Played a few hours, up to level 4. Some early impressions:

- Combat is arcade-like. I'm not finding any tactical nuance to it whatsoever. Hold down the right-mouse button for a constant stream of fire since - at this point, anyway - you have a nearly endless stream of power and there is no need to worry about your energy level. Even with heavy use of 'turbo', I'm barely moving the power meter. There is no power balance feature between thrust, shields, and weapons, unlike in some other games. I'm trying to figure out the point of turrets - it looks like they simply fire at the same place as your fixed-mount weapons. Might have something to do with using the other flight mode (loosely described below).

- Navigation is pretty simple, and within the nav screen you can call up detailed info for each location. Your navigation route is also remembered even if you dock, so that's pretty handy if you stop off along the way to repair and rearm; you simply launch and pick up where you left off.

- They took an interesting tack on mouse control for flight. Two modes: one where you simply aim your mouse and that's where you go, and a second one where it's more of a point-and-click style - you only steer in the direction your mouse is pointing when you have the left button held down. Easily toggled with the space bar. Seems they did it this way so you could A) target things easily with the mouse, B) access the HUD buttons along the edges of the screen, and C) have a simpler flight mode (without holding down the left mouse button) if you prefer to do it that way during combat. Given the un-tactical nature of combat, I think a joystick would actually hinder your ability to fight in this game.

- Trade is pretty simple, much easier than the X series. Choose a commodity either to buy or sell and the description tells you the price for that item among all of the places that you have visited. As you explore more places, more prices are shown. Makes it handy to know whether to sell or hold on to your cargo. There is some mention of being able to mine for ore but I haven't yet visited an asteroid field to try it out.

- Yes, it has those damn encounters that interrupt your flight in the express lanes. They're getting old already.

- It's not anywhere near as pretty as Independence War 2, which is surprising since I-War 2 is the older title by a year or two. Resolution is maxed out at (I think) 1280x960. It's passable, but nothing to write home about. The upside is that it should be accessible to folks with older PCs.

- I'm getting attacked by factions and have no idea why. The Xenos and Lane Whosits were going after me the first time I encountered them. I guess they facebook with the Liberty Rogues against whom you're pitted from the start. It would be nice if there were some documentation, either in-game or in a manual, that fleshes out the whys and hows of each faction. Gotta figure, as a trader you character should already know a bunch of this stuff.

Have you installed the swag pack as that installs the HD textures and also enhances the sound quality while keeping the vanilla gameplay. It even gives you the option for 'bloom'. I had used this before and it looked great.

Swag pack


Also the Xenos are hostile to everyone. There's even a bar that shows your standing with each faction. I don't remember much but I think you can read up about each faction in-game since I remember reading Xenos were hostile to everyone while another faction were friendly to a certain group and so on or I could be mistaken .

I still have the game, is it OK on Win 7?

Never liked it much, too simplistic, and the shoot em up combat was just awful, economic part was braindead. Probably mostly a game for actionfans.
Although I wanted to like it, I must have tried it like 3 times for many hours in different years.

The only problem I have, and it barely qualifies as a problem, is that I need to launch the game twice. In other words, I double-click the icon once, spinning circle for a second or two, and nothing. I double-click again and it launches. Same thing happened when running setup.exe. As far as problems go, I'd call this super-minor.

Makes sense for Xenos, otherwise they'd be called something else. ; )

I haven't messed with improving the graphics through mods. I played it vanilla the first time around 10 years ago and am looking to repeat that experience now. I guess my comment about the graphics isn't so much a gripe as it is just something that struck me as a bit odd, considering someone did it much better a couple years earlier for a very similar environment. Ultimately, the graphics aren't so much a big deal for me so long as the game gets its point across. For what it's worth, it runs smooth as butter even though the game said it didn't recognize the GPU the first time I launched it.

The relationship meter is found in your character info window, which I believe is F7. I haven't found any sort of place to read about the factions but I'll play around with that tonight. What is a bit frustrating this early on is that I'd like to simply explore a little bit and I'm getting attacked a lot. That includes instances where the enemy is outclassed by my ship and they blindly charge in guns a-blazin' anyway.



As an aside, I was thinking about that last night. A lot of games use a relationship bar / gauge / meter and in most of those games I've played, the factions who don't get along with you to one extent or another will ALWAYS attack on sight. This would be like me having a disagreement with the neighbor and chasing him with a baseball bat every time I saw him step outside. "We don't like this guy for some reason, even though there's never been direct interaction, so you will shoot on sight no matter what." "But sir, I pilot a tug!" "I said NO... MATTER... WHAT!" "Oh, shit."

If you're getting frustrated now, then you're in for a treat when a certain corporation starts targeting you. I thought my ship was powerful since I had been mostly taking out targets with just a couple of shots .Felt like I was piloting a mini dreadnought but with more speed.

Boy, was I put in my place when I came upon that section in story mode...it felt like a war of attrition once the battle started with those ships. Overall, I felt puny but with a burning desire for vengeance. During my blind fury, a lot of ships were destroyed..friend,foe,law enforcement..all of which came back to bite me in the ass.

Thanks, going to root it out later and give it a shot, cheers!

Indeed, although I think it was really mostly aimed at fans of CRPGs. Ultimately it was a casual action game with tons of grinding that motivates players with a defacto experience system. It blows my mind, though, that not every single fan of classic space combat sims considered Freelancer disastrously bad since it lacks almost everything that made games like Wing Commander, FreeSpace and TIE-Fighter awesome.

StarLancer! Don't forget about StarLancer! I hated how the Freelancer opening video was a kick right into the nuts of every StarLancer fan...

I didn't forget it, I decided to keep the list short and skipped StarLancer because it's highly related to the Wing Commander series which I included. Doesn't change the fact that the game is awesome, of course.

"Casual action" seems like a decent description, or maybe "uncomplicated action" - the action itself has been fairly heavy so far. It does seem keep the controls and options light, and as such it's pretty easy to learn. The interactions on base are also quite easy to manage.

Along the lines of casual, that also manifests in the random missions you undertake. Seems you can have only one mission at a time, unlike Privateer which allows for three active missions. What's nice about Privateer in that regard is that you can plan a single sortie around multiple missions and get nice fat haul in one shot.

One of Freelancer's problems was the lack of proper mission design. Al you basicly did in Freelancer was "Go to system X and shoot Y", even the story missions. I can't remember even a single noteworthy mission. Meanwhile, there's so much good stuff in FreeSpace, StarLancer, even Klingon Academy...

Ah, FreeSpace. I've been meaning to dive into those two games but the poor old joystick needs to be replaced, which is part of the reason I decided to play FreeLancer again - can scratch the outer pace itch without a stick. Just need to suck it up, order a new stick, and enjoy those other classics.

And Privateer 2. I don't think I ever finished that game since, at the time, it brought my PC to its knees.

It was the multiplayer that made Freelancer great. It was a lot of fun trading between systems and helping allies attack space pirates! If Freelancer ever shows up on GOG, I wonder if it could work with GOG Galaxy.