For background, Freelancer provides the standard fluff intro that you've come to expect from many CRPG's. The backstory is adequate, although not revolutionary, and the occasional cutscenes add some amount of interest in between interplanetary voyages and starfighter combat. The underlying storyline is flat, however, but I'll get to that in a second.
First, let's talk graphics. "Phenomenal" is one word that comes to mind; cruising between the planets, one encounters asteroid fields, ion storms, nebulae, and all sorts of stellar phenomena sure to tickle your rods and cones. One tip: play this game on a big monitor, as you'll want to fully appreciate the beauty of the graphics.
The space flight engine is very good as well, although its actually modeled on a two-dimensional scheme; this becomes apparent when your ship occasionally rights itself back to its starting point back on the good ol' X-Y axis, leaving the Z axis to take care of itself.
The best feature of the game is the mouse-control flight system. Since it seems that joystick games are becoming fewer and farther between, Digital Anvil skipped the usual translation of joystick-to-mouse control that has been problematic for some games in the past; instead, Freelancer has been designed to fly-by-mouse right from the ground up. Using the PC's two-button mouse as a centerpiece, the designers came up with a system that lets you fly, shoot, and control damage-repair options using just the mouse, saving only a few things for the keyboard hot buttons. Anyone who suffered under the two hundred thousand or so hotkey combinations common to the Mechwarrior line of games will appreciate the streamlined simplicity of the Freelancer interface, and you can make it as simple or complex as you like by adding options to your ship. The heads-up display in the combat sequences works like a charm, including a very simple (yet not simplistic) method for tracking the location of enemies and friends and reducing the amount of extraneous sensory input that has occasionally made other spaceflight games overwhelming. Flying your fighter and blasting bad guys is the highlight of the game, which is a good thing, because the rest of the game has some adequacy issues.
Like so many games released in the Age of Pentium, Freelancer’s designers sadly succumbed to the intoxicating charm of the high-octane graphics and wrote the backstory almost as an afterthought. On first pass, the storyline greatly resembles that of Privateer, the 1994 game in the Wing Commander series that was a delight to play even with its 486-era graphics. You play the role of Trent (indicating the target audience of the game, I suppose – there’s no option to play a woman or minority here), a freelance cargo hauler who is caught up in the midst of a mysterious terrorist attack. Finding himself with neither ship nor cash, he signs on as a hired gun with a shapely, young, vaguely Asian woman named Juni. Together, the two of them – and often Trent by himself – proceed to paint the stars red, usually with the blood of whatever pirate they’ll be hunting that day. You’re often given a little time to pursue your own missions as well, using the local bar (every port, space-station, and battleship has one) as a hiring hall.
Interwoven with the endless series of combat missions – which do begin to run together, as they’re all basically the same – are the cutscenes that advance the storyline, which has a vaguely X-Files feel to it: dark conspiracies, alien artifacts, a guy smoking a cigarette watching you all the time. You get the picture. The character animations are passable, although the designers didn’t take the time to program in much in the way of actual human movements; consequently, the animatrons are jerky and uncoordinated, and the plasticity of their complexions matches the woodenness of their actions. They also don’t do anything unless you’re interacting with them; walk into a bar, and all the denizens are sitting rigidly upright, alone at each table, and with nothing more than a slight turn of the head to indicate that they are actually supposed to be living beings. It’s hard to understand how a programming crew that produced the breathtaking space settings could be so ham-fisted with the animatrons.
But the animation is truly brilliant when compared to my two chief complaints with the game: the unforgivably horrible dialogue and the numbingly linear storyline. First, the dialogue. Approach any room full of gamers and repeat the following lines:
“Hey, stranger. New here?”
“Uh, huh. Got anything for me?”
“Oh. Well, I work [unnatural pause] …for the Liberty Police. [pause again] We don’t actually run this place, but we have an understanding with the people who do. [another unnatural pause] Well, if you must know, I have heard a rumor.”
“Go on.”
“OK, here it is:” [cut to pop-up box containing rumor]
I guarantee that at least one person will leap up and quote more infamous Freelancer dialogue, such as the oft-repeated combat voices: “I’ve got one on my six!” and so forth.
The dialogue just does not improve. Worse, it doesn’t change – the scene I quoted above will occur in every bar you visit, and the dialogue will be nearly identical to that above, with minor variations – sometimes, just for fun, Trent will respond “you could say that” rather than his characteristic “uh, huh”. Oh, let the good times roll. Worse yet, the people recording the voices down at Digital Anvil used the same two actors – one male, one female – to record *all* the bar dialogue, so that no matter where in the cosmos you are, all the people you talk to sound like either a constipated white guy or a snippish corporate woman. They also all look basically the same, and one would wonder if, in fact, there’s some kind of underground cloning operation that staffs all the bars in the galaxy.
The poor scriptwriting is a real disappointment, just as is the homogeneity of the voice acting. This is a surprise, since there are no fewer than 45 voice actors credited for work on the game, including legends such as George Takei (Star Trek’s Sulu), John Rhys-Davies (Gimli, Lord of the Rings), Christopher Lee (Saruman, LOTR), and Kevin Michael Richardson (whose name you may not recognize, but who has been a staple in most computer games from Baldur’s Gate to Fallout, and who was the voice of the Deus Ex Machina in Matrix Revolutions). This is some expensive and high-powered acting talent, and it is mostly wasted on the pathetic script, which was written by two guys who, as far as I can tell, might actually be dead. Or else they worked up the script while riding the bus from their day jobs at McDonald’s to the Digital Anvil studio. Who knows.
And this brings us to the real deal-killer, in my not-so-humble-and-entirely-biased opinion: the linear storyline. In Freelancer, there is, in fact, no real role-playing whatsoever. You can only control the combat missions you choose to take and what guns to put on your ship, so enjoy that part, because when it comes to the central story, you are simply along for the ride. The cutscenes progress without any decision-making or input from you, and you know it’s time to move on when you’re summoned by one of the main characters – “Trent, it’s Juni; meet me on Planet Manhattan. Even though I’m only a minor functionary in a police bureaucracy, I have this inkling about a vast alien-technology-smuggling conspiracy that will unravel the fabric of the universe unless you fly straight to Planet Manhattan and meet me so we can go solve it, at which point I’ll let you take some time to go fly around on your own missions and rack up some cash. After all, there’s no hurry. Oh, and someone killed your friend from Freeport 7, kidnapped my partner, and made an entire battlecruiser disappear, but don’t worry about any of that – we can tie it all up in the last five minutes of the game.” Yep, it’s that bad.
Which is disappointing, since Privateer gave the player quite a bit of control over the progression of the storyline and their part in it. Freelancer feels like a bid to recapture those old glories, but without the depth of thought and nuance that have made many CRPG’s into classics. In fact, there’s very little to recommend this game as an RPG; it’s basically a space combat simulator pasted together with some vapid storyline, not unlike a bad adult movie that involves some pathetic attempt to actually resemble a literary work (mostly by including situations that will require burly plumbers and cable-repair men to make house calls on scantily-clad housewives). As a simulator goes, it’s superb; as an RPG goes, it’s not worth buying. Nowadays, I may boot it up just to play ten minutes or so of good space combat, but I never, ever go into a bar anymore. Maybe that’s why the marionettes always say: “Hey, stranger. New here?”
