So I played a bit of Freelancer last night, and despite early warnings of its demise, I must say that this game is great. There is something about space-trading/dogfighting games that really grabs me — and I played Privateer quite a bit in my youth. Freelancer is more of the same, and BETTER. In Privateer you could pick your ship and outfit it will all sorts of firepower and such, and Freelancer does much the same. Your alignment with various groups in the game is affected by what you blow up, and who you screw over/do nice things for.

As far as the dogfighting goes — well, I will tell you that this game has NO JOYSTICK SUPPORT. No, at first glance, that’s fairly disappointing, right? Wrong. The mouse control for flying is really quite smooth and easy to do. You dogfight third-person from your ship and the handy targeting system (how far should I lead my firing to hit the enemy?) is challenging enough to stay interesting. The environment in which you play is quite open and large — you can explore all you want, or you can use the “space highway” system within the game to get where you want to go in a hurry. In relation to dogfighting — whereas in Privateer you couldn’t “abort”, that is to say, run away, from a fight — in Freelancer, if you are fast enough you can do damn well what you please!

There is a multiplayer side to this thing, replete with an in-game browser. The server for the game comes along with the install, and there are already a number of servers out there to play on. I can’t really say any further than that as I’ve only played single-player so far, but I’m assuming it’s a free-for-all out in cyberspace, yay!

Oh, I bet you are wondering what kind of monster system you’ll need to play this thing, right? Well, the specs call for a 16 meg video card on a 600 Mhz machine, and they are probably right — I’ve got a 1300 Mhz machine with an ATI RADEON 8500 card, and the game is smoooooth to me. The graphic in this game are not simple, but they are certainly CLEAN. The planets and spaceports are not extremely detailed, but the “fog” or “particle cloud” effects look quite good… altogether a nice, clean presentation.

Anyway, that’s my horribly written pseudo-review. I give it a thumbs-up so far.