'Freelancer' Review (9/10)

One of the best games ever. Freelancer is one of those games that comes around only a handful of times each decade. The sequel to StarLancer,  Freelancer is a space-based flightsim-rpg (I use the term rpg loosely). While the story isn't exactly groundbreaking, the visuals and combat mechanics are relatively top notch. Even now, in the age of advanced shaders and physics engines, Freelancer still looks great and plays great.

The game introduces us to two factions, the Alliance and the Coalition which, for some reason or another, were locked into a stalemate stellar-war. At one point the Coalition gets a lucky break and deals a deathblow to the Alliance -- but not before the Alliance is able to launch several sleeper ships (think big transport ships built for the purpose of repopulating a system) to a far off galaxy in an attempt to 'start over' free of the petty war. The game starts about 2000 years after the sleeper ships make it to the far off galaxy.

In this world, you are a one Mr. Edison Trent (the guy on the cover) and you are one of the few survivors of an attack on a remote spacestation by an unknown force from [presumably] beyond the story's universe. Having been rescued from the wreckage, you are taken to another planet to start your life over again. Cue player.




The story's first few levels introduce you to the basic combat and interface mechanics. You are provided with a startership and basic funds and set loose in a sandbox-style universe. If you opt to play the storyline (i didnt) you attempt to unravel the nature of the attackers that attacked your spacestation in the pre-game and that's that. The sandbox multiplayer is much, much more entertaining. It simply amounts to the very simple formula of

1. Do quests to get money
2. Use money to upgrade ship/guns
3. Blow stuff up

Sure it's simple but it's elegant and, with the basics that simple, you cant really go wrong. The quests fall into the standard set of archtypes:

• Blow up a bunch of ships
• Assassinate a specific ship (on the higher levels, the marked ship doesnt show up until you grind through the first wave of escorts)
• Retrieve something - similar to the assassination mission except you have to survive all the way back to the ship/station you got the quest from
• Blow up a station - exactly like assassination missions except your target is a small space station

The game has a few more subtle/advanced mechanics like a trade route system where you can move goods from one planet to another (each planet has a predefined price it will buy/sell a good for, so maximizing profits involves going to and from specific systems with specific goods). Some goods are considered contraband and if you get scanned by police/military forces they will confiscate it (or you can refuse and they will open fire) while others are perishable meaning you have to haul ass.

Graphics and physics-wise, this game is absolutely top notch -- even compared against modern games. The backdrop worlds are positively gorgeous (something about coronas and space dust that's so soothing). It's also one of the first flightsims to offer newtonian physics (i.e. if you cut engine power in space, you should still continue along your initial flight path -- and with the use of maneuvering thrusters, you should be able to do so and turn around, presumably to fire at targets behind you). Anomolies such as radiation zones (which damage your "health" directly - bypassing shields), mine fields (both military and naturally occuring phenomena) and most obviously, stars are subtle elements of combat and gameworld that set this title apart.

This all comes to a pinnacle for the input mechanics -- this is a keyboard and mouse flightsim. No joysticks needed (and after you've played it, no joystick support wanted). The mechanics for handling spaceflight with a keyboard and mouse are absolutely butter-smooth and while it does take a little bit of getting to (possibly more if you're spatially challenged), that's what the training levels and starting zones are for!

Being able to scale to 128 players, the game is effectively a mini-mmo with dedicated servers - perfect for clan gaming. The entire freelancer world is bustling -- transports go to and fro on their trade routes, police/military ships patrol tradelanes (think of them as space highways), junk ships rummage through shipwrecks and various faction ships engage in combat with their enemy factions -- all of this happening  regardless of whether there is a player in the area or not. In short, the game world is very much alive.

That being said, the game isnt without it's flaws. While the initial game universe is relatively massive for it's original launch time (2003) and it's passable for a 2010 title, there is the feeling that there could be so much more. That is largely dealt with by user mods such as Discovery and Crossfire. These mods and others like it add dozens of worlds, new ships, weapons and missions as well as graphical updates (I personally play Discovery). They dont however, do much to fix the glaring problem of the underlying engine -- it's boring! You have pretty much two major routes for playing this game

1. Do quests and get money (as mentioned above). With this route, after a few hundred quests you recognize that they will all be of one of the major archtypes and this gets very tedious. The game scales with your "level". Your level is a somewhat intangible measurement of your combat power (ship, weapons etc) as well as how much money you have (presumably money is a measure of 'potential combat power'). The game scales the missions to around your level, so as you level up, you'll find yourself fighting light-fighters, then heavy-fighters, then very-heavy fighters and lastly you'll be slugging it out with frigates and destroyers. The additional ship classes and ships from the various mods help to alleviate this a bit by providing more variety, but it ultimately boils down to the same formula.
2. Go sandbox and just blow stuff up, chaotic-pirate style. This works well too but there is a reputation system in the game so if you go around blowing up too many things, those factions will declare war with you (and factions at war with them will ally with you). This faction system is pretty subtle and simple but very well executed. Again, this is pretty tedious.

All the tedium isnt a bad thing per-se, if you happen to be a loot-collector. While Freelancer (even with the mods) doesnt boast the millions of items that, say, Boarderlands has -- Freelancer is vastly superior on [a] differenting between the weapons and [b] giving the user incentive to actually go farming and loot-hunting.

The last game flaw in the game revolves around some of the game mechanics. While it's a fairly advanced element (beyond the scope of this minireview), suffice it to say

• Enemy AI is pretty darn predictable
• Enemy AI aims really, really good. At the later levels, you're literally getting hosed by weapons fire and not just because there's 40 of them and one of you (sometimes the odds are worse) but because they all aim right where you're gonna be
• Aggro-mechanics are a little broken. Definitely beyond the scope of this review, but sometimes it works against you (with regards to accidental shootings).

As for Vista/Windows7 support -- you can fully play the single player elements flawlessly without any work, however to work with multiplayer, you need to go and disable IPv6 before you can do anything. Scorewise I'd put this title at 9-9.5 out of 10 simply for the sheer fun and loot-appeal (particularly with the mods) but I'll round down due to the relatively blandness of the of the vanilla game and enemy AI -- the elements which you'll be interacting with the most!