Summary
Star Wars has been back in the news recently because, to cut a long story short, the US alt-right have decided that Darth Vader was actually the good guy. We are not here to indulge such buffoonery. We are here to talk about Fate of the Galaxy, a free unofficial space combat simulator set during the events of the original Star Wars trilogy, featuring several mission-based campaigns and a stable of Imperial and Rebel Alliance ships that ranges from the quad-blasting X-Wing to Boba Fett’s Firespray 31. Also, Naboo starfighters, if you really must. It’s a total conversion of poor dead Volition’s venerable dogfighter FreeSpace 2, running on the open source Free Space 2 Open engine via the popular Knossos launcher. You don’t need a copy of FreeSpace 2 to play it. You also don’t need to pay. And nor do you need a whizbang PC – this bucket of bolts hums along happily on my i5-1145G7 with no dedicated graphics card. As the Rancor said to the padawan: finally, some good food. Watch on YouTube Fate of the Galaxy has been in development off and on for almost two decades, weathering a number of team changes and shifts of focus. The FreeSpace Wiki has a longer account of its travels. It’s not an officially licensed Star Wars production, as made evident by a scrolling text intro which takes the official orchestral theme and moves every note up or down a place, as though spitefully jolting the piano around under John Williams’ fingers. It’s not quite as bizarre as Portsmouth Sinfonia’s Also sprach Zarathustra but it did make me cackle like the Emperor contemplating a freshly made asteroid field. But then I began playing, and my presumptuous merriment became a frown of concentration. While hardly Steel Battalion, Fate of the Galaxy is a proper nerdy sim with a bustling 3D cockpit and all sorts of keyboard shortcuts to try once and immediately forget. You’ll need to funnel energy between fore and aft shields during bombing runs on Star Destroyers, target individual subsystems with your ion cannon, give orders to other pilots, and consider whether to synch different guns for maximum effect. I can run the game fine on my work laptop with integrated graphics, but I’m definitely feeling the need for a beefier keyboard. And also a joystick. Certainly, I’m not going to get far in LAN multiplayer with this hunk of junk. It seems a very generous production, based on 30 minutes playing kiss-chase with TIE bombers. The story campaigns and quickfix stand-alone skirmishes aside, there’s a mission editor with text-based files for easier sharing. There’s also VR support with head-tracking, should you own one of those haunted helmets. Learn more via the online manual (Google Doc), and find Fate of the Galaxy itself on Moddb. You’ll need around seven gigs of disc space. This being the year 2026, there’s the question of generative AI usage - a topic of much concern lately in modding circles. Fate of the Galaxy’s official site boasts that all the visual assets were “made by humans only”. I’m less sure about other aspects – there’s seemingly some artificial VO during the tutorial, though it sounds like antiquated, less insidious robocaller software. The FreeSpace Open engine itself greatly pre-dates today’s chatbot invasion. The original FreeSpace 2 launched in 1999 - a more civilised age, when everybody still thought Darth Vader was an arsehole.