Freelancer Review

Freewheeling and open-ended space epics don't come along too often, which is a shame because if there is any setting that screams "open-ended" it is outer space.  Games such as the classic Privateer that have tread these waters before have earned a special place in the hearts of many gamers.  Freelancer has clearly been inspired by its predecessors in this sub-genre, and for the most part it proves itself a worthy entry in the field.

Freelancer follows the adventures of Edison Trent, a freelance spacefarer who runs into a spot of bad luck in the form of a sabotaged space station that takes a big business deal, and his sizable investment, down with it.  As Trent, you must rebuild your wealth while working to find the cause of the disaster.  To accomplish this, you must take on a series of missions that will take you through a universe filled with different worlds, systems, stations, and a number of competing factions on both sides of the law.

So is Trent a merchant or a mercenary?  A bounty hunter or a deputy of law enforcement?  The answer is: you decide.  The missions that make up the game's storyline are only a part of the whole.  Freelancer's universe is filled with factions: navy, police, corporations, raiders, smugglers, and many more.  Each faction has a relationship, both good and bad, with the other factions in the game.  As you can imagine, the police don't get along too well with the smugglers, while the police and navy hold each other in good regard.  When you accept and complete a mission for a particular faction, you raise your standing in their eyes.  Of course, you'll also earn the ire of any opposing factions in the process.  If you maintain a good or neutral reputation with a faction, you'll be able to freely enter their bases and conduct commerce with them.  If your reputation is bad, you risk being attacked on sight.  So if you run a lot of smuggling missions, you'll become a smuggler and be offered contraband cargo runs while having to dodge the police and navy.  Track down fugitives for the police, and you'll become a bounty hunter welcome at police bases everywhere but will suffer constant attack by raiders and other factions on the wrong side of the law.  You can even choose to run some missions for everyone, carefully maintaining a neutral reputation.  This can be especially profitable since you'll have access to many different planets and bases and the goods sold there, while avoiding attacks along the way.

The game encourages you to go out and explore on your own in several ways.  First, you are free to decide when you want to take on your next story-based mission.  In theory, you could play the game and build up quite a fortune without ever taking on a story-based mission.  Second, the game prevents you from playing the story missions back to back.  The next story mission will often be locked until you gain another level.  Experience is measured in terms of your net worth, so you need to collect enough money trading cargo or completing missions to advance.  You'd also be advised to take on a few extra missions before progressing the story so that you can begin the mission with a large bankroll and a fully-upgraded ship.  Finally, Freelancer never ends.  You can complete the game's story, but at that point you are still free to continue exploring the game's universe and to take on random missions.

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.

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.