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Big disappointment

» Pros

» Cons

All weapons are pretty much identical
All ships are pretty much identical
"Technomagic healing spells" (nanorobots)
Ships cannot be customized
No real freedom until the story is done
Extremely repetitive gameplay
No shield management
No ability to target and destroy subsystems on capships
Serious balance issues - a single fighter easily destroys a huge, alien battleship
Static economy system
Annoying level system - if I have the cash, why can't I buy the ship?

» Review

When I read about this game in the previews, it sounded like FreeSpace2 meets Elite - complete freedom with lots of ships and items to trade but with a story that you could participate in whenever you wanted. Well, that's not the case. As it is, singleplayer gameplay consists of doing three to five identical "go here and kill this" missions before you have a certain amount of money, at which point you get a message saying that it's time to get on with the story. Technically speaking, you can ignore the message and do some more missions but there is no point because of the level system. See, you can only gain levels by doing story driven missions, and you can only get better equipment by gaining levels. HUGE letdown.

The combat, which is very important in any spacesim, is also a letdown. All ships accelerate at the same rate and have the exact same maximum speed. They turn a bit different, but not enough to really make a difference. All the weapons are identical except in the damage they do and their ROF, and the missiles are pretty much worthless - not to mention the so-called "capital ship killing" torpedoes which actually do LESS damage than a standard loadout of reasonably advanced blasters. There is no shield management - if you get hit, your shield power goes down, but you can't choose to boost forward or aft shields, and you can't transfer power from weapons to engines to shields as you can in the good spacesims. Basically, all you do is aim the mouse at the closest target, fire away and have your finger on the magic healing button. Yes, the magic healing button. See, in this game, there are nanorobots that instantly give you your health back if you are wounded - like the magic healing potions in Diablo 1. Jesus, at least they could have made them like the magic healing potions in Diablo 2 where they needed some TIME to repair your hull, but nooo, that would remove the arcade nature of this game.

Furthermore, you cannot injure anything except weaponry, hull and shields. Apparently, the engines, life support, communications etc etc on the ships are impervious to damage. I remember in Tie Fighter where your radar could be destroyed, your energy indicators blasted, your control thrusters mauled and your engines disabled. No such thing in this game, except that hardpoints for your weapons can be hit, meaning you loose said weapon. Not even the capital ships (which are about 1/5th the size of the ships in FreeSpace 2) have any subsystems. If you want to take one down, you have to fire at their hull, because you cannot disable their engines, power systems, weapons coordination centres or shield emitters. Again, I guess the developers didn't want deep gameplay and prefer arcade.

You can't customize your ships either. In FreeSpace 2, that made sense because you were a military officer on assignment, and they don't get to add whatever they want - they will use what is given to them and they will like it. However, when you are a Freelancer, you should be given some freedom - like in Elite. In Elite, you could buy better engines, mining equipment, better shields etc etc, at the cost of money and cargo space. There was also fuel management in Elite which I would have loved to see in Freespace - but again, no. They didn't even use Tachyons nice system where you had hardpoints for computer addons, energy reserves etc that you could buy to get perks like autoaiming, more energy reserves, better radar, radiation shielding etc. Again, they chose arcade instead of depth.

All in all, this game is just a pretty package with no content. The story is so cliché it's sad, the gameplay is shallow and repetitive and things like trade and mining is only fun for half an hour or so. Once you get past the pleasure of actually playing a new spacesim, you realize that this game doesn't really contain anything new after the first two hours of gameplay. You might as well be playing space invaders instead if it weren't for the graphics.