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Freelancer Demo Impressions
Let's get the bad out of the way first: Worst. Installation. Experience. Ever. Irritating spy-ware-esque "license key management program." Vague errors about out of date drivers. Multiple reboots to install said drivers. Confusion and madness reign supreme. (I had a longer rant about this last night, but I was in a foul mood when I wrote it, so I took it back down.)
Once I ran the gamut and got into the game, however, I was immediately entranced. The graphics are spectacular, which is nice; but it's also nice to see all the little details, like how the turrets on your ship move around when you move the mouse, and how the clouds are moving on the planets. Planets seem "big enough", although they probably aren't actually to any sort of real scale -- they just feel like they're at a good scale.
There's a decent story hook early on; and while there were only a few story missions in the demo, they left me with high hopes for the rest of the campaign. Other missions seemed more cookie cutter (blow these guys up, capture this guy, destroy this guy, probably some convoy guarding). Exploring the system was fun, once I figured out how to use the nav map to set way points, and how to use the jump lanes. I didn't play long enough to figure out if there was any pattern to where bad guys would attack me, but it did kind of seem like different factions had different haunts.
So far, the game seems to avoid several Privateer problems. In P, you could end up spending an hour just getting from planet A to planet B, because you couldn't make the next jump until you'd killed all enemies in your current area. In F, the trade lanes provide better acceleration, but you can still get from point A to point B under your own power, so running is much more of an option. (Especially since you can always kick in your high-speed cruise engines, albeit at the cost of taking your weapons offline.) Also, the game actually remembers what prices you've seen for things on different planets, making trading actually seem plausible instead of just deeply irritating. It's easy to review the prices seen, and you also get a little in-interface red/yellow/green indicator to let you know if the price you're offered is good or not.
The on-planet sequences are attractive and well-designed, but can get repetitive fast. When you talk to people in the bars, you get some bracket voice dialogue where the guys basically tells you if he remembers meeting you before, who he's associated with, and how much influence he has in this place. This gets tedious fast, but may sometimes contain useful info -- but not often enough to keep me from skipping it. The actual meat of the infodump is in a text box. It would be nice if they'd skip over parts of bracket dialogue that you'd heard before. Also, there's some "move from location to location" animation that 's cool the first time and boring the twelfth time. Again, it'd be nice if they scale back the gee-whiz once you get into the nitty gritty of trading and repair.
Combat seems well-paced. By default, you use a behind-the-ship camera, which seems to give a little more peripheral information. I wish the shield indicator was a little more central, though -- it's hard to keep track of. You use the mouse to steer, and you also have turret-mounted guns which fire where you've placed the cursor. This is unbelievably nice, and leaves me with hopes that eventually I could buy some computer controlled turrets to cover my six. When you've destroyed an enemy, you can use tractor beams to obtain any salvage/loot from their twisted wreck.
There are some other nice details, like letting the computer manage the task of flying in formation or flying to the next waypoint. Also, you can strafe, although I haven't made good enough use of that yet. I noticed that it looked like I could improve my strafing abilities with a better thruster engine, but I hadn't found one yet. Also, you can hear radio chatter from other nearby ships (including enemy ships!) which provides nice ambient information.
A couple of weird things happened to me. Shortly after the start of my first story mission, I lost my ability to fire with the right mouse button. I realized later that I must have disabled my weapons (shift-1, shift-2, etc), but at the time all I could do was fire the weapons manually via the 1 and 2 keys. Yuck! Also, after an extended system exploration, I was heading back into what I thought was safer space. I was cruising up to my next waypoint and taking the opportunity to review my nav map, when WHAM! Somebody knocked three missiles into me and I died. WTF?
I noticed that you can buy freighter-style ships, which makes me wonder if it's possible to hire other people to escort you. And I'm also very intrigued by the multiplayer possibilities, since it's supposed to be a persistent but intimate style of multiplay, where you and your friends can play in the same universe, hosted on one of your machines.
The upshot is that I'll definitely purchase this sucker when it comes out in a week. If the demo is any indicator, they've more than fulfilled my hopes & expectations for this long-awaited title. 11:19:03 AM () 
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