Freelancer Game Review
By Prankoys JJC
Gummy Village Idiot/Handyman
(Click on the pictures for larger versions)
You lift off from the planet Leeds in your Cavalier-class light fighter, weapons armed. The waypoint to your destination appears in your contact list. Your objective: to rid the nearby asteroid field of pirates, with 7000 credits as a reward. You steer your fighter towards the debris field, and engage your cruise engines. Minutes later, you arrive at your destination. Three pirate vessels emerge from the void and jet towards you. You quickly dispatch two of them, while suffering moderate damage to your shields. The last fighter appears to be helpless against your superior craft, but three more pirate vessels enter the area and begin pummelling your shields with their lasers. The other pirate ship also turns about and begins attacking you as well. Thinking quickly, you charge your cruise engines and point your ship in the direction of Leeds. Unfortunately, one of the pirates launches a cruise disruptor missile which knocks your cruise engines out, leaving you helpless. You turn around to fight, and watch in horror as three missiles streak out from the pirates. Your shields are gone, and your hull is already severely damaged. The missiles impact and tear your ship apart. Everything goes black.
Welcome to the world of Freelancer.
Freelancer is a sequel to Starlancer, a spaceflight simulator released by Microsoft in 2000. It is set 800 years after the war between the Alliance and the Coalition in the previous game. Whereas in the original game, the player fights in the Sol system where Earth is located, in Freelancer the theater is the distant Sirius system, where five Alliance colony ships were sent in the middle of the war and settled in different parts of the Sirius sector.
Freelancer's graphics are impressive for a game nearly four years in development. Even at the lower detail settings, everything is still nice to look at. Fighters leave exhaust trails, the jumpgates and tradelanes (the main method of interstellar travel in the game) have some cool effects, and parts of ships are torn off depending where you shoot them. The larger battleships are especially cool to look at when they explode, as instead of exploding into unrecognizable little bits a la the Death Star in Star Wars, they simply break up (amidst smaller explosions) into two or three large chunks which just drift there. The environments are breathtaking as well. Even the character models are nicely done, with facial expressions and some good texture work. The best thing about Freelancer is that you don't need a top-of-the-line PC to run it. A Pentium 2 333MHz with 128MB SDRAM and a GeForce2 MX200 is enough to run it.
The sound in Freelancer is not bad, but it isn't that good either. Unremarkable, as most of the sound effects are your typical science fiction fare. The music fits the mood very well, although you won't find the themes bouncing around in your head or yourself humming them as you take a walk. The voices are nice, although sometimes the conversations sound clipped because of the multiple wave files randomly chosen for conversations. Also, the voices are sometimes given to the inappropriate characters. Ever seen a pure Japanese guy speak with an American accent?
The story borders on the generic side, as the race-of-aliens-released-by-a-single-artifact's-discovery/activation bit was done in Independence War 2 (another good spaceflight sim, this time from Infogrames). Not that it's any problem, as the story isn't really Freelancer's strong point.
Freelancer is controlled entirely by the mouse and keyboard. There is no joystick support, which will be a disappointment to those expecting to use their force-feedback-equipped joysticks to play the game. The mouse/keyboard control scheme works fine, though. It takes some time to get used to, but once you get to grips with the controls, you'll be flying like a pro in no time.
The game allows immense freedom of play. There's a plethora of pilotable ships and usable equipment. You even have the freedom to take the path you choose. Want to be a pirate? Easy enough, just raid transport ships and sell off their cargo to the highest bidder. Or maybe you'd rather stay on the good side and take on jobs for the police? That's all right. How about the (semi) peaceful life of a trader shuttling goods back and forth through planets and stations? You can even mix it up and take a little bit of each, though that'll be a hassle, considering you can only have one ship at once. A word of warning, though. There isn't much variety in the missions you can get from the job boards. Most of them are basically go-here-kill-this missions, with the occasional pick-this-thing-up-after-the-battle-and-bring-it-here mission every now and then. Because of this, it gets tedious and boring after a while. Of course, that's what multiplayer's for. Up to 64 players can be in one multiplayer game.
All in all, Freelancer is a very good game, one of the few bright lights in today's PC gaming scene.
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