I have been a space flight fan since I first played TIE FIGHTER many, many, many years ago. Freelancer reminds me more of the Wing Commander series, primarily the game Privateer. I would go so far as to say that it is directly related, but I couldn’t verify if the same developer produced it.
Graphics
The graphics are awesome in Freelancer. I haven’t been tat impressed by a space scene since Wing Commander Prophecy. The environment was just gorgeous. The ship models were somewhat limited and not too creative. The character models were a little weak, but the focus of the game is space combat so that’s ok.
Controls
The controls are simple. Anybody should be able to get going in this game without too much of a hitch. This game is just very easy to pick up and play. Despite being in space, it has a simple First Person Shooter type setup. W is increase throttle, S is decrease, D is strafe right and A is strafe left. The only unique thing is that your guns follow your mouse in this game, not your ship. Instead, you need to right click and hold the mouse button down and then your ship will follow the mouse. You’ll hold this button down for 95% of the game. The keys around W, A, S, and D are used to fire missiles, countermeasures, mines, etc. The only thing that I didn’t like was that you had to use the shift key at times to do certain things (like fire torpedoes or enter cruise mode). And when you are in the middle of a fire fight, it’s just one more thing for your left hand to do which is already changing speeds, dodging left and right, and firing missiles and mines. You can customize the controls however.
Story
The single player portion of the game does have a story that you have to follow. You gain levels in this game by earning money and completing the story missions. You can’t achieve a higher level until you finish those missions. The ships and weapons that you can buy depend on your money and level. This is how the game controls and forces you to play out the story instead of just flying around randomly. That’s ok though, because it gives the game a shape and purpose, which every game needs.
In the multiplayer portion of the game, you are free to do whatever you want. In that respect this game kind of reminds me as a modern day Trade Wars. I think the multiplayer aspect of the game definitely has a great potential. It reminded me a lot like a modern version of Trade Wars, only it’s lacking direction. In Trade Wars, you built a galactic empire by controlling and developing planets, building space stations, and amassing wealth as you competed with other traders. The game had a limited time to play and then the wealthiest Corporation won. This pitted the players against each other, generated a political system, enemies, allies, mercenaries, grudges, great victories, etc. The multiplayer version of Freelancer lacks direction and purpose, which the story missions gave the single player game. I definitely think it is fun to fly and shoot things with your friends, but to what end?
Sound
The sounds in freelancer were very problematic. This is a known issue with the game, that if you have other mp3 codecs installed, then freelancer will have problems. The answer is to uninstall them and any applications that installed them, and then install all of Microsoft’s Media Player codecs. I think that’s wrong. If you play the game without doing this, some of the spoken dialogue is fine, and other times it doesn’t work. Either it should work or it shouldn’t, a codec doesn’t choose when it can or can’t decode a media signal. No other applications have this problem. There is even one mission that requires you to be able to HEAR the dialogue to progress. There’s no menus, options or anything. It plays the dialogue like most other missions, you just can’t continue if you don’t hear it. I don’t see why it’s just this one mission that has the problem. This isn’t coincidental. This was done intentionally by Microsoft so that you only use their codecs and their software and to discourage you from using a competitors product. No other piece of software has this problem. I sent my game’s save to my friend who got past that point for me, and then he sent it back to me. I refused to follow Microsoft’s procedure to remove the other codecs. You shouldn’t have to. I played the rest of the game without dialogue, no problems. The rest of the sound effects were good and had no problem playing.
Other Notes
I missed playing the multiplayer with a large group of my friends because of a problem with DirectX9. If you want to play this game, make sure you have DirectX9a installed. DirectX9 had a glitch with its networking code. DirectX 9a resolved this.
Summary
Freelancer was a good distraction. The story wasn’t all that original or gripping, but it was easy to pick up and play. I appreciated that, because games shouldn’t be work to play. I enjoyed the game and I played the single player from start to finish of the story mode. After the story mode is over, the game is open for further exploration, but there is no point to it. You would be better off playing the multiplayer version and at least fly about with some friends and people. I definitely think there is a lot that can be built from this game in the future. For now it was satisfying at least the way it was for a short while.
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