Freelancer (PC) Microsoft
Lately I seem to be starting quite a few reviews off “do you remember”. This concerns me, as either I’m starting to get too old, or there are many un-original game ideas being produced. Freelancer takes me back to the game “Elite”, one of the first 3d polygon games to come out of the 80’s, and if you ever played it you’d know how incredible it seemed for it’s time. Freelancer has the same vibe, and looks and plays better, but maybe my attention span has waned, or my time has become more important, because it doesn’t seem to have the same hold over me that Elite had.
The story behind Freelancer is that four gigantic ships fled from a terrible war on earth and settled in the Sirius Star system 800 years ago. In the 800 years since, the colonies have grown and prospered, opening trade routes between one another, and a flourishing economy has arisen between the four “nations”. You enter the game as Trent, the last survivor of an attack on Freeport 7, a space base located just outside Liberty space, and you’ve been left with little money and little prospects until you meet Juni, who’s currently working for the Liberty Security Force. Through working for Juni, you eventually learn why Freeport 7 was destroyed and by whom.
The controls are different for a space sim, as you don’t have the option of using a joystick, which seems very odd at first. You use the mouse to steer and fire, and use W and S to accelerate and slow down. The thing is, it works really well. You have a shield and armor, and pressing F and G releases Shield Generators and Nanobots that repair these as you battle. These can be brought in space stations and on planets, but are also dropped when you destroy other spaceships (amongst other goodies), and you can beam these aboard (using B) and use them immediately, which is often a saving grace in the bigger battles. There are also goto, docking and formation manoeuvres accessed by the F-Keys that put you in autopilot mode, meaning you don’t spend ages messing around and crashing pointlessly.
When docked, you have various places you can go – The Launch Pad, which launches you to space, The bar, to get jobs, The Equipment Dealer, who sells weapons and upgrades for your ship, The Commodity Dealer, whom you trade items you beam aboard, and finally the Ship Merchant, where you buy new space ships. Each planet has it’s own unique architecture, and whilst you cannot move around as such, the backgrounds are wonderfully illustrated and make you want to explore the stars to see what fantastic sites await you. The Commodity Dealer deserves a special mention, as through him you can buy and sell goods on the market, and by looking up trade routes you can establish quite a profitable business in trade.
Graphically this game is quite impressive. Space looks striking – whether you are flying through gas clouds or zooming towards a sun, you get the sense of being in space. The expansiveness of space is represented well – see a distant planet and you can target it and “goto”, enjoying the ride. You also move about via “trade lanes” which are essentially space “express ways”. You can also jump between vast amounts of space using jump gates or naturally occurring jump holes, which have animation similar to the movie “Contact” when you enter them. The space battles are wonderful, as each type of weapon has a unique firing animation, and there are a wide variety of weapons and starships to choose from, each beautifully rendered. The music and sound is equally impressive, giving you a firm sense of “intergalacticness” comparable to any good Sci-fi movie or series, and the radio chatter adds so much to the feel of the game, even if it does get a little repetitive.
The main part of the game has you embroiled in an intergalactic conspiracy, and whilst it is compelling to do these missions, this is one of those games where you don’t have to follow that mission storyline. But it pays to otherwise the game is quite dull. I found the other aspects of the game to be quite boring. Ok, so you can fly about, attack people at will and steal their cargo and then fly around trading it, or go mining where you fly through asteroid belts and shoot them to release goodies which you then tractor in, or join the local security forces and be a cop, but it’s all pretty much the same. The main story missions are a little more complicated, as you have to escort and protect ships, capture this and that, escape capture, as well as the standard “blow up these ships / bases” type missions. Some of the space battle missions are quite difficult, and autosave is needed and welcome tool. Apart from autosave, you can only save when docked, so it pays to dock at places often. Each mission unlocks more of the puzzle to why Freeport was destroyed, but I found the main story line to be rather unimaginative.
Secondary missions are obtained in the Bars, and given to you by organisations that you are on friendly terms with. As in GTA and Morrowind, doing missions for one organisation will have you lose credibility with another, and they’ll attack you on sight if you’ve got too low a rep with them. Unfortunately they are all the same – find space ships at nav point X and destroy them all. You might have to capture an escape pod, or obtain/destroy some dropped goods, but other than that there is no change from one mission to the next. There are no trade missions or escort missions or anything promised on the box or website, and this is so very disappointing.
The whole problem with this game is it’s fun, but only for a little while. It’s fun to explore, it’s fun to raid, it’s fun to blow things up, but then what do you have left to do? You keep doing missions, but with them all being essentially the same, you run out of patience with the game, as it doesn’t really take you anywhere. Siding with one faction or another doesn’t give you anything but different ships and weapons, and most of them are equivalent to each other anyway. Even multiplayer can’t really add to the game, as it contains the same “blow up these ships / bases” type missions without the main storyline, but you can team up with people. Not all that exciting really. You can also fly around and attack noobs, but that’s only fun until you get kicked. Freelancer really doesn’t deliver on what it promised, so only gets about 7 out of 10.