Beyond the Red Line is an ambitious homebrewed action game created for fans of the Sci Fi Channel television series “Battlestar Galactica.” It’s now available for the Mac, and it’s absolutely free.
Beyond the Red Line rewinds the show’s timeline a little bit, taking players back to Battlestar Galactica’s second season. You arrive on board the Battlestar Pegasus, ready to help defend humanity against the Cylons. Actually, you’ve been given no choice: A civilian refugee, you’ve been press-ganged into service as a pilot, and you take the yokes of a Viper Mk II, Mk VII or Raptor spacecraft as you test your skills against wave after wave of Cylon craft.
Beyond the Red Line features detailed, high-res ship models, original audio, new voice acting and custom soundtrack, a single-player mission campaign, multiplayer head-to-head action and more.
The game is entirely fan-created — it’s neither made nor endorsed by Universal Studios, NBC nor anyone else officially associated with the hit reimagining of the 1970’s space opera, which has received massive acclaim since its introduction three seasons ago.
Beyond the Red Line utilizes the open-source Freespace 2 game engine created by Volition software — a 3D arcade shooter set in outer space, descended from the classic “Descent” series and published for the PC by Interplay. Although Freespace 2 didn’t come to the Mac as a commercial project, Beyond the Red Line has been ported to the Mac (and is currently in the last stages of coming to Linux as well). And Beyond the Red Line is a completely standalone project — it doesn’t require any Freespace 2 files in order to work.
This release of Beyond the Red Line is offered as a demo — the game is still a work in progress. You can track the development of the game in the forums, linked to from the Beyond the Red Line Web site. Recently news has come to light that a commercial Battlestar Galactica game is in development, unrelated to this project — Beyond the Red Line’s creators say they’ll continue to work on their game for as long as possible.
System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.4 or later, Intel or PowerPC running at 933MHz or faster, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200 or Nvidia GeForce 3 or better 3D graphics card and 650MB hard disk space. You can fly with a mouse or keyboard; joystick is optional.