Freelancer

After watching a quick look of Sol III: Exidus, I was bitten by the space explorer bug and had to go back to my private collection of like minded titles. I could have gone to my old faithful, X: Beyond the Frontier, but I instead reached for Freelancer. I had tried to get into this game when I first picked it up years ago but the flight controls just put me off of it. But now was the perfect time to grit my teeth and trudge through those controls and see what Freelancer is all about.

Probably coming out in just after the prime of the genre, Freelancer has you playing the part of Trent. He is as you might imagine a freelance pilot taking his ship and doing whatever might pay the best at the time. The game is broken up into main story mission chunks and freelancing chunks. You will advance the story a bit and reach a break where you have to do some freelancer missions to get your net worth up to a certain level before the next chunk of story is unlocked to you. The reason for these freelancing breaks is to add money to invest into better weapons and equipment for your ship because in my experience, the story mission has way harder enemies then any of the freelancing gigs.

Those controls I mentioned before, well they can’t be mapped to a gamepad, as the X games can and that is why I was hesitant to play it before, because I am a console gamer and I enjoy a controller as opposed to WSAD controls. Basically your mouse controls your ship. You can continue flying in a straight line until you press the space bar to switch to free flight. In free flight your cursor will lead the ship so if you move your cursor towards the top of the screen the ship will fly up you get the idea. Your left click is to lock on to your target and your right click is your weapon barrage. The WSAD comes into play when you want some other finer ship functions. W and S is your throttle, Tab is your after burner which is critical in dog fighting as I soon learned. Q and E are your missiles and mines. Oh and if you hold shift and W you go into cruise flight where your throttle is tripled but your weapons are disabled. Yea as you can see, a lot going on.

The story is, well eh. Some aliens have taken over the persona of some big wigs and they are trying to wear out the defenses of the human race in order to conquer it. It is pretty generic. But there are a few surprises in the voice acting department, including mister Sulu himself, George Takei. At least it sounds like him. And Metal Gear fans will recognize Juni’s voice from Niomi Hunter. Those are the ones that stood out to me though I am sure Tabius is famous as well.

So is it worth a play through? Well that depends on if you are a fan of the genre. If you are then you probably have played this before or at least enough of it to know if it’s for you or not. If you haven’t, well there are other better space sims out there that I would encourage you to look into. But really, this isn’t a bad little game. It has its share of frustrations but it is also pretty old and enjoyable none the less. Plus there is a crazy fan base. Google Freelancer: The Next Generation to see what I’m talking about. Gotta love those die hard computer gamers!