The job of a game review is to rate the success of the game in the context of what the game is. Maybe that seems obvious as you read it, but it's a common failure of professional and amateur reviewers alike. An example of this would be to review a platformer game (i.e. Mario, Munch's Oddysee, etc) and give it bad marks because "platformers suck". Another example would be reviewing a game like Unreal2 and giving it bad marks for lack of a multiplayer component. Sure, maybe the game isn't the kind of game you like to one degree or another, and that's a perfectly valid reason to dislike a game. The distinction is when it comes to reviews the reader already knows if he doesn't like platformers or if he demands that all games have a robust multiplayer component. The job of the game review isn't to tell the reader what kind of game to like, it's to tell the reader whether the game succeeds at being good at what it is.
Freelancer is a space game. It's partly explorer, partly shoot'em'up, and it's got a few other elements thrown in for good measure. It's very open ended.
Freelancer is NOT a SIM. There isn't any gravity, planets don't revolve around their suns, the universe isn't dynamic, and there is no joystick support. Yes. You read that last part correctly: no joystick support. If I were to review this game as a SIM then I'd give it very poor marks indeed, as the most important elements of a SIM in space are entirely missing. As it is the great lack of realism has affected the score for Freelancer, but not to the degree that it would were it a SIM.
The variety here is pretty good. If you browse Freelancer forums you'll find plenty of threads claiming many of the ships are profoundly ugly and stupid looking. You may check out some screenshots and come to the same conclusion yourself. But look at the forums again, look at who is complaining about which ships. What you'll discover is that every ship in the game has people who hate it and people who love it. This says to me that the variety of ships, which for the most part are very distinct and unique, has hit the sweet spot. If you like space games you will probably find several ships in the game to fall in love with.
The downside to this nice variety of distinct ships is that ships can only be upgraded beyond their purchased power so far. The claim by the developers that ships will be the players' true avatars (and thus their justification for not allowing the character avatar to be customized at all) is betrayed by a game mechanic that forces you to continually buy new ships rather than just endlessly upgrade your single favorite.
Furthermore the player is unable to customize a ship's look at all. There are no skinning options in-game and no support for decals. You can mod the game and give a particular ship a different skin, but then every example of that ship on your screen will be reskinned, and online your skin change is not visible to others.
The failure here is really sad. In a game with such potential as a multiplayer game ships really are the players' way of standing out. Digital Anvil started out with a stellar assortment of ship models that could have garnered a 10/10 here, but lack of custimization and the forced upgrade mean that in the end everyone is flying identical ships and no one stands out.
Lets start with guns. There are a wide variety of energy weapons, with different rates of fire, different power drain, and different projectile speeds. The look of the weapons and the projectiles varies from weapon to weapon and presents a nice variety. The one shortcoming of the energy weapons is the very best guns in the game offer little to distinguish one from the other. Missiles are piss-poor. They are expensive, do not make up for their cost in damage, and offer little in the way of "fire and forget". A missile launcher will take up a slot for an energy weapon, and if your aim with energy weapons is good an equally classed energy weapon can easily outperform a missile in the 'damage-per-second' category. Mines and torpedos have their own weapons slots on ships that can carry them, so even though their applications are somewhat limited you can still buy them for specialized use without hampering your ship's general firepower.
Other equipment is available as well. Cruise disruptors to stop fleeing targets from getting away, Countermeasures to help you escape from missiles and cruise disruptors, Shield and Thruster upgrades. While the selection isn't stunning, it's good.
Ships can also carry shield batteries and nanobots. What are these? Think of health potions in Diablo2. If your shield is getting beaten down or fails and you've got some shield batteries, you just click a button and regain some or all of your shields. If your hull has taken damage you can use some nanobots to repair the damage and prevent a hull breach.
Here's how single player works. You start with nothing, no money and no ship. Once you accept the offer to take a mission from Juni she gives you a ship and you launch on your first single player mission. Once you've completed the mission you gain a level (levels in single player determine what equipment you can buy provided you have enough money). Then you're told to go make some money. At this point you can do some limited trading (you can't leave the system yet) or fly random missions you pick up in bars or whatever the hell you want to do (wander around doing nothing, hijack some freighters and steal their cargo, whatever you want). Once you've made the specified amount of money you'll go up in level again and you'll be contacted to take on another single player mission. Once the single player mission is done it's back to doing your own thing.
It goes back and forth like this for something like thirteen single player missions. After you have finished all the single player missions you can continue playing the game, exploring, aquiring stuff, etc. If you don't continue past the last single player mission and you never play the multiplayer game, then you will miss seeing probably about half the game's universe.
The single player missions are fairly well done with scripted events, dialog that progresses the storyline, etc. They get progressively harder over time and are generally fun to play.
When playing Single Player you must take the single player missions. When one comes up you become unable to level up until you complete it, so your upgrade options on your ship can come to a stop. Freelancer will allow you to continue taking random missions after you've been contacted for a single player mission, which is handy when you need extra scratch to help you through the single player mission, but after a while if you keep ignoring the single player mission the game will stop allowing you to take random missions. Furthermore your access to system-to-system travel is sometimes restricted until you've completed certain single player missions.
That you are forced to follow the single player missions is a legitimate justification to bring this score down a little because the game description does specify that the player is able to choose his own course. In single player these claims are false as far as the single player missions are concerned.
Random Missions, the missions you pick up in bars, are quite limited in their scope. There are only a few different mission types available:
Beyond this, missions vary in difficulty, pay, who the enemy is, and who is paying you to carry out the mission. Missing is any sort of mission that feels like it supports the trading aspect of Freelancer. Missing is the courier style mission. Missing is the patrol style mission. The result is that the random missions feel very flat. When you get right down to it, every single mission is "go to the place and shoot stuff until everything has blown up" with the only variant really being whether you have to return to the base where you got the mission afterwards or not.
Freelancer utilizes a faction system, and if you've played a MMORPG before you'll be familiar with what this is. Basically put, every computer-controlled ship that you see in the game belongs to one of something like fifty factions. When you first create your character (whether single player or multiplayer) most factions are neutral to you, some are hostile, and some are friendly. Each faction has certain factions it likes (allies) and certain factions it dislikes (enemies). When you blow up a ship the faction that ship belonged to will like you significantly less, their allies will like you a little less, and their enemies will like you a little more. When you carry out a mission the faction that gave you the mission will like you more, their allies will like you more, and their enemies will like you less.
When a faction likes you they may offer to sell you better equipment or offer higher paying missions, and friendly criminals will not demand you hand over your cargo. When a faction is neutral they'll offer lower paid missions and may not be willing to sell you their best guns. Neutral police and military will be more likely to scan your ship for contraband, and neutral criminals will demand you drop valuable cargo or they'll go hostile. Hostile ships will open fire on you on sight (unless you severely outgun them) and they'll cause their nearby allies to go hostile on you even if that faction likes you. Hostile bases, planets and battleships will not allow you to dock.
In combat NPC ships do a fairly good job, but they "cheat" in some areas and are handicapped in others. NPC ships can barrel roll (you can't), can turn on a dime, can cascade their weapons fire perfectly, and take no damage from radiation. On the handicap side NPC's have a much slower shield regenration rate and never use shield batteries or nanobots.
In non combat NPC ships will occasionally crash into planets or suns, which is actually quite amusing, but for the most part maneuver well. Ships run patrol routes within a star system, cargo ships have destinations and cargo, police and military are constantly scanning for contraband (including scanning other NPC ships). NPC's hail bases, bases hail them, there's radio chatter, NPC's taunt eachother, mug eachother, and scream as they die. NPC's outside of combat do an excellent job of making a populated system really feel populated.
The main mode of control is the mouse. The mouse moves your reticle which determines where your weapons are fired. In "free flight" when you left click your ship will turn towards where your reticle is. In "mouse flight" your ship turns towards your reticle without the need to left click. Hitting the space bar toggles between "free flight" and "mouse flight". Maybe this sounds clunky. It isn't. It works extremely well and is extremely intuitive.
Other ship controls can be performed through keyboard shortcuts or onscreen icons. It's quick and easy to learn how to control your ship, there's almost no learning curve at all. If you play Single Player you should have all the basic moves mastered half way through the first mission, and before the start of the second mission you can expect to have the controls pretty well mastered.
Movement of your ship is never clunky and your options are fairly well rounded. The game eschews the "newtonian" flight model, when you turn you're going to be moving in the direction you're facing, not sliding around out of control like you might in a "realistic" space sim. You can strafe. You can cut your engines to perform slides or quicker turns. You can engage afterburners for a burst of speed. The only movement option noticably missing is the ability to roll, which means barrel rolling isn't possible. Unfortunately, that's a really significant shortcoming, especially when the NPC's can do it.
Lets get this out of the way first: the single player missions have NO replay value. You can't approach them in different ways, and in general they're not so interesting that after you've seen them you'll be dying to see them again. That's the bad news.
The good news is that even if you don't want to play online, you can fire up a server and play the "multiplayer" game alone. The multiplayer game doesn't use levels to limit what equipment you can buy, and as long as you can survive the trip you can fly wherever you want from the very beginning. The faction system, which really is quite well rounded, and the freedom to just fly around and do what you want mean Freelancer is a game with a lot of possible approaches. You might want to try being a full-on trader and make all your money that way while trying to limit the number of factions that are hostile to you. You might want to play on the side of the law, hunting down criminals. You might want to play as a criminal and hunt down police and military, or hold up frieghters for their cargo. There really are a lot of ways you could approach playing the game and get a lot of game time out of it.
The one thing I'd caution against is rushing to the endgame. Once you've got the best ship and equipment, there's really little else to do but amass more and more money. You'll have nothing to spend it on and nothing more to attain. Because it's possible to reach the endgame really quickly if you try, it's all the more important to stress that the game's strong point is the fun you can have on your way to reaching the endgame. Rush to the end and you'll miss the game.
A great deal of the game's data is contained in encrypted ini files. There are tools available to decypher them so they can be edited. A great deal can be achieved in this way. You can add ships, bases, planets, entire systems, or modify the ones that already exist. Freelancer would have received a perfect score here.
It doesn't receive a perfect score because there is no real support for these mods beyond that they can be done. Servers can't distribute them, and DA is unwilling to provide documentation or tools for modding. Death blow: there is no support in the game for managing mods. Players have to manage the mods themselves, which requires shuffling game files around, and has the potential to corrupt save files or the game itself.
Freelancer is arguably at it's most fun in multiplayer. Unfortunately:
I would give Freelancer a big fat goose egg here except for a single aspect. Players have ID's which are generated the first time they ever fire up multiplayer. This number won't change unless they modify it in their registry or uninstall/reinstall. So when a player gets banned from a server he has to go to extreme measures in order to play on that server again (a ban bears no relationship to a player's IP Address). This approach, coupled with multiplayer characters being stored on the server, means that a banned cheater who goes to such measures to return to the server he was banned on loses access to his characters on other servers. It's not enough, but it's 'better than nothing'.
This game looks great. It's not the best looking game of all time, but it makes up for some of it's technological shortcomings by offering a wide variety of visuals. There's a lot to see. If all you do with Freelancer is rush to obtain neutrality with all factions, then fly around to see every star system, then uninstall the game never to return, you will still have gotten more than your money's worth.
A very nice touch to Freelancer is the continuity of it's backdrops. I felt these were done well enough to warrant an entire subsection (and thereby weight their effect on the Area Design section).
A great demonstration of this would begin in the Gallileo system following a course through Liberty and destined for Rheinland. As you're flying through Gallileo towards Colorado (the first Liberty system on your route) you'll notice a small (distant) orange nebula. This nebula is part of the backdrop. In Colorado you'll see this same nebula ahead of you as you fly towards New York, but it's slightly larger. In New York it's larger still and will be in view as you fly towards Texas. In Texas the orange nebula is very large and dominates a good portion of the backdrop in front of you as you head towards Rheinland. The border systems between Texas and the first Rheinland system do a good job of making you feel you're entering the outskirts of the nebula, and the Rheinland systems place you within it.
This example is perhaps the most prominently noticable, but is a universal element in Freelancer. In the border systems and Liberty systems it's especially noticable that you can identify different regions of the sector as represented in the backdrop of the system you're in.
The layout of the Sirius Sector, which encompasses the entire gameplay area, is well done. Alternate routes are available to take you from one place to another, dead ends are rare and used wisely, and difficulty ramps predictably and for the most part gradually.
Some systems are a little too sparse when it comes to connectivity to other systems, especially when a player is playing the role of a specific faction. Freelancer could have greatly benefited from a higher degree of connectivity.
I'll look at this category as the rough equivalent of 'level layout' in a shooter. Freelancer shines here because everything is wide open. Rarely does one feel boxed in and placed on a linear path, although it does happen from time to time in the single player missions (multiplayer is blessedly free of this curse).
There's plenty to find and to explore, and a good sense of areas of systems being controlled or dominated by a certain faction or factions.
Freelancer loses points here for scale. Everything is much too close together, in most systems while you are next to one planet you are close enough to see every other planet in the system.
Planets are too small. The largest gas giants are probably sized just about right to be on par with Earth's moon. If Freelancer was a SIM then the scale problems here and elsewhere would be grievous enough to discount the title as a total failure. As it is it's a big enough shortcoming to break suspension of disbelief pretty sharply the very first time you launch into space.
And if planet size is bad, star size is a sin. Most stars are smaller than the planets in their systems. Most of the time they're smaller than planets to such a degree that if you position yourself so a planet is on the far side of the sun from you, the planet takes up more screen space.
There is a nice variety of stars and planets, and there's a definate sense that if you've seen one you haven't seen them all. Good job there.
Bases and Battleships are scaled just about right when compared to a planet. This means that they're much too small compared to your ship. This scale problem is less jarring than the planet problem simply by virtue that at least you can't see the bases from the far side of the system. On the other hand, the scaling problem is easier to demonstrate here: just fly right up to a base so your ship's window is next to one of the base's "bar" windows. Go into turret view and compare the size of the windows on the base to the size of your character. Now dock with the base and visit the bar. Check out how much bigger that window is now. Oops!
Again, there's a good variety of bases and battleships, and a sense of discovery when you locate a hidden one.
Obviously there's a scale problem here, too. Nebulae are too small, and asteroid fields are too dense (not to mention there should be plenty of asteroids of a much larger size than any asteroids already in the game). On the other hand, these effects are done pretty well and offer a wide margin of variation from one to another. Additionally, nebulae do a good job of blending into the backdrop when you're outside of them, so that flying into or out of them has the effect of making the backdrop seem less like a backdrop (that's quite an accomplishment, and one I've never seen another game pull off so well).
Trade lanes are intrasystem travel devices which help you travel from one point to another within the same star system very quickly. Criminals (and players) can disrupt them in order to rob the freighters using them. Jump Gates and Jump Holes are for intersystem travel, the former being devices generally under the control of corporations or law enforcement, and the latter being anomalies generally under the control of criminals.
These systems are well conceived and well executed, although tradelanes as implimented wouldn't work in a system where objects actually orbited their star. No scale problems asside that if Battleships were scaled correctly these things would need to be much larger to accomodate them.
The cut scenes that take place on planets or in bases tend towards painful. The lip sync'ing isn't particularly good, and on occasion is glaringly bad. Some of these scenes, especially the ones involving Tobias, are just plain insulting. On the other hand, the ones with less dialog and more action are sometimes even moderately well done.
Since Freelancer is geared more towards showing ships and fighting, than people walking around and talking, these are much much better. Some of them are even excellent. An otherwise stellar score loses points, though, because on several occasions the cutscenes end with a delay between enemy ships openning fire and the player gaining control of his ship, and in one particularly grievous case the player can actually get shot and killed during a cut scene.
Normally I'm not a big fan of this crap, which is why I consider voice acting to be baggage... especially in this case where some of the voice acting is so bad that I actually shut the sound off until the scene ends.
So why such a high score?
Because the voice acting is used very well outside the cut scenes. The radio chatter. It fleshes the game out and brings the game's world alive. If it hadn't been for the painful cut scenes I'd give this part a 10.
This is pretty simple, Gameplay is far and above the most important aspect of any game. If it's not fun or it's irritating, then any other success falls short. So Gameplay carries a 3x weight, or 50% of the score. Area design comes next in the scheme of things. A player can get past poor area design and still enjoy the game if gameplay is there, but area design is not able in return to overcome abysmal gameplay. Area design is still important. Area Design carries a 2x weight, or ~33% of the score. Finally, baggage is just that. It's little nagging things that can drag a title just a little further down, or be the icing on the cake of a perfect game. Therefore Status Quo Baggage carries a 1x weight, or ~17% of the score.
| Gameplay | 7.8 |
| Area Design | 8.37 |
| Status Quo Baggage | 7 |
| Total | 7.9 out of 10 |
|---|
Another great game that gets a mediocre score. I don't love this game as much as I love Splinter Cell, which remains my all time favorite video game, but it's still very good. I'll say this again: perfection is not a necessary component of a great game. The important thing to do with a review like this is to understand that although this game is great, a 7.9 is still a little generous. It has it's flaws, and in some cases the flaws are heinous. If you're looking at this review and trying to decide if you should try the game, I say go ahead and try it. There's a free demo that lets you see what it's about.
Then you need to consider whether the game's flaws outweigh for you it's strengths. Perhaps online cheating is a big deal to you. It is to me, so I only play the game alone or on a passworded server with friends, and in this way the cheating flaw is one that hardly affects me at all.