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Gameplay

The ships in FreeSpace 2 are even bigger this time. The Juggernauts span over six kilometers and are virtually indestructible by your tiny ship that you pilot. The only way to bring down a ship that size is to combat it with a ship the same size.

Seeing two huge ships battle each other with their massive beam guns is truly an amazing site. You just have to watch out when two massive ships have their beam systems aimed at each other, because if you get caught in the beam, you’re as good as dead. The new beams that FreeSpace 2 has can rip through the hull of other ships and bring them down in no time at all. If you are brave enough, you can try to take down one of the massive ships yourself. I tried to destroy all of the weapon systems on one of the Shivans biggest ships and I was unable to destroy them all because there were so many of them.

There are over 30 missions and they also include you playing of both the Vasudan side and the Human side. The weapon system is also more advanced, that allows you to fire a guided missile and mark a target for a huge capital ship to lock on and destroy. This is what they call painting the targets.

You also have command of up to 7 squad mates at a time. I found this feature very useful. Attacking the larger ships while having my squad go for the smaller fighters made the fight a whole lot easier. The rearming and repairing ship was good, but I found that it took them what seemed like forever to get to my ship, so I had to make sure I wasn’t in heavy fire to get rearmed.

Another good thing about attacking the larger ships is that you can direct your firepower towards the subsystems of the ship. For example, if you wanted to disable the target, all you would have to do is destroy the engines. Of course they can still fire at you, so what do you do then? Destroy their main weapons system. That leaves them vulnerable to anything. The smaller ships can be fired upon in the same way, but they are mostly weak and you will likely destroy them entirely before the subsystem is destroyed.

The weapons that your fighters use have some serious oomph to them. In some cases the gun system can shake the whole ship. Which is a really cool effect, but it can get annoying when you’re on the tail of a Shivan.  

The weapons now have various effects that damage the target differently. Good thing there is the option to place two different combinations of gun systems on your ship at the same time. The effects of each weapon can be combined to have a really goon affect on the opponent. It’s just a matter of finding the right configuration for your ship.

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