I believe that I played enough of Freelancer for now (until full version releases in january).
I finished almost entire campaign while failing the very last showdown (ngl that did leave me very salty).
As for the mode itself, I’m gonna say that despite me not liking rogue-like games and my favourite content in HITMAN 3 is the one that let me save, Freelancer is definitely a breath of fresh air.
I do like that regular missions are more or less contracts with randomized targets and additional things that adds depth to them (buying weapons in field and getting money from safes and special NPCs).
Showdowns are good too with figuring out who the target is but it definitely needs more tweaking.
As it currently stands targets appearance sometimes doesn’t allign with intel which misses the entire point of showdowns (hopefully it gets fixed in full version).
Another thing is that during final phases there’s way to many suspects walking around with additional assassins and lookouts.
It’s mostly noticeable in smaller and more cramped maps like Hokkaido where I failed. My target was in the morgue area and there simply wasn’t enough space to freely move around.
When it comes to changes, adjustments and additions to the mode there are things I’d like to see:
- Don’t take away ALL tools we have when we fail. Instead make them work like weapons where we’re losing only the ones that we have on us. After all poisons and explosives already work like consumables so we need to rebuy them after use anyway. Losing everything is just unfair.
- NERF lookouts. As it stands right now lookouts alert targets to escape INSTANTLY which really doesn’t give any room for error (they should at least run to nearest target/assassin/guard before triggering alert).
- During missions give us some indicator next to rarity of weapon that says whenever we already have it or not in hideout (currently it’s hard to collect new “pickable” weapons from the map without knowing if we have it).
- Add some sort of “Banking System” where we can pay 25% of our merces to keep rest safe from losing. For instance let’s say I have 200 merces and I want to deposit 100 of them. In order to do so I need to pay additional 25, which leaves me with 100 merces in bank and 75 merces on me. That system could work as middle ground (75%) between keeping all merces when you’re not failing missions (100%) and when you fail (50%).
- Put us back at the beggining of phase when failing showdown rather then failing entire campaign.
I don’t think I have any other problems with Freelancer right not and I can’t wait to play full version in january.