First impressions? Wow! As soon as I started playing the game I was in love with it. The graphics were beautiful to look at and there was an entire galaxy for me to explore. To say I was a little excited would be a gross understatement - but were it's good looks at the expense of gameplay?
The game ran very smoothly on my system which, I am ashamed to say, is only average. Just by looking at the graphics I was expecting the FPS (frames per second) to be quite low but even on a Geforce MX2 the game behaved really smoothly and I only noticed a small amount of slow down during some epic battles in asteroid field where there were lots of moving objects on the screen, but even then it did not hamper the game play.
Sooo, I guess you all want to know what the game is actually about, eh? Well, as the game title suggests, you are a Freelancer; a pilot that takes on missions from anyone for a nice wad of cash. The game gives you a lot of freedom in this respect as you can become a bounty hunter or an assassin or, if you prefer the quiet life, you can just buy a freighter and trade along the space lanes. Whatever you do you are guaranteed to piss some people off (that is the type of guy you are) and you will need to equip your ship with the best weapons and shields because you will find yourself being shot at almost where ever you go. The universe is an unfriendly place...
In order to buy advanced ships you need to attain certain pilot levels. You achieve fulfilling the goals set at the beginning of each level. This may be either completing part of the storyline mission or by earning a certain amount of money.
I am a big, BIG fan of games that give you almost unlimited freedom to explore and, basically, do whatever the hell you want. I am also a fan of space games like Tie Fighter, X-Wing and Elite. You would think that this game would be a match made in heaven but I found myself getting very bored of it very quickly. The missions are almost all the same; "Go out to waypoint 1 and kill Mr. Bad Guy. Reward 3000c", "Go to waypoint 1 and blow up a freighter. Reward 2000c" etc etc. There is very little variation in the missions and they pretty much all involve flying off to a certain spot, shooting the crap out of some guys and then flying back to repair your ship.
The combat system itself seems to have been dumbed down to the point where it isn't even a challenge. You have your mouse cursor on the screen and moving it around aims your guns for you. Easy. When you target an enemy ship you get a bright red marker that leads the enemy craft and you place your cross hair on top of it and fire. Almost too easy...actually, it is TOO easy. All you need is to be able to track the red marker across the screen and hold down the trigger and in a few seconds your enemy will be vaporized. It does get a little harder when you have other enemies shooting at you but it isn't hard to evade their fire until you have destroyed your target.
The graphics are nice though. Very nice. Even though I found the actual game quite dull I still enjoy going for a joy ride through the many asteroid fields. There are nebulas, gas clouds, debris fields and other weird spacey phenomenon that you can fly about in whenever you are bored and fancy a change of scenery. There is also a lot of salvage lying around that you can pick up with your tractor beam so your joyride won't be a total waste of time.
There is a multiplayer aspect to the game where you can do missions with other players but when I tried to play a multiplayer game I was unable to find any active servers. I will give it another go when I have the time.
The actual storyline mode can be completed over the weekend and is a little too short for my liking. Once you have completed the game missions there is very little else for you to do aside from joy riding through nebulas and trying to make your ship 'l337' by doing the other NPC missions or shooting up pirates and stealing their guns.
They say it is always good to make a good first impression which this game did. However, it didn't follow through and, as a result, it gets a thumbs down from me. The missions were all pretty much the same and lacked substance, the storyline missions were too short and the game was effectively completed much too soon. I tried a bit of trading but it was really, really boring. Really boring. It isn't so bad once you find a good trade route but until you do it can be very frustrating.
If you are looking for a game that combines trading, space battles, pretty visuals, vast expanses of space to explore and lastability then I would suggest checking out Eve: Online. As the name suggests it is a completely online game and involves a fair bit of trading but at least you can talk to other people whilst trading. Thank God!!
James Coghlan
