I’ve played through all 21 missions in about six hours and found this to be a decent-enough casual space shooter. As a budget title, I wouldn’t say there’s anything amazing about Project Freedom, just enough to keep my interest all the way to the end of the campaign. Probably the most outstanding aspect are the graphics: stills looks good for something released in 2004, with gorgeous sky boxes, backgrounds and that special “I’m in space!” feeling. I also appreciated the art direction as we’ll get to visit places not usually featured in video games such as a named asteroid in the solar system or Io, a moon of Jupiter. The design and layout of ground installations, and also ships of course, seemed appropriate for the setting and crafted with great care.
Otherwise, I’d rate Project Freedom as average. The plot was interesting but unfulfilling as several plot points were hinted at but not explored (or deliberately left for a sequel?), voice acting was serviceable but certainly not terrible, the soundtrack did its job and I had few complains regarding the controls. Taking inspiration from Freelancer, movement and targeting and weapon management is achieved almost exclusively with the mouse. The only other things you’ll have to worry about is the throttle, boost and secondary weapon selection.
I did have some nitpicks, however:
1) Our nameless space craft didn’t appear particularly well-suited for any mission profile. Too slow to be an interceptor, too unmaneuverable to be a space superiority fighter, wrong weapon/turret configuration to be a heavy fighter or ground attack craft.
2) Did I mention the craft was dog ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ slow? Also, I had to wait until the second to last mission for turbo/boost to be unlocked. It had a long cooldown to boot.
3) The basic energy cannon is terribly short-ranged even for dog-fighting.
3) There’s no radar of any type and enemies aren’t marked until they’re well within visual range, leaving one guessing as to where they are and coming from. Targets not on screen are marked with arrows on each screen border, but there’s no differentiation between fighter, battleship, hostile ground target, civilian ground target etc.
4) Overall, the campaign worked quite well except for one sudden difficulty spike. Missions 7 and 8 send your ship against overwhelming odds without having much in the way of ship upgrades. I had to restart the entire thing on easy difficulty because I just couldn’t prevail despite my best efforts and 20 or so combined attempts. There is no adjustable difficulty in this game, you’ll have to start over. Ironically, most of the later missions which should have been more challenging on paper would have been quite manageable thanks to receiving better weapons, a shield generator and auto-repair module. But easy was really just TOO easy, more like a shooting gallery.
Technical problems:
1) As delivered by Steam, the game will crash when attempting to play a cutscene or even the intro movies. Best I can tell, the bundled decoder appears to rely on some depreciated code from WinXP or older. Tried multiple compatibility settings, transcoding the video files and swapping out the MPEG-1 decoder for something else. No luck. Options are to rename all files in the installation folder or use a dummy mpeg.dll file from the PCGaming Wiki or Steam forums.
If you’re in the mood for a casual Freelance-style space shooter and don’t have the highest expectations, it may be worth picking up on sale for a buck or two.
