I miss Freelancer. You miss Freelancer. Let's Tokyo Drift through space.

I would have not recommended this game if every other instance of the combat wasn't absolutely phenomenal, and the following things I listed weren't worth it.

The visuals, graphics, environments, music, and combat, are worth the $8 for me. I love how gorgeous the space looks, all the environments felt like real space, among the asteroids and belts near the planets. The music was fantastic, energizing me in all the moments that it needed to, and giving great backing to the moments and cutscenes. I wish there were even more moments of the music coming through.

And the combat is peak. Teleporting behind enemies, drifting and side-swiping ships, doing strafing runs on larger ships, even bigger ships where you can fly in and out and pull off awesome destruction runs, I loved the space combat. And that's where the meat of the game is.

The meat of this game is not in the story, nor is it in the boss fights. The boss fights where you take on a single ship, just you and the other ship, which happens twice in a mini-boss circumstance, are awful. You barely deal any damage, and the game actively punishes you for using your abilities on them. They drop tons of mines, have a nuke ability, regen their shields fast, and sometimes even ignore you shutting off their ship engines. I would stun a boss ship and she would continue to fly her ship in curves anyway, even opening up on me with a bunch of her guns despite her visibly spinning. How does that make sense?

And the final boss has geometry problems that cut off a lot of your openings for damaging it a lot, in the second phase that happens a few times. The first phase of the final boss had me apathetic about the game where I actually struggled with motivation to want to finish the game. It wasn't hard, it was boring. So little chances to actually do damage. I spent so long just flying around trying to keep the shields down before I could do an ounce of damage, and he'd regen the shields fast. I even got what was potentially a bug when he went into his second phase again and then GAINED BACK 20% HEALTH, from 45% up to 65% and I was so aghast I was again debating not playing this game through to completion.

I wish they had played more of their own game in the big fights that mattered. It would have made me give this game a glowing review.

This is a good game, but it's not a great game. Get it on sale to truly enjoy it.