I thought they were a little on the tough side when it came to the controls, but I managed to scrap a few bots while having fun doing it. Now, both Descent games were lauded for taking the 3D revolution by the horns by burying players deep inside deadly caverns and mineshafts in a hectic, claustrophobic shoot ’em up in ships versus hordes of robotic foes. When Parallax Software split into two companies, one of those became known as Volition and with the backing of veterans that had worked on Descent, dared to take players back into space with a little something called Freespace. Still, it was clear that demographics were changing and the popularity of certain genres became much more appealing to large publishers eager to get a gilded piece of the growing pie as developers looked for ways to stay in business so that they could continue to do what they loved. Their sales were often overshadowed by titles such as id’s Quake II, Westwood Studios’ Command & Conquer series, Activision’s dabbling with Mechwarrior, and a duo of titles from developers at Parallax – Descent and Descent II – which will become a lot more important later. As for my aging PC box at the time, I probably could have used a dedicated 3D card to make the last battle in the swirling depths of subspace a bit smoother.īy 1998, the space combat genre was being beaten back into the ropes.

Freespace’s goal was to channel the kind of flak busting chaos that a cap ship and a hornet’s nest of fighters could bring to a fight. This wasn’t that much of an exaggeration.

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