My wish for a better ship from the last post is immediately granted when I head to the ship dealer and buy my first heavy fighter. This doesn’t obviously handle any differently from every other ship which begs the question what the distinction is between heavy and light fighters. It does allow for 6 guns simultaneously which certainly gives me more punch in combat and I’ve soon raised the money to get called back for the next story mission.

Junko (with the aid of the Blood Dragons) has found out that a senior figure is going to defect to Rheinland taking the Proteus Tome with him. We have to fly off to intercept the transport which is currently in dock.

I’m tasked with taking out the weapons platforms around the base which don’t last long at all with my extra gun turrets. It’s the shortest and easiest story mission in some time in fact and we capture the transport and fly off with it to the fabled secret base of the Blood Dragons.

Nothing is ever simple though. Our information was wrong and neither the Senator or Tome were on the ship. While the others try to find out more, I’m left to my own devices once again. I notice that this new base has loads of fancy equipment which I’m one level too low to buy. 3 or 4 mercenary missions later and I’ve advanced enough to get a new shield and some level 6 guns.

In the bar I’m told that we have located the Senator at his fortified base which we are going to attack. I find out via the comms while flying over that Juni considers this a suicide run and given how my first attempt at it went, she may well be right.

The fortified base is a huge arch on an even bigger asteroid. I make it close and I’m tasked with docking with it. I haven’t quite figured out my tactics here though as I have to destroy 4 shield generators first and there are hordes of fighters around. I think I probably ought to thin out the fighters first rather than the suicidal assault I attempted. Suffice to say I get blown up and decided to come back and try this again tomorrow.

While I’m posting, I have to mention the Elite Dangerous Kickstarter that just launched in the last day or two. It’s a curious Kickstarter in that there is nothing in the incentives for any of the tiers that I would actually want except the already sold out £5,000 top level. There is also precious little detail about what the game will be so the whole basis as far as I can tell is are there enough people who liked Elite (and have maybe forgotten about it’s sequels) to raise £1.25 million for a new one. Looking at the total race up the answer could well be a resounding yes.I’ll certainly be putting some money in but not nearly as much as if there was more to go on or even just a level with a boxed version. I am without a doubt a sucker for games in cardboard boxes but at least the lack of that option will stop me spending money I should be saving for Christmas.

The weekend allowed no time for Freelancing but I’m back in business again beginning with finding a guy called Hovis, who allegedly is close to Quintaine. Like just about everyone else in this universe, he is hanging around in the bar. He wont give me any information unless I beat him in a race of all things.

I was hoping for a footrace Decathlon style, but this being a space sim it’s the usual fly through hoops affair you always see in these games. This proves to be really, really easy to win even if my ship doesn’t look like its built for speed. He does pull a fast one at the end setting a load of gun turrets on me but I ignore them and fly on to win at a canter.

I forgive and forget about the little gun turret incident and Hovis comes through with the information that Quintaine is on a space station so near I can pretty much see it from here. I fly over and he is already coming under attack from the pesky Rheinlanders who I see off before docking. After a more than frosty reception, Quintaine refrains from throwing me out of an airlock and agrees to come with me when I reveal that I have the artefact.

It’s around this point that I start to come up against an increasing number of larger ships. A torpedo launcher of some description is looking like a good idea but so far I only ever buy the equipment I need after the fact. We still make it safely back to Leeds but there are yet more Rheinlanders poking about. Quintaine tells us how a mysterious figure called Kress warned him before going into hiding and gave a clue where to find him if he ever needed a safe haven. This looks like as good a time as any to take him up on that offer and we all head off, except for Tobias who is safer left out of it.

There is a cutscene on launching showing us all flying to the jump gate. The detail on the ships is impressive and seeing the pilots on the inside I cant help but be reminded of Star Citizen. One of the real problems with the POV in this game is that all this detail in these ships is lost on me most of the time. The only ships I ever get a good look at are my own.

Predictably, given the cutscene, we are attacked at the jump gate when two Rheinlanders come out of cloak. We see off one but the other cloaks again and goes to get reinforcements. What follows after are a series of larger battles culminating in the jump gate out of system having a cruiser parked on it. Tobias decided we needed some help after all and shows up around this point to help in destroying it.

After a lot more running and a pit stop on another station to get instructions as to Kress’ whereabouts, we are given some coordinates to head to. When we get there, it looks like the entire Rheinland fleet ever a step ahead had the same idea. We need another last-minute offer of help at this point, and as luck has it, Kress’ fleet shows up to lend a hand. This still doesn’t make life easy but we destroy every Rheinland ship, then fly off to meet Kress.

His crew is about as pleased to see us as Quintaine was but Kress himself is far more helpful even if he is working for The Order who are in theory a terrorist group. He says he is on the side of peace and the news reports exaggerate the truth. Quintaine chooses to reveal at this time that he needs the Proteus Tome to complete his work translating our artefact. This sounds to be an alien Rosetta Stone and is in safekeeping in a museum. I turn down the offer of Kress letting his agent retrieve it and head there with Juni to do the work myself.

The flight there is uneventful for once, but I do pass through possibly the best looking bit of space yet including a giant ringed purple planet. I’m curious to fly into the rings and see if they turn into asteroids but I’m running out of time so I leave it for now and meet up with The Order’s agent, Lord Hakkari. He basically tells me to wait for him to sort it out. We aren’t happy with this option and Juni decides to stay and work on getting the Tome herself leaving me once again to my own devices.

That was one long and convoluted mission with a lot more twists than I included in the write-up. If the purpose of the plot is a gradual tour of the Freelancer universe, it’s doing a good job of it.  Every one of these plot missions always leaves me feeling like I need a better ship. I have plenty of spare cash, maybe 70,000 at this point but I’m not seeing anything worth spending it on. Fingers crossed I can find a better ship/weapons dealer in this system.

My first goal is to head for Leeds to meet up with Tobias, who is a Bretonian ship dealer who raised me as his own. This does beg the question where I got the American accent but I’ll let it pass. Getting to him is problematic with a load of bounty hunters out to get me but I struggle there in the end making a stop on the way.

Tobias, who is unmistakably voiced by John Rhys Davies, gives me some good advice which is to get another ship so I’m not recognised. He even throws some money my way and tells me to head for the ship dealer on New London which I immediately do. I’m not exactly overwhelmed with choice on ships when I get there and choose the Cavalier sticking to the fighting rather than trading route. On a side note, the architecture on all these worlds is really distinctive with this system bringing some of the best so far.

My new ship is a clear improvement and allows for an extra gun which can never be a bad thing. After flying several missions, Juni invites me over to Cambridge where we pose as potential donors to Professor Quintaine’s research. He’s not an easy guy to fund as no one knows where he is but we do get a lead to an ex-colleague who is doing research in the middle of nowhere. At the last minute we learn that the Rheinlanders were also wanting to make a donation today…

We quickly fly off to the planet in the middle of nowhere and when we get there some Rheinland ships come out of cloak just early enough to not surprise us. They also stay out of cloak for the entire fight which is losing a trick if you ask me and they are just like any other ship in combat. I always liked fighting Strakha which were more liberal with their use of cloak and I’m surprised not to see it used here. As it is, we soon clear the skies and search around on the planet for the dig site where we expect to find Quintaine’s colleague.

It’s hard not to notice that the plot in this game has definite overtones of other Wing Commander games with newly discovered cloaking technology being one of them. We’ve had some nameless traitors within the LSF but we ought to get someone more high profile before the end of the story if it’s going to be true to form.

Maybe it will be our new associate although she doesn’t seem the most likely. She is a scientist who has been doing research into the long missing aliens and claims to be close to understanding their language. She is also the one who found our purple egg artefact in the first place but doesn’t seem to know any more about it than we do.

About this time, more Rheinlanders show up and start bombing the base. We escape in the nick of time and run away to the nearest nebula.

It may be in a nebula but this next base doesn’t prove to be any safer, which shouldn’t have come as a shock being all of 30 seconds flight away from the planet. We launch once more in the nick of time, this time staying to fight rather than running away. After another successful fracas, we decide to try to get back to Tobias in Leeds which is several systems away. On the route we find a pair of turncoat Rheinlanders who refused to fire on a civilian transport and want to defect. While we have been chasing around looking for alien egg experts, war is slowly breaking out in the system with the apparent cause being our artefact. All exits from the system are allegedly blocked which is why the ex-Rheinlanders need our help but they know of a lightly guarded little known jump point.

When we get to the jump point, the Rheinland military have already thrown their proverbial towel over it and a battleship is in the way. Our new wingmen may not want to take out civilians but downing one of their own battleships poses no such problem. They cloak, fly to point blank range and then take it out with torpedoes leaving us with just a handful of fighters to deal with. We all make it safely to Leeds where we split up once again pursuing individual leads while I’m left to be the breadwinner.

This means yet more combat missions which do at last start to vary slightly. The first involves taking out a station which admittedly just means shooting it a lot at close range but it’s not a fighter at least. Another mission throws some weapons platforms into the mix, which are kind of like large missile launching mines. It all seems a little basic compared to fighting some of the capships in older games I could mention but there may be bigger and better waiting for later.

Another 10,000 credits or so later, Juni sends me off to the Dublin system to track down someone she thinks may be able to help. She expects him to be on a particular battleship which I fly to and will see if I can find him in the bar next time.

I’m definitely hooked on this game at this point although I’m not sure how long that would last without the story campaign driving me on. The freelancing missions are in dire need of more variety and I’ve only had the barest signs of it coming 8 hours and counting into my playthrough. When it’s only 2 or 3 of these freelancing missions at a time, this isn’t an issue though. The mouse combat has grown on me, and there is a decent level of challenge to the gameplay now without it being too hard. The controls are so radically different from a typical space sim, it has almost changed the genre to something closer to FPS but I’m always up for something a little different as long as it’s still fun. I’m very glad that Star Citizen will have joystick controls though.

This will be a short post as I only had about half an hour to spare but I did make it to the end of the next mission.

From the moment we launch, things don’t go well. The bodies we left behind yesterday have been found and hordes of LSF ships appear from nowhere closing off all the jump points. After a frantic minute trying to stay alive, Walker appears with his missing fleet, takes out the ship blocking the jump point and we run away to a hidden base in the badlands.

Juni’s associate is all alone on this station monitoring some sort of spatial anomaly. He agrees to help despite the two of us being named Liberty’s most wanted on the news. He starts by analysing our artefact but all he can do is confirm it’s active and point us to an expert in the subject on Cambridge. At this point the LSF who for some reason we didn’t think would come out this far despite us being their most wanted appear. We are to escape via a long disused jump gate.

We hang around for a while trying to save the base but don’t stand a chance and end up running for the jump gate. We are greeted by a horde of bounty hunters eager for the price on our heads at the other side. The soon apparent truth after getting blown up half a dozen time is that my ship isn’t up to this fight.

After enough attempts I make it through by luck, cowardice and a lot of evasive manoeuvring. It doesn’t hurt that the Lane Hackers decide to come along and help purely on the basis that an enemy of Liberty is their buddy. They take out all the opposition while I’m otherwise occupied trying to get as far away as possible. We even get an invite to their secret base at the end of the fight.

After that last mission, I take this as my cue to upgrade my ship and the base is well stocked so I treat myself to a new gun, thruster and shield generator. It appears to do the trick as the next stage of the mission is a breeze although there were only a handful of Rheinland fighters to contend with. We jump out of system and I split up with Juni. She goes to Cambridge to find out what our artefact is and just why everyone wants it, while I return home to Leeds to track down an associate and start fundraising again.