We're giving away two copies of Freelancer
Oh Elite, what have you done to us!? A few wireframe spaceships floating round on an old BBC computer have resulted in god knows how many attempts to recreate its space trading magic in recent years. Most have been fairly identical, but you must have thought that if anyone could make a grand addition to resurrect a floundering genre then it would be someone like Microsoft. They’ve thrown a lot of effort into this and I have been tracking its progress for a long time. So why is it so very underwhelming?
Freelancer is just about the same as so many that have gone before it, there is a good game in here somewhere but it is hidden beneath several layers of puzzling design decisions.
But lets start on the positive side of things, Freelancer kicks off with a fierce assault on a transport ship, one on which you character is sat. The story is moved on with some pretty good 3D cut sequences which work very well, the voice acting is spot on and the characters move very convincingly, despite having oddly flat noses. From here you are recruited in a bar to do a little security work where you are granted your first ship and mission. The story nudges you along for the first hour or so until you get full freedom of your actions. When you are left toy your own devices there really is a huge variety of ways to make money. You can go sign up for a mission, plot a course to an unexplored area of the galaxy or start attacking some passing cargo vessels. All this can be organized through a detailed map that marks political boundaries, patrol routes etc. I also liked the player details which record exactly how much each faction likes or dislikes you passed on your actions.
There are a huge amount of planets to sell your wares to; a good number of upgrades are available to you as well as whole new varieties of ship. All this freedom is welcome and sets things up so well…but all this becomes irrelevant to me as the most important part of the game isn’t that much fun – flying your ship.
Arguably one of the dumbest decisions in gaming memory is making Freelancer mouse-flight only. Yes, one of the big, technical, space combat/trading games, one that we have waited for for so long doesn’t support joysticks. You simply control your gun sights with the mouse and your ship follows them, you don’t even get a cockpit view. I can understand offering mouse control as an option to people who don’t have a good joystick, but good lord! Why not offer joystick control as an option too? Playing with a mouse pretty much removed a huge level of involvement for me.
Combined with this simplistic control method is a simply flight dynamic, no inertia drag or cool physics and your only control is speed, guns and countermeasures. Where are the likes of my shield settings and power usage options that made me feel so in control of my ship in games like X-Wing and I-War? To play, Freelancer feels like Playstation arcade shooter Colony Wars.
In terms of visual performance you probably won’t have to struggle to run the game, things move pretty fast in the space sections and this is helped by some fairly low polygon ships. There is some flashy weaponry and explosions to cover this up though, but overall its long development time has removed some of its visual impact.
Freelancer has a lot of plus points, but it doesn’t seem to know what kind of game it wants to be. It wraps a quick-blast flight system with a detailed, methodical structure and for me this is a let down. The fact for me is that Freelancer neither sounds, looks or plays as good as I-War 2, a game now available on budget that was released a good few years ago now. You may enjoy Freelancer if you really just want some action, but I was left wanting a bit more.
OVERALL SCORE: 66%
0 Comments
You can be the first one to leave a comment.