Strong words? Absolutely. But Freelancer is that strong of a game. Recently released for PC by Microsoft Game Studios, the game combines open-ended gameplay with fast-paced 3D space combat. For the most part the game is rather balanced between the two, although there are some points where you’ll be feverishly seeking your next mission. The beauty of that, though, is that your next mission is wherever you want it to be.

For those who choose to follow the story, here’s the Readers Digest condensed version. It’s the 24th Century, and Alliance forces have escaped from Earth to establish a new colony elsewhere in the galaxy. These Alliance forces represented various cultures, each of which set up a unique colony in neighboring systems. Upon the destruction of Freeport 7, your character, a former resident of Freeport 7 known as Trent, sets out to get to the bottom of the devastating attack and its mysterious connections to authorities. Now whether you opt to follow this story or carve your own destiny is entirely up to you.

Freelancer has essentially two gameplay components. The first is the aforementioned 3D space action, which combines the frenzied pace that all action buffs crave with the calm-Sunday-drive open-endedness that all RPG fans adore. In fact, these subtle RPG undertones play strongly to the game’s second basic gameplay component: outfitting your ship, choosing missions and determining which alliances, if any, you end up making.

Controlling your ship in combat is incredibly simple. Your HUD allows you to target specific locations or ships, which you then cruise to by pressing a hot button or hitting the "Go To" icon with your pointer. Firing at opposing ships is accomplished either with the number keys or the right mouse button, while steering is done by pressing the left mouse button and moving the mouse in any direction.

In a nice nod to the various ships at your disposal, each craft moves, fires and handles differently than the others based upon its class. A light fighter, for example, is much more agile than a freighter, but it’s likewise less armored and often doesn’t pack quite the same punch when it comes to massive space battles. As a result, upgrading and/or equipping your ship with the money you collect through trade and completing missions is in large part determined by the missions you choose to accept.

If you want to play Freelancer as a bounty hunter, you’ll accept missions that draw you closer to that crowd. Alternately, if you want to play as an allegiant officer or rogue pirate, you’ll accept missions (or decline others) to help build your status among those respective groups. You can even accept a mission and break from it entirely by sabotaging the wingmen at your side. How you play the game is entirely your choice.

As you’d expect from an open-ended game, the more you fight for one side, the less the other sides will appreciate your actions, which you can monitor from a "rating" chart in your display. Getting on one or more groups’ hit list can lead to some nasty ambushes and battles, and given the advanced AI (it adapts to your fighting and flying style and gets harder as the game progresses), you’ll want to avoid ambushes as much as possible. Siding with one group or another also affects the number of missions available to you. For maximum missions and to cruise through space unimpeded by "opposing" forces, your best be is to stay balanced and impartial among all entities. As you’ll soon find out, though, this is hard to do.

Accepting missions and equipping your ship in Freelancer is accomplished at space stations or terrestrial settlements, each named after one of the cultures that escaped with the Alliance. While you’re in this interface, you see Trent in third person and click on characters to interact with them. If Freelancer has a weak point, this is it. Although each conversation amounts to a cutscene, you’ll almost always end up hitting the Esc key to advance to the text of what the person has to say. Since you can only accept one mission at a time, these conversations get tedious, because unless you want to roam around the entire time (which is an option), you’ll need to come back to this cumbersome interface time and again just to get on with the incredible space aspects. Don’t get me wrong, these moments serve a purpose and advance the game, but when the combat is this enjoyable, the conversations really seem to "get in the way" of the good stuff.

Speaking of good stuff, the graphics in Freelancer are beautiful. Whether by the game’s slight weakness in the "land-based" activities or by your own choice, you’ll probably spend most of your gameplay time in space, so it’s a good thing that the ships, stars, asteroid clusters, bases and cosmic clouds are all illustrated with the utmost attention to detail.

Every craft in the game, from small sentries to traditional transports, are fully bump-mapped and react to directional lighting, laser fire and explosions. The far-off views are all reminiscent of the most picturesque scenery ever captured with multi-spectrum telescopes. Even the asteroids and space junk floating around look good, and they’re fully rendered, meaning you actually need to maneuver around them as you engage in space-age dogfights with enemy fighters.

Amid all the fabulous graphics and frantic combat action, Freelancer maintains a buttery-smooth framerate, regardless of the number of ships flying by, lasers being fired, missiles whizzing past, debris scattering around and smoke effects coming from your thrusters and other craft’s engines.

Ironically, where the gameplay dips a bit (the land-based conversations), so do Freelancer’s graphics. You’d think the fast-paced action would lend itself to reduced graphics, but instead it’s the relatively static areas where the polygons come out and the presentation takes a dive.

Whether it’s the Popsicle-like fingers, the three basic animations shared by all NPCs or the five basic models divvied up among the various characters, the graphics outside of your ship just leave something to be desired. They’re not atrocious by any means, but with the drop-dead gorgeous graphics in space, it’s a noticeable decline in quality.

Some of the text-heavy menus and multiplayer setup pages stuttered a bit, but I was using a Radeon video card, which presented a known issue, so I doubt that experience was a universal problem for the game.

Again, Freelancer is a winner in the sound department. With a game that smoothly transitions between Sunday drives and serious action, it’s nice to hear the soundtrack dynamically change just as smoothly from more sedate tunes to the more fast-paced music during combat.

The game also includes some great radio "banter" among your wingmen, and the radio occasionally picks up conversations among the enemies. Maybe I’m sadistic, but I find it quite satisfying when I can hear the enemy panic as I pick apart his shield and take him down. Of course, it’s not quite as satisfying when my own on-board computer tells me "shields, failing. Hull breach immine…."

Since you’ll probably be using your weapons quite often, you can rest assured that the sound effects for each weapon are quite varied, with lasers sounding drastically different from missiles and mines. The effects (both audio and visual) of traveling through wormholes are also quite nice, and are very reminiscent of the movie "Stargate."

There’s not much to say here besides "you’ll play this forever." In case you’ve been asleep for the last thousand words or so, let me repeat: the single-player game itself is entirely open-ended. Naturally, this means you can play the game as long as you want and never run out of things to do. And that’s without accounting for the online multiplayer options, which enable you to trade, battle and chat with other online freelancers playing on your server of choice.

In a nutshell, Freelancer is the type of game we at DailyGame call a Time Suck. You start playing at 9 and realize five hours later that it’s time to call it quits. I can honestly say (and reluctantly admit) that I was a few days late with this review simply because I couldn’t quit playing long enough to write it. But duty called, and here you are reading it. Now, back to the game….

Freelancer offers some of the most addictive and arcadey-yet-refined gameplay I’ve seen in a long time. Couple that with the immense replayability, the persistent online elements, an expansive universe (I never, ever found a wall) and gorgeous graphics, and it’s hard to poke a hole in this one. Freelancer is the best space-based game since X-Wing, its gameplay is just as innovative, and it’s the most complete PC game of any genre that I’ve played in a couple of years.