It was completed ahead of schedule in less than a year, and released to very positive reviews, but the game became a commercial failure, and was described by certain critics as one of 1999's most unfairly overlooked titles.

The game continues on the story from Descent: FreeSpace, once again thrusting the player into the role of a pilot fighting against the mysterious aliens, the Shivans.

The game features large numbers of fighters alongside gigantic capital ships in a battlefield fraught with beams, shells and missiles in detailed star systems and nebulae.

[11] The player flies around in a fighter with a first-person, in-cockpit view with a fully customizable fixed head-up display (HUD) as the visual interface.

With the game supporting force feedback technology, joystick players will find their controllers vibrating or putting up resistance when they engage the afterburners or collide with objects.

[14] FreeSpace 2 allows multiplayer games to be played across a local area network (LAN) or over the Internet via the free services provided by Parallax Online (PXO).

[15] FreeSpace 2's story is brought out via narrative pre-rendered cutscenes, the pre- and post-mission briefings, as well as in-game chatter between non-player characters, and scripted mission events.

The storytelling took on a character-driven approach with expositions taking the form of cutscenes in which Bosch gives out monologues, revealing the purpose and driving forces behind his actions.

[17] Despite this alliance, opposition still exists to this union in the form of a faction of Terrans led by Great War veteran, Admiral Aken Bosch, who leads the rebel group under the banner of the Neo-Terran Front (NTF).

Seeking to stop the NTF from securing Deneb, the GTVA launch a campaign in the star system, though they are shocked to find Bosch within.

Despite efforts to secure and recover the cruiser, the Trinity is destroyed, and the GTVA fleet focus on dealing with the Shivans, before returning to Gamma Draconis for reassignment.

The GTVA manage to save the surviving crew and the ETAK device, but as they try to intercept the Shivan transport carrying Bosch, they discover a second jump gate in the nebula.

[28] The Alliance devises a plan to halt the Shivan invasion by collapsing the two jump nodes from Capella to the rest of GTVA space.

[29] The plan works, but the GTVA loses the Colossus, their only match for Shivan juggernauts, in a diversionary engagement, resulting in a pyrrhic victory.

The player can choose to flee the scene when the warning is given or stay and die defending the remaining ships, which affects the ending slightly.

The Admiral concludes by saying that the Alliance now has the means to recreate the Ancient subspace gate, implying that there's a chance the node to Earth can be restored and that this conflict didn't bring only sorrow, before signing off.

[11] Due to time constraints, a lot of the initial ideas were dropped from the final version of the game, such as atmospheric battles, and new weapons types like a "subspace missile artillery strike".

[31] The shifting of their target focus to higher end machines also fulfilled their top priority of having capital ships many times larger than fighter crafts.

[36] SquadWar was implemented as an attempt to establish a sense of continuity among the players in the form of a persistent online territorial fight, along with pilot statistics and ladder rankings.

The nebulae feature was also praised for its rendered atmosphere, which reviewers described as tense and paranoia-inducing as they keep expecting enemy ships to appear out of the gases in a deadly ambush.

[12] GameSpot felt FreeSpace's story was "both deeper and darker" than either the Wing Commander and X-Wing series, establishing invincible foes who never lost their stature despite the player learning of plausible ways to defeat them.

Combatsim.com offered another angle; Reynolds said the gameplay elements of FreeSpace 2 are "light years beyond the competition" and more than offsets the loss of being personally immersed in the game's universe.

[68] FiringSquad described it as a "total thrill" to be among 20 fighters flying in between opposing capital ships with beams, missiles, and flak all around and warnings going off, as they try to seek out and destroy their opposite numbers, a view which GameSpot agreed with.

[24] The game's AI was judged adequate to provide for such fights, being cunning enough to trick others to crash into the walls of narrow openings, and good enough to detect and warn their wingmen of enemies coming up directly behind them.

[16] While the dynamic mission objectives were celebrated for coming up with twists and turns to spice up the story,[15][17][25][67] there were a few who found these "in-game red herrings" overused instead.

[6] Sharky Extreme praised FreeSpace 2 for having the enormous capital ships, as this burst the "trapped in a bubble" trend in Wing Commander- and X-Wing- type games.

The scenes of these giant ships duking it out, with many gnat-like fighters swarming around in their little dances of death, have led reviewers to feel a sense of epicness,[9][16] comparable to reliving battles in science fiction series like Babylon 5 and Star Wars.

[76] In NowGamer's interview with Jim Boone, a producer at Volition, he said that this could have been due to joysticks' being sold poorly because they were "going out of fashion" and more modern first-person shooters, such as Quake, were "very much about the mouse and [the] keyboard".

Led by Edward Gardner and Ian Warfield, the FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project was formed to standardize changes and maintain a core engine for others to take advantage of.

The components of its website were, however, later handed over to the FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project to help them create a similar service in tracking statistics and rankings.