Played on:
Windows
Freelancer is the space action game that has been in development for quite a while over at Digital Anvil. A few years back, Microsoft bought up the company and spurred development along a bit. Finally, all their efforts have paid off with an excellent game - generally, you will find the quality of the classic space sims along with great graphics and open-ended gameplay.
It would be difficult to write a Freelancer review with out a nod to the best space sim titles in PC history: Tie Fighter, Descent Freespace 1 and 2, and the Wing Commander series. Generally, these games have hit and miss sales, and they do not always correlate with how good the game is. At least with the case of Freelancer, though, the game may or may not sell well but there is some quality work in there.
I believe Freelancer uses a custom game engine, although I was unable to find any info on it. The engine works great, though, and it has quite a few features, tons of options, and manages it all with a decent Level of Detail system that keeps the frame rate high.
As it is with space sims, there often isn't much ground detail to be had, so the detail generally gets poured into the ships and special effects. Some high-resolution space backdrops are always nice, and Freelancer delivers in this aspect. While this game isn't visually stunning, the graphics are solid and the frame rate is excellent almost all of the time.
This is going to be an area where die-hard space sim veterans will roll their eyes. Freelancer offers only one control method: a keyboard and a mouse. That seems very silly and useless, but the game has been specifically designed to use the strengths of this system. Aiming is generally easier here, since you are not required to point your whole ship directly at an enemy to shoot at him. There are a bunch of keyboard commands that you will eventually have to learn, but the developers have smartly added a mouse interface for a bunch of the more obscure (yet highly useful) functions. Keyboard shortcuts are of course still there, but few of them need to be memorized.
Any way you look at it, though, Freelancer was obviously meant for consumption by the masses. The controls are easier to get into and the basic interface is simplistic. Still, the game does have a whole element of trading going on, as well as a customizable ship interface, and in this area, the interface could have used some work. The in-flight interface is both good and bad - on the one hand, the ability to look up player status, waypoint map, or inventory screens while you are flying is wonderful. Everything is accessible pretty much all the time here, which is very convenient. On the other hand, though, the actual interface is just plain ugly - the controls are big and bulky, the text isn't so hot, and the in-flight indicators for combat are not very useful. It seems like they got the whole game together and then suddenly realized they needed an interface - in short, it feels like they threw it together at the last moment.
Buying and selling gear is not terribly convenient, and switching out weapons is a somewhat complicated prospect based on the available spots on your ship to mount them. A more visual interface for your ship's inventory and equipped gear would have been very welcome here. Some people have said that Freelancer does to space sims what Diablo did to role-playing games, and in some cases that is true, but in others, Freelancer complicates certain aspects of the interface too much.
Space sims are tough games to generate good-looking graphics for. Most of the time your character winds up flying some little fighter without a whole lot of room for eye candy, and most of the ships you fight aren't much better off. Still, Digital Anvil has done a respectable job in making this game look pleasing. The backdrops for the different star systems are varied and unique - enough so that after a while can sometimes recognize where you are in the universe by the background alone.
The ships look decent with a few good and bad exceptions, and there are a ton of different types of them in the game. Freelancer doesn't really do much in the line of epic space battles where dozens of ships duke it out - the scope of the game is a little more personal most of the time. Still, there are some big ships that get involved, although they generally aren't as impressive as you would expect out of a game released in 2003. Still, when a battle takes place alongside a few installations which orbit around a planet, it looks great and runs quite smoothly. These situations don't come up all that often, but it is nice when they do.
The special effects are generally fairly impressive, although most of the weapons you get don't really throw off any huge solar-system-shattering blasts. The design for most effects is clean, though, and explosions are quite complicated and satisfying to see.
The game includes a large number of cutscenes, most of which involve your character talking about whatever is going on in the story with the people who are giving him the missions. The animations are generally pretty good here, although the mouth movements don't even remotely line up with the actual text being said. The character models are mostly quite good, although something about them didn't seem quite right most of the time. In these cases, I can usually point out what I find wrong, but here it is hard to tell.
There are a ton of stations and planets to explore as well - there are a wide range of environments you will see when you land on a planet, including huge city structures or cramped little tunnels. No, the player can't walk around in the cities or anything, but then again, that would be taking away from the focus of Freelancer.
The first thing I imagine die-hard space sim types would ask is how the combat works. Generally, Freelancer is more about getting money together to buy more powerful ships and gear than it is developing the skill to kill enemies. You will find that most of the time, you have the best equipment out in the field, and you will most likely need it - the game will throw waves of enemies at you at once sometimes, and constantly evading enemy fire may be all you can do to survive.
