Post originally by javelin98 at 2004-02-23 17:37:13
Converted from Phorums BB System

I thought I had, but I'll add more detail for you.

The space sim itself is great -- lots of ships and weapons to choose from, beautiful graphics, nicely balanced controls and hotkeys. As an RPG compared to Privateer or Freespace, it's excessively shallow and very linear.

One thing about the combat missions -- they're all basically the same: "go to X and shoot Y." Occasionally after shooting Y you'll have to do one small extra step -- tractor-beam in a container or escape pod, for instance -- but the "shooting Y" part only varies in that Y is almost always a set of enemy ships, a weapons platform, or a wanted criminal. Those three things comprise about 95% of the mission objectives in the single-player campaign. I was hoping for some more creative missions -- convoy escort, fast reconaissance, stealthy insertion (sliding into a zone while keeping a moon between you and your objective sort of thing), recovering data cores, mining asteroids, that sort of thing. But instead, every single mission (except for the few storyline-driven missions) is "go to X and shoot Y."

Still, if you're just looking for a cool space sim, Freelancer is great. For me, the stunted mission selection and RPG elements seriously decreased the enjoyability of the game, but if you don't care about those, then you're good to go.