I decided to try some PC gaming for a change, since my boyfriend has a new PC and is all into space / strategy simulations. He's so enthusiastic that I thought I would join in the fun! I've had a copy of Freelancer on my shelf for a few years, I bought it in a charity shop and it had some decent reviews, so I thought I would try it.
The title on the box is actually "Freelancer - The Universe Of Possibility", and the back of the box says "Pirate, Hero, Merchant, Smuggler you decide!", so I thought this sounds good. It sounded like it would be a more up-to-date Elite style game - even though Freelancer was released in 2003 it's a good few years newer than the most recent Elite game, and I really like those! Space trading, perhaps signing up for army misions, perhaps engaging in space piracy, perhaps going space mining, or just plain exploring - yeah, I enjoyed the Elite games very much!
So I installed Freelancer on Windows XP (no problem), and gave it a go.
First impressions:
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I've gone through one and a half missions before failing the 2nd one because someone on my side got killed. AND THANK GOD. This game is making me infuriated and sick. @_@
Whoever thought that using a mouse was a good system for space-flight control was an idiot. Dear god. It's awful. You accelerate with the "W" key, you slow down with the "S" key. That I can cope with. You've got hold-left-button-and-drag to head in different directions, you've got point and right-click to aim and fire guns. Now how are you supposed to effectively steer and shoot at the same time? You can lock onto an enemy but all that seems to do is put a box round them, it doesn't seem to help your piloting or weapon targetting. All I can do is spin around endlessly, shooting lasers while chasing round spacecraft; I've got a small fleet here - where are our tactics? Why are our tactics just "spin around constantly, shooting at everything"?
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Then I realised that I could go into the options and change it so that I use the keyboard for steering my ship, and the mouse for firing. That made the game bearable. It is a bad default control system.
I carried on with the game for the following days, and got as far as becoming "level 6", but I think I will give up with this game.
I'm really bored by it. It's all dogfights and bus journeys. By which I mean, there's autopilot for everything so you just click some buttons to select the route you want to take, click some more buttons to go, and you wait. It makes me feel like a passenger, it's like being on a bus.
All missions are "go to X and engage in battle". Rather repetitive. If you want to be a trader, sometimes you get attacked, so, -=yawn=- another dogfight. If you decide to do something different, e.g. go mining, you will also get attacked, so, -=yawn=- dogfight. It's as though the game was thinking "hey, you're flying around not being in a fight, that must be boring! Have some attackers!". It just gets tedious. Well, the whole thing is somewhat tedious.
For a game that touts freedom as its main selling point, this game is really very one-track and repetitive. I do not care to play this game any further than I have so far.
