The game really gets started once you finish the scripted storyline. Free to do your own thing, you can roam the colonies as a freighter, raking in cash by shipping anything from engine components to diamonds to illicit drugs. You can work as a mercenary in a fighter, doing other people's dirty work for cash. Or you can just buy a ship and explore; vast sections of the colonies are not included in your nav maps, and they're just waiting for you to explore them.

The secret to success lies in how you interact with the various factions and political groups that operate throughout the colonies. Any given system is usually home to a particular faction. If you are on friendly terms, you get safe passage. If not, you have to fight your way through. You can improve your reputation by taking on mercenary jobs and by bribing the right people. Of course, if you gain acceptance with one group, you make enemies with another.

Once you explore every system, gain the best fighting ship in the galaxy and outift it with the most advanced weaponry available, I imagine that Freelance will get boring. If you don't like the fly to star system, kill enemies, trade goods, Profit!, rinse, repeat style of gameplay, Freelancer probably isn't for you. Me, I need to get in good with the Corsairs so that I can get my hands on one of their Titan über fighters.

The question, of course, is whether I succeed in doing this before I go out and get my copy of Enter the Matrix. And the question that follows that one is whether any game anywhere is going to be able to hold a candle to the upcoming Half Life 2, which just got demoed at E3.

(This review was first posted here at the Limey Brit.)