Beyond the Red Line

Yes, another Battlestar Galactica related post. But I must show you what I’ve recently discovered by accident.

I was a huge fan of Microsoft’s Freelancer Space Sim, Arcarde, Trade… whatever.. game. It had some really nice graphics, smooth gameplay, a good story and so on. But it was released 4 years ago. Some weeks ago, I thought I want to play something like that again, but with better graphics and maybe a better multiplayer part. On my search I came across some titles like „Dark Star One“ or „Spaceforce 2“ and some others. DSO had some good critics but also many that told they prefer to stick with the 3 year older Freelancer. „Spaceforce 2“ came out this June and a Demo was released at the beginning of this month. I tried it out. Most of the graphics were great, but for example the textures for the planets were really blurry, for a modern game I had expected much more. Also the cutscenes and the english audio was really terrible, I felt like I was seeing a freeware game from 1997.

And then… suddenly during this week (I wasn’t looking any longer after this stuff) I accidently came across „Beyond the Red Line“. I really can’t remember how I found it but it is the most promissing candidate right now. There was once a game called „Freespace“ and a succesor called „Freespace 2“. Later the game’s engine has been made open source and since then the Freespace community has enhanced it with many nice features to keep it on the level of modern games.

„Beyond the Red Line“ is not only a modification of that open source version, it is a stand alone game (you don’t need „Freespace“) and it is freeware. It is playing in the universe of the famous Battlestar Galactica series. So you can fly arround with the legendary Viper MkII and Viper MkVII, also the Raptors and Cylon Raiders are avaiable. Here are some screenshots:

The developer released a first demo some weeks ago at the official site www.game-warden.com/bsg/ which is already very playable and makes a lot of fun (especially if you know the series). They plan to release a new demo soon. I think the screenshorts are not the newest as I’ve got a much better graphic on my pc.

So what are you waiting for? Go to the official site and download the demo.