Freelancer (video Game) - Reception

Chris Roberts is highly regarded in the field of spaceflight combat simulators due to his successful Wing Commander franchise. When the industry learned that he was creating a new spaceflight combat simulator, they paid close attention to it. In its first public showing at E3 1999, Roberts's Freelancer won four Game Critics Awards, including Best Game of the Show. Journalists at one of the game's later showings queued up to 90 minutes to catch a glimpse of a half-hour demonstration. Computer Gaming World, trusting Roberts's vision, named Freelancer as a game that would revolutionize the gaming industry. Shortly after the game was released, IGN called it the Game of the Month. Early in the game's development, the industry was enthusiastic about the prospect of playing in a world that changes without player interaction (a dynamic world), although there was caution over the possibility of such implementation with contemporary technology. Delays in the schedule and Microsoft's take over of Digital Anvil gave rise to speculation that Roberts's most promised feature—the dynamic world—would be cut.

The concerns were partially realized; the features, although not cut, were reduced, leaving Freelancer with a virtual world that did not live up to the industry's expectations. It presented a static galaxy, where territories of various factions never change despite the groups' frequent raids and attacks on each other, and commodity prices remain fixed. Nonetheless, reviewers from video game sites, such as Eurogamer and GameSpy, accepted the limitations and focused on other areas of the game. They found the lack of variety a greater detraction from the game than the compromised dynamic world. Excluding the single-player campaign, players never meet any memorable NPC; almost everyone sounds American. According to Game Nation TV, after playing for a while, every character and place looked similar to the extent that the game makes "Star Trek look like a xenomorphic zoo". Furthermore, instead of serving as entertainment, the missions, which entail the pilot to fly to a particular location and destroy the enemies there, are so repetitive that they become chores to the reviewers instead.

Freelancer's graphics software was of older technology, but it did not detract from FiringSquad's praise of the game's artistic quality. The beautiful and realistic depictions of the universe impressed other reviewers, such as GameCritics.com and the Stratos Group. IGN, in particular, was enamored with the game's graphics, describing them as "simply gorgeous" with the best explosions and enormous ships. The mouse-and-keyboard flight control was praised by the industry. Several reviewers found it easy to shoot down enemy ships with the intuitive controls, but others pointed out that aerobatic maneuvers, such as jinking or barrel rolls, cannot be performed, reducing dogfights to overly simplistic and repetitive "chase or be chased" sequences that pale in comparison to the action in other spaceflight simulators.

On the story side, reviewers agreed the professional actors, such as Ian Ziering, did a good job in bringing their respective characters to life. However, criticism was placed on the lone voice who voiced all the generic male encounters for his monotonous delivery and making all his characters sound alike. The long cutscenes, which cannot be skipped, frustrated game journalist Tom Chick; he wanted to skip the scenes and continue playing instead of being forced to watch a clichéd story. Other reviewers expressed their own frustrations with the story, such as being forced to move to another star system at undesired times, or leaving them without an objective after the campaign abruptly ended.

FiringSquad said Freelancer's multiplayer mode encapsulated the "best and worst of in a nutshell": although players can move their characters anywhere, group with others for missions, and trade ships and equipment, they have very little else to do in the unchanging virtual galaxy. Despite these limitations, Stratos Group said the joy of playing with real-life counterparts is a positive factor; the NPC pilots are so inept that human-controlled pilots outperform them most of the time. However, as the missions are practically the same, IGN and GameCritics.com questioned the point of playing them repeatedly with friends. Furthermore, IGN thought it was meaningless to amass wealth and higher-grade equipment when they cannot be transferred to other servers. The lack of substance and repetitiveness led the gaming site to wonder how long Freelancer can be viable as a commercial multiplayer product. Whereas massively multiplayer online games such as EverQuest have thousands of players in a vast playing area, Freelancer can accommodate only up to 128; the loneliness of playing in such a sparsely populated virtual world gave UGO concern as well over the longevity of Freelancer's multiplayer mode.

Overall, reviewers acknowledged Freelancer fell short of the promises initially made by Roberts; however, it demonstrated a high quality of work in its implemented features. The various concepts were well meshed together to form an entertaining product. It never broke or raised the bar of its genre, but boasted a high production value, and has been said to be well worth the money. The game, however, was an anti-climax for those who were hooked by the touted and promised initial concepts, many of which were never realized. Freelancer was a "hugely ambitious game", as admitted by Chris Roberts, for a company to develop without the necessary capital and resources.