Freelancer Trial Version

a snap­shot review by Brad Grier

FreeL­an­cer hails from a very rich lin­eage of games. Élite, the old Atari/Apple/Amiga clas­sic, is prob­ably the closest and earli­est example of a game of this type — being a fairly rich space-combat-trading-ship-building-RPG style of game. Élite was one of the first that offered a 3d exper­i­ence, albeit wire frame — you had to use your ima­gin­a­tion a bit.

FreeL­an­cer is Digital Anvil’s take on Élite and it’s brethren. You get cool ships. You get to fly from planet to planet using very funky space lanes. You get to blow things up in a future uni­verse that’s chock full of people and places — and there’s lots of dif­fer­ent things going on. You are not the focus of this uni­verse, but what you accom­plish does have an impact. Check out Microsoft’s site for the offi­cial background.

The FreeL­an­cer Trial is some­what lim­ited, allow­ing you to play a few of the early story-based mis­sions across more than a dozen bases. You’ll exper­i­ence space com­bat, trad­ing, repu­ta­tion build­ing, nav­ig­a­tion, space explor­a­tion, dis­cov­ery, and char­ac­ter inter­ac­tion (though you may
get tired of the repet­it­ive nature of some of that inter­ac­tion — just press the escape key and you’ll get to the import­ant inform­a­tion without the repetition.

The retail ver­sion includes mul­ti­player game-play, which accord­ing to online reports, is quite fun. You can join a squad of your friends online, and pil­lage through other sys­tems defen­ded by other live-player-squads on player-hosted serv­ers, or escort your friend’s freighter (loaded with per­ish­able trade goods) with your beefed up starfighter.

The graph­ics are very pretty, quite inline with what you’d expect to see in a mod­ern space sim, though at times the debris fields appear quite dense. It’s almost as if you’re fly­ing through a sec­tion of space where a fleet of Borg Cubes were oblit­er­ated. Other space envir­on­ments in the Trial include neb­ula clouds with elec­trical storms, and aster­oid fields.

So far, I’ve had access to two dif­fer­ent ship types. The major dif­fer­ences between them are man­oeuv­rab­il­ity, weapons mount­ing points, and cargo space. They’re more than enough to give you a taste of the action though.

FreeL­an­cer Trial Ver­sion game play is rather simplistic. Meet people in the Bar (escape through the dia­logue). Gather inform­a­tion and rumours, or be offered a job. Accept a job — usu­ally to blow someone up, expose the loc­a­tion of a lost patrol, or cap­ture a reneg­ade — and you’re on your way to build­ing your repu­ta­tion in the galaxy. Remem­ber to equip your ship with all the weapons and defences you can afford, you’ll need them early on and your tar­gets are not defenceless.

Now, you will likely be ambushed on your jour­ney to com­plete the mis­sion — all part of fly­ing the friendly skies. Be pre­pared for it. If you’re low on shield bat­ter­ies or mis­siles, con­sider restock­ing enroute. FreeL­an­cer space is a very harsh place.

FreeL­an­cer does offer rudi­ment­ary Role-Playing-Game-like (RPG) game­play. The pro­cess of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment is really quite simple. Launch your ship, escort friendly ships going your way (there is safety in num­bers), or nav­ig­ate to the tar­get alone (the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence help­fully tells you where to find your tar­get). Blow up the tar­get and col­lect your reward. Do that a few times and you’ve com­pleted the pre-scripted por­tion and enhanced your repu­ta­tion. Now you’re on your own, explor­ing this sec­tor of the game.

As alluded to earlier, there is a trade-based eco­nomy built into the game. You can buy trade items at almost any space-dock or planet, pack them in your cargo hold, and then take them to cus­tom­ers in far-flung sys­tems — and hope­fully do so at a profit. The items may be more or less in demand at vari­ous des­tin­a­tions around the galaxy — you will need to pay atten­tion to buy/sell prices. Repeat enough times and you’ll quickly have enough to buy a big­ger, more power­ful ship.

It appears that there is also an under­ground eco­nomy, as your space­craft will often be scanned for con­tra­band cargo by vigil­ant police ves­sels. You may have to duke it out with them, but I’d not encountered this in the Trial Version.

In the full ver­sion, you have the uni­verse to explore. In the Trial Ver­sion, you have the New York star sys­tem of the Liberty Space — about a dozen bases and worlds. There’s a free form com­pon­ent to the game, and there is also an under­ly­ing sys­tem of struc­ture and goals. These were pinched off in the Trial Ver­sion after about three mis­sions. Yep, it left me want­ing more.

Hardware-wise, this game is played with the mouse and key­board. There is no joy­stick option — which may upset some of the die-hard capsule-jockeys. Regard­less, it is very play­able, though my mouse fin­ger is get­ting a bit tired — reminded me of Diablo. I found the key­board con­fig­ur­a­tion a bit awk­ward, and am cur­rently play­ing around with some altern­ate configurations.

So, after about 15 hours play­ing the demo, FreeL­an­cer rates a 4/5 in my books. The repet­it­ive nature of the nego­ti­ation dia­logue dropped it, and the con­trol scheme is some­what unfa­mil­iar, but man­age­able. Had mul­ti­player been there, it would have been a per­fect 5/5. Con­sider the Battlefield:1942 Wake Island demo — if that kind of multi-player aspect had been included… the FreeL­an­cer Trial Ver­sion would have Rocked!

As it is¦it’s still a damn fine play.

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