I don’t typically like ‘simulator’ style games. Never have. So I have no idea what compelled me to pickup ‘Descent Freespace: The Great’ war back in the late 90’s and it’s expansion pack ‘Silent Threat’.

I’ve dabbled with the iconic Wing Commander series, and was more interested in the cutscenes between the missions than the missions themselves. The Star Wars titles like X-Wing never really grabbed me either. I don’t particularly enjoy flight simulator or car driving games either. Just a me thing I guess.

But there is something about Freespace that just grabbed me back in the day and it left a lasting impression on me of being a really good game.

But it’s been decades since I played the game, and looking at it again recently I now know why. For one reason or another the resolution of the game is hard baked to 640×480. I’m not even sure if my monitor supports a resolution that low anymore (Windows 10 only lets me go down to 800×600). Regardless, it’s also difficult to stream low resolution games without a bunch of fiddling with OBS.

Thankfully there exists an open source port of Descent Freespace 2 and through that players are able to enjoy the original Freespace game at a much higher resolution on much more modern hardware.

I’ll have details of the programs I used and how I used them at the bottom of this review.

Descent Freespace: The Great War was developed by Volition, published by Interplay, and released in 1998. As I understand it the name Descent was tacked onto the front of the game title to both cash in on the Descent brand and to avoid any confusion with the FreeSpace disk compression software.

By 1998 we had already seen the release of every Wing Commander game (except for that crap EA released on Xbox 360 in 2007) alongside popular titles such as X-Wing, Starfleet Academy, and many others.

So what was it about Freespace that really stood out for me?

Hard to say really, although the ease in which you could jump into a mission and engage in dog fights was probably one of them. Many simulation titles get bogged down with too many buttons and functions, while hardly an ‘arcade’ title, Freespace is pretty easy to pickup and play.

It also has a several degrees of difficulty, and the easier difficulties can be pretty forgiving. You can even fail certain objectives and still technically ‘pass’ the mission, although there may be repercussions later.

It does have a few cutscenes but they are fairly brief and far between. The downtown between missions is pretty short, typically involved little more than a brief of your next mission. In this fashion the action is fairly continuous. Even the escort missions tend to focus more you flying around killing enemies than slowly gliding along side a transport ship.

The game looked pretty great back in 1998 and thanks to the open source project and a few filters still looks pretty good today. Sure the ships don’t have high polygon counts or 4K textures with ray tracing, but the ships and colourful galaxies still look decent.

The cutscenes look pretty dated, can’t do much about them. The voice acting is a bit hit-and-miss. The music though is really good and the sound effects equally well done.

In fact all told it’s fair to say that the actual ‘on mission’ elements of the game are really well done and the ‘fluff’ that wraps around it is ‘meh’. But that’s okay because there isn’t much ‘fluff’ to be had and you’ll spend 95% of your time on missions. The storyline is a little cliche (by today’s standards) but serves the action well and does help create a sense of tension. As I mentioned earlier it’s also slightly adaptive to your performance in the missions, which is neat.

I played through the game entirely on my Twitch recently and really enjoyed doing so. It seems after all these years Freespace still has ‘it’, I just can’t quite put my finger on what ‘it’ is. Gameplay I guess? Must just be the absolutely solid gameplay.

From memory I preferred the original Freespace to the sequel. Thanks to the power of the open source project I fully intend to fire up Freespace 2 in the near future and see if that still holds true.

Descent Freespace: The Geart War is an outstanding space combat simulator, so good in fact that it managed to not only have someone like myself who typically doesn’t play simulator games not only play it, but thoroughly enjoy it too.

Playing Freespace in 2023

Before you race off to GOG and purchase the Descent Freespace Battle Pack know that for whatever reason you only need to own Descent Freespace 2 to work with the open source project. I’m not sure how that works legally, but being that I own big box copies of Freespace and it’s expansion I wasn’t too worried.

So the first step is to purchase Descent Freespace 2 from GOG if you don’t own it already.

The second step is to download the Knossos launcher. It’s an extremely easy-to-use front end that will easily let your navigate Open Freespace projects and mods.

Once you’ve download, installed, and loaded Knossos, point it at your Freespace 2 GOG directory. Use the search box at the top to find and install “FreeSpace Port” and “FSPort MediaVPs”. The former is the original game ported to the Freespace 2 engine and the latter is some updated assets.

And that’s really it. Now you’re ready to to enjoy the classic Freespace games on modern hardware with modern resolutions.