Graphics

This is the Original FreeSpace Engine?

Well, not quite. It's been modified, but the enhancements made to it are on par with the enhancements that Valve made to the Quake II engine to give us Half-Life. Quite honestly, this is the best looking space game I have ever seen in my life.

Almost everything graphical is superb. Every single ship in the game is well-designed with a lot of polygons and they all look original. Terran ships have identifiably plain and practical designs for the most part, though the fighters do have a cool edge to them. Shivans tend towards sharp, pointy and butt-ugly spacecraft of all sorts. With their black and red coloring in addition to numerous weapon points that stick out of the craft, you get the feeling that you're fighting a big old Black Widow in space. Vasudans, on the other hand, add a kind of artistic touch to their ships. They have sleek lines, smooth curves, and rounded surfaces interrupted by the occasional sharp turn or razor edge in the silhouette.

Check out the beams

One down!

Textures, especially for the space backdrop, are magnificent. From the plain black space with a few nebulae and stars in the distance all the way through violent, pulsating storms in nebulas are drawn magnificently. Going through a nebula is like driving a Ferrari at full speed at night with a thick fog. You never know just when you're going to find something a short distance in front of you, but you know that odds are it's gonna kill ya. Every time you go into a foggy area you'll run into a killer surprise with big, sharp nasty teeth that leaps at you and bites your head off … no, wait, that's Monty Python and the Holy Grail… in FS2, you'll probably just run into a 2 kilometer Shivan destroyer loaded with a dozen beam weapons :) Speaking of beams, they are great. It's not just a short flash, but a long burst of bright light that tears into an enemy ship, then the beam moves around to spread the damage. =) Explosions are excellent, and if you're too close you'll be rocked around or even destroyed by the death throes of a destroyer or cruiser. The only disappointing effect is the torpedo/bomb detonation, which looks very pixellated. :/

Fire!

Finish him!

A word of warning: play this game in at least 800x600. 640x480 just does not do it justice, even screenshots fail to show how much better it is in 1024 or 800.

"It's not the motion of the ocean, it's the size of the ship!"

Ugh. Alright, kill me. That's a horrible heading. But it helps get my point across: the ships in FS2 are *huuuuge*. Just wait until you see the Colossus. Dozens of anti-ship beams, anti-fighter beams, laser turrets and missile turrets all packed on a 6 kilometer long hull. The Colossus is just insanely big. In fact, all the ships are huge. The sense of scale you get is astonishing. You are a speck, a fly, nothing more … I'm just amazed that this graphics engine can display 3 or 4 big ships and dozens of fighters, missiles and lasers on screen, all active …

Another one bites the dust

You've taken a bit of a beating