I was playing some Everspace 2 and while it sure is pretty and feels pretty good there was something lacking that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’m only 20 hours or so into it but I just felt like it wasn’t quite living up to my memories of Freelancer.
Now I last played Freelancer over 15 years ago so I was sure that I was just seeing this through a heavy mist of nostalgia, so I reinstalled the old game, installed the HD mod and a few other user made tweaks and loaded it up. The opening scenes were definitely nostalgic but once I started to fly missions properly again it became crystal clear, nope Freelancer still kicks the shit out of every other space game I’ve ever played since.
Elite Dangerous, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, Everspace 2, Spacebourne 2, EVE Online, Chorus they all have strengths but nothing feels as good as the grand daddy Freelancer.
People keep saying they don't deliver but they have been delivering. The game gets a new build every quarter with updates and new content. Players are still technically playing a development build so it's full of bugs and only limited to one star system but that one star system is huge with 4 planets, 7 stations and lots of points of interest.