Where have I been for the last week? When I haven't been studiously watching movies for my film class, or throwing in a few afternoon hours at work, I've been playing Freelancer.

I am Edison Trent, one of a few survivors of a terrorist attack on the deep space base Freeport 7. Arriving back in the deep space colonies, I embarked on a mission to find out who was behind the attack. The search took me through many of the colonies' numerous star systems, and what I eventually found had major implications for the survival of the human race. Naturally, I (reluctantly) stepped forward and saved the day.

The irritating thing about this game is that there are enough flaws in it that it shouldn't be as much fun as it is. Despite performances from the likes of John Rhys Davies, the voice acting is very stilted and repetitive; you can lip sync to the conversations with the patrons in the bar in any base you land at after talking to two characters. The scripted part of the game is relatively short; I haven't made a habit of playing computer games much recently, so I don't really have much of a yard stick to compare it with, but it took me less than 24 hours of game time to finish (and I wasn't exactly hurrying my way through it). One of the biggest annoyances with the gameplay is when you pilot your ship: there is no way to make a roll maneuver, only pitch and yaw. This might pose a problem in combat situations if the AI were less predictable. As it is, it just makes a dog fight longer than it has to be. (I haven't had the opportunity to play the multiplayer game; I imagine that not being able to roll would be a much more significant hang up against unpredicatable human players.)

Despite these hindrances, I've still managed to spend a significant portion of my evenings cruising through space. And therein lies Freelancer's hook. The colonies consist of five sectors of space, many light years away from Earth. Each colony sector contains about ten star systems, and each of these systems typically has four or five planets or bases on which you can land: in all, there are more than 150 unique destinations.

Freelancer's space is very colorful. Some systems are dark, lit only by distant stars. Others are vibrant oranges and reds, backlit by nearby nebulae. There are asteroid belts and debris fields all over the place; In this game, space is neither empty nor boring to look at. This is good, because the textures on any given object (eg, a spaceship or an asteroid) are not particuarly inspring; the big picture is more pleasing to the eye than the details.