I can pick up Freelancer for 23$...

[Carolus Rex]

...or, more precisely, 160 Swedish crowns. Should I?

When you read the back of the cover, this seems to be one of those promising games that gets you itching to play it...

Good atmosphere, an open game with many different ways to play it, space, exploration, trading, piracy... [where's a drooling smiley when you need one?]

What's 'Poly's verdict on this one? Dig in or let it be?

Carolus

[Spaced Cowboy]

Send me $10, I'll send you mine. Fun for a while, but somewhat repetitive, with the exception of the main missions.

[DrSpike]

Probs costs more than $10 to get it to Carolus from the US.

[Carolus Rex]

Hey Doc, what do you say about this then?

I tuned in on ravagon's site for System Shock II... The game is (IIRC) 9.95 Australian dollars and shipping it to Sweden costs 20 Australian dollars...

Not much in absolute terms, but nice shipping cost/game cost ratio...

I'll take it!

Carolus

[Kuciwalker]

It's OK. The open-ended parts are boring (all missions amount to "fly here, shoot stuff"), but the SP campaign is kinda fun.

[ravagon]

Originally posted by Carolus Rex

I tuned in on ravagon's site for System Shock II... The game is (IIRC) 9.95 Australian dollars and shipping it to Sweden costs 20 Australian dollars...

$20 to ship a dvd-sized case to Sweden!!??
Yikes. I think you've been taken for a wee bit of a ride there.
On the bright side though they do combine multiple games into a single order (domestically anyway) so I imagine you could probably get >1out of that $20 too.

FL, IMHO, is pretty darned good. The control system is easy to use and the SP campaign is good too although you don't have any choices to make and you're pretty much doing the same thing for much of it (ie: Running away from the bad guys ). If you intersperse it with a variety of randomly generated missions it's quite long too. Took me 40-50 hrs to complete IIRC.
Then you have the rest of the star cluster to explore.
Ultimately it'll stop being a challenge though once you've got one of the seriously tough ships but they aren't available until after you've finished the SP campaign.

There're also an awful lot of mods that look very promising too (although I can't seem to link to the major mod site right now ... ).

[Kuciwalker]

All of the mods really suck.

[Traianvs]

After the SP campaign there isn't really much to do. All of the missions are 100% the same (kill raiding rogues etc). You don't need the best weapons, with some skill you can kill just anyone with noob weapons anyway, it'll just take a bit longer. Anyhow you will find enough funds to get the good weapons anyway so it's not too hard

I expected more immersion in the game outside of the SP campaign. However that SP campaign is quite entertaining, if not somewhat easy

[Kloreep]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy
Send me $10, I'll send you mine. Fun for a while, but somewhat repetitive, with the exception of the main missions.

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
It's OK. The open-ended parts are boring (all missions amount to "fly here, shoot stuff"), but the SP campaign is kinda fun.

What they said.

During the SP it's not an "open universe of possibility" or whatever the marketing says, but that's okay, because you almost always are allowed to do as you wish within some limited area between missions, and since you're required to move from area to area, you always have new systems, equipment, and opponents to check out. In short, the campaign is very fun.

Once out of the SP campaign, however, things do get repetitive. You can't access the best gear during the campaign, so you can try to upgrade further if you wish afterwards; but the random missions, and trading, are all you're left with once the campaign is over. The random missions will have gotten repetitive by the time you're done with the campaign, and while trading is interesting to try for a while (it really only becomes profitable once you're done with the campaign and thus free to travel across the map), it too gets repetitive.

[Spiffor]

I really liked the game, though it does get reperirve after the main campaign. The colours in space are gorgeous, the music is really nice, and the piloting/combat is fun.

It's well worth 160 Kronor IMO. You should have 20-30 hours of great fun, and you could pprbably stretch to 50-60 if you're captivated by the graphics and music.

In the same vein, X2 The Threat has more modern graphics, and is much more interesting. However, the aesthetics are less mesmerizing than in Freelancer

[Locutus]

What the others have said: the campaign is great, if all too easy for experienced players of this genre. The game itself is very solid: fantastic UI, graphics, sound effects and music, great voice acting (the lead characters are actually played by Hollywood actors such as George Takei (Sulu from Star Trek) and John Rhys-Davies (Gimli from LotR)), solid (if slightly cliché) storyline, fun gameplay, good performance with low minimum specs. However, after the main campaign the rest is pretty repetitive. Besides doing a little bit more unit upgrading, there isn't a tremendous amount of stuff to do anymore. The campaign offers 13 missions (most of which consist of several 'sub-missions') that probably take about an hour each on average. Then there's some time between the missions in which you have to do random missions, so in total maybe 20 hours of gameplay.

Beyond, there are basically two reasons to coninue playing, if you're into them:

1) To find out the entire backstory. There really is a HUGE backstory: every faction, every system has its own history, its own story. Just discovering all the systems alone can take quite some time, some can only be accessed through well hidden jumpholes in dense nebulas. I read in an earlier thread on the game (not sure if it was here or on some other forum) that people thought the 5th sleeper ship (Hispania) was not in the game so it could be used for an expansion pack. But it actually *is* there, you just have to do some exploring (and be friendly with the right faction) to find it. I wonder how many people here have found it? Anyway, if you're into discovering stuff and reading backstory, that can still be fun, but of course it doesn't offer infinite replayability as the PR promises and it requires a LOT of talking to people (repetitive) and scouting huge areas of mostly empty space (boring).

2) To get involved in big battles for some senseless but fun action. I still enjoy taking a poor or mediocre ship and flying straight to an enemy base or meeting point. Fighting off 10+ more advanced ships at once (and a few weapons platforms and stuff) is still just a great way to blow off some steam. Not something to do hours on end, but fine for just 30 minutes after a hard days work...

It really is a fantastic game in its core, would've been an all-time classic if only they had made the actual 'freelance' part of the game more interesting (dynamic economy, more different types or random missions, (limited) contruction and destruction of bases, ongoing intergalactic political developments, AI that actually use shield batteries and nanobots, etc). If it's worth $23 of whatever mostly depends on what your gaming tastes are and how much money $23 is for you. It probably is though.

[Carolus Rex]

Originally posted by ravagon

$20 to ship a dvd-sized case to Sweden!!??
Yikes. I think you've been taken for a wee bit of a ride there.

Actually, I understated the price. The game is 9.05 and the shipping cost 30 Australian dollars... I'll still bite! Call me naïve, but I don't think companies like that are thieves...

Which, I guess, answers Locutus' question as well.

Thanks all for your input. Still a little bit indecisive, though... Anyone else got something to add?

Carolus

[Spaced Cowboy]

I believe that there is a demo, I played it and then bought the game. I do not buy too many games at full price, but this was one of them.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Carolus Rex
Hey Doc, what do you say about this then?

I tuned in on ravagon's site for System Shock II... The game is (IIRC) 9.95 Australian dollars and shipping it to Sweden costs 20 Australian dollars...

Last time I looked that game was abandonware on the site that cannot be mentioned. Just to clarify, that's $0, and $0 shipping.

[Kloreep]

BTW Locutus, you can mod the AI to use nanobats and batteries, it just doesn't in the default game.