sims. I just happened to pick this game up off some shelf at a local software store and, well, WOW. This game has its own original theme. The game play is quite smooth and the story line is riveting. I constantly find myself actually yelling "Haha! Take that, you damn space invader from hell!" after blowing up an enemy craft. Quite unusual. There is a nice selection of ships, each with their own unique traits and appearances (unlike those stupid TIE whatevers and whatnot) allowing three different species to duke it out in style. The game even comes with a mission editor called FRED, which is really great. I'm working on my own campaign with it as I write this.

The Bad
There's this one aggravating mission that I simply can not beat. Damn you, Lucifer! It's SO hard!

The Bottom Line
This is Descent times 20. There is very little bad that could be said about this game. It's a completely original space sim in which three species have at eachother with their own squadron of unique fighters, bombers, cruisers and the occasional destroyer. Very nice graphics and gameplay. You can't go wrong.

Windows · by Sam Tinianow (113) · 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.