Freelancer

"Freelancer: Solid Game"

I need to be honest for a moment. In all honesty, I acquired this game because it had a nude patch. Yeah, I know I'm a pervert, but, hey, I figured that staring at naked women would be fun even if the gameplay was dull.

Well, I was in for a surprise.

At first, when I played the game, I wasn't too interested in the overall gameplay; after all, that hadn't been my purpose. But, I did notice the graphics were nice, and that the game seemed easy to play, so I thought I'd settle in for the duration and see where the game would take me. Boy, I was in for a surprise.

While the plot was about as linear than n = bx + cy, the gameplay was surprisingly good. The controls are relatively simple and intuitive, in my opinion; moreover, the more I played, the more addicted I got to the flight-sim/combat aspects of the game. Although the single-player missions leave something to be desired and some of the limitations to equipment are irritating, I found myself playing because the game was good clean fun.

In my opinion, the best part of the game is the ability to customize your ride. From guns to shields to utility items, you can grab whatever you want and bring it along for the ride. Also, the idea of being able to haul cargo is nice, but I found most cargo routes to be too long and boring to haul more than once. But, if you're planning to haul cargo, here's a tip: diamonds are the way to go. Also, you can mine for precious metals and other minerals, allowing for different type of jobs, but what irritates me is that, except for the campaign missions, all other missions require blowing things up. No escorts, no cargo transportation. Just assassination and enforcement runs. Gimme a break; don't corps sometime need somebody with a fast ship that can blow people apart but still carry cargo?

Then, I discovered mods. Boy, do I love mods. Apparently, there's a community of gamers who like this game as much as, if not more than, I do, and they had programming knowledge. Thus, I was introduced to new weapons, new ships, new system, the works. And that was good too, because I was just getting tired by the gameplay. The mods tacked on even more hours of gameplay for me.

The story's actually pretty generic, in my opinion, the usual antihero saves the world fare. Then again, I wasn't really interested in the story, although character development does seem a little problematic. Rather than being dynamic, most of the NPCs seem to be static in nature; hell, even the main character is static.

Now, to be honest, this game isn't perfect. If anything, two things bug me. One is the music. I found the lack of varied music to be something of a mood dampener; moreover, the music got repetitive after a while. You know how some songs can be played over and over without being repetitive? Well, this game doesn't got them.

Second problem is the voice work. Even if I don't talk about lip synchronization, it really gets me that very few of the NPCs actually speak in complete sentences. Rather, they speak in fragments, and they're very obviously fragments, especially because they seem to pause at moments to think of who they work for.

In all honesty, this game is good. Not excellent, mind you, and not even superb, but it's definitely a game that's worth playing if you've got plenty of time to kill and you like to blow things up. Oh, by the way, custom weapons rock.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/05