by Brian - November 21, 2004

Space Interceptor: Project Freedom looks great, especially for a budget title, but looks can be deceiving because it fails in almost every other category.

Ugh, just... ugh.

When I played the demo of this game a few months ago, I wasn�t exactly impressed, but I wasn�t disappointed either. Though the story is rather bland, the game was kind of fun. Little did I know that the full game would be more frustrating than trying to start a fire with two wet sticks. What went wrong? Well, there are two things really. For one, in the demo I had all of the weapons available to me in each mission, as well as shields and the ability to use a boost to elevate my speed for a short time. Not so in the full game. When you start the game you will only have your main laser cannon and air to air missiles. As you progress through each mission you can research an upgrade for your ship�s stats: attack, defense, or speed. You will get more weapons, shields, and the boosters as you need them, but this made the demo a whole lot easier to handle, and a whole lot harder to recognize the game�s biggest flaw: The AI of your squadron members. Its terrible. Almost non-existent. In fact, to call it artificial intelligence is an insult to games that actually have artificial intelligence. They do nothing. Well, that�s not entirely true. They talk to you and bark orders over your radio, things like �Go take out the cyclotron. I�ll take out these enemies,� but of course they don�t. They just fly around chasing them, but never actually kill anything. This makes it nearly impossible to complete some missions, because they send a lot of enemies at you, and you have no help whatsoever in taking them out. Oh, and this is on the easiest difficulty as well.

But it looks good...

Yeah, it does look good, but that is practically the only thing this game has going for it. The environments are lifelike (most of them are based off of real places in our solar system), the special effects are top notch, and cinematics are also great looking, although not the best I have seen. Oh, and the load times are pretty zippy too. I only wish they spent the same amount of time working on make the game fun than they did on the graphics.

The land of Mediocrity

The sound effects, voice acting, and music in Project Freedom are unremarkable as well. None of it is particularly bad, but its not memorable by any means. You will likely want to listen to your own music as you play through the game because the in-game selection is very sparse and overly repetitive. Sound effects are pretty derivative of what you would hear in other space combat games as well.

Its just not very fun.

If this game had multiplayer, it might be worth your time. After all, there aren�t many good space combat multiplayer games nowadays, and if I didn�t have to deal with the AI�s incompetence the game may actually have been fun. It doesn�t have multiplayer though, so you may as well forget about this game. I wish I could.

Closing comments

Unless you really like a challenge, and I mean really like a challenge, do not get this game. Even if that is the case, this game isn�t for everyone. The action can be intense at times, but the gameplay is so simple that it is almost never anything to brag about.