While traveling through space in your ship, you'll quickly find that Freelancer is more of a space action game than a sim - the game doesn't even provide support for a joystick.  The lack of joystick support is a bit of a disappointment, as a mouse just can't replace the feel of the squeeze of the trigger as you make a kill or the frantic swings of the stick when you try to lose an enemy on your tail.  That being said, the game's designers have done an excellent job of implementing the mouse control in the game.  The game is played from a third person perspective with the camera placed outside and behind your ship.  The ship is steered by moving the mouse in the direction that you want to travel, and you thrust by pressing the left mouse button and fire by pressing the right.  The throttle is controlled by the W and S keys, so the control scheme works remarkably like that of a first-person shooter.  Targeting and setting waypoints is easily done by simply clicking the objects in your field of view.  The game's HUD is well-designed too, and makes it easy to filter the objects in the area so that you can quickly find and target bases, planets, enemy ships, and more.

When ships collide with asteroids, the asteroid usually wins.

The first-person shooter analogy also applies to the way spaceships are modeled in the game.  The various classes of fighters handle pretty much the same, the main difference between them being the number of weapons you can mount on them and the size of their cargo hold.  Also, you can only own ships that fall into the fighter or freighter classes.  You won't get a chance to command bombers or capital ships which may prove disappointing to some space jockeys.  Even more disappointing, there is no way for you to own more than one ship at a time.  You'll have to dump your fighter for a freighter if you really want to make money hauling cargo and then trade it back in when you're ready for combat missions.

The Freelancer universe is packed with details and great visuals.  Asteroid fields feature thousands of rotating asteroids of varying sizes and crater markings.  You can enjoy the view while traveling through a field, but each one is a real object and you'll need to avoid them if you want to make it to the other side.  The planets look fantastic and are more than just pretty backdrops.  You'll often need to navigate your way around them, but will need to avoid getting too close lest you begin to burn up from atmospheric friction.  The capital ships and starbases appearing in Freelancer look great as well and the game does a superb job of capturing a feeling of scale.  The starbases are significantly larger than any of the ships you'll be flying and you'll have no trouble believing that they can contain the locations you will visit inside plus a whole lot more.

The game also does a good job of managing scale where it tends to matter most - travel times.  Systems are connected by jump gates, locations within systems are interconnected via high-speed routes that automatically whisk you along, and you have cruise engines to quickly take you to your next local waypoint.  You're never forced to sit and wait as your ship plods its way to a distant planet.

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