Breather Level: A few locations can be very easy to complete missions on depending on the circumstances:
New York is fairly easy. The deposit boxes and the vault contains up to 7,000 Merces that can help with buying items from suppliers, and the pool of randomised potential targets are surprisingly small, making it the one (relatively) consistent level in an otherwise randomly generated mode. The one downside is that to get at the Merces, you need to avoid the lasers, but it's well worth going for.
Sapienza is one of the easiest levels to do a Showdown on thanks to the wide variety of lookout locations. The clocktower, the roof of Villa Caruso, and the church tower all provide perfect sniping locations to take out your targets once you've identified them, potentially making it easier to do showdowns on.
Whittleton Creek can have lots of targets clutter in Cassidy's house, which keeps the ability to gas targets with the fumigation machinery. It also reliably spawns both emetic and lethal poison, and it's very simple to get a muffin worker disguise that allows players freedom to poison things if the Leader is Dehydrated or a Foodie, making them easy to eliminate.
Contested Sequel: This is the general reception of the game mode by players. On the one hand, the game does away with rewarding players for following the story or the usual strict "gameplay script", so to speak, of getting Silent Assassin, making playstyles that you would otherwise get for not attaining that rank much more coveted and rewarding. On the other hand, the game mode comes with arbitrary objectives (depending on the target), harder ways to accumulate loadouts, very punishing failure conditions, unaccommodating starter equipment, and the Showdown and Confrontation stages can come off as an anti-climactic guessing game.
The assassins that show up in Showdown missions are among the deadliest NPC's in the game. Their main gimmick is that they follow the targets around the level and act as muscle, and if they spot 47 doing anything illegal or outs 47 in a disguise, they will pull out a gun and deal very high amounts of damage; double-tapping 47. This makes Showdowns even tougher than they already are, since taking a risk that fails and causes a disguise breach can bring the wrath of an assassin down on you, and fails your campaign if you lose.
The lookouts in Showdown missions can end a campaign in the blink of an eye. The lookouts function similarly to enforcers that can spot you through any disguise. The difference between enforcers and lookouts is that while accidentally being spotted by an enforcer leaves a small amount of time to run away from them before your disguise is compromised, lookouts only need to spot 47 for a fraction of a second and anyone in their network will flee the map. Unlike with enforcers, running away from the lookout won't help. So unless you already have a solid idea of who the target is and can take them out before they reach the exit, chances are that your campaign is ruined.
Gamebreaker: The sedative and emetic weapons, such as the Kalmer and Sieker dart guns, as well as the emetic grenade, are easily the best freelancer tools to bring into a mission for much the same reasons in the base game; they can be used on a target to get them to a secluded location to kill them, and many objectives in missions become far easier with them in tow. Silent Assassin? Use the Sieker or emetic grenade and drown them in a nearby toilet to get a clean and breezy kill. Poison a Guard? Throw an emetic grenade at a guard at any point, and you'll complete the objective. Collateral Accident? Get your target alone using one of these weapons, place their body somewhere public, put a Gas Canister next to them, and shoot it once another person comes close, fulfilling the objective. They are very versatile, and can be used for basically everything in Freelancer.
It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Hardcore Mode is one of the most hated parts of Freelancer. Prestige objectives are mandatory (which relies on a fair bit of luck to get bearable tasks), every level is on "High Alert" (meaning each level is harder to play and navigate around), almost every Target, assassin, and lookout sees through every disguise (making traversal of maps and target identifications in showdowns harder), and the rewards for completing a campaign is a trophy on your shelf in the safehouse (which only you can see), and "The Bruiser" suit (which was added in the May 2023 patch), both of which comes off as an insult to injury, rather than proper reward. The developers did attempt to fix things in the May 2023 patch by making Prestige objectives more consistent (I.E, choose from different categories and making timed missions end when the targets are killed, not when the player exits), but that has done little to satiate the general complaints of the mode.
Heartwarming Moments: Whenever you fail a mission, Diana will wish 47 a quick recovery and assure him that he will do better in the next mission. There's even a voice line where she just worriedly calls to check up on him.
Playing Against Type: Lance C. Fuller is one possible VA for Suppliers when he usually plays the most mild-mannered and harmless characters in the trilogy. Anyone who knew him as, say, the well-meaning Custodian who tries to help the Master of Ceremonies on the Isle of Sgàil get over his stage fright is in for a shock when they come across him as an arms trafficker.
Levels on "High Alert" can be very tense and annoying to deal with. These levels use the Master Mode variants of a map (which adds more cameras and enforcers, and sometimes minor level edits), ups the security rating of the entire level, and causes guards to be more paranoid. Normally, doing something illegal (such as sabotaging the environment) just causes a citizen or guard to chase 47 and pester him for a bit, letting you deal with it. But here, there's no such leeway, and doing anything illegal instantly causes guards to become hostile and out your disguise, and hone in on your location like a wasp. Furthermore, failing causes the campaign to restart, ala failing a Showdown, making them punishing to attempt without careful consideration of your objectives, and it's possible to have showdowns on High Alert, depending on what levels you chose prior or whether you've botched a mission prior to it. One of the more annoying parts is the you cannot avoid them, as the game is set up so that you are guaranteed to have an absolute minimum of six levels in your campaign like this (one in the second tier, two in the third, and three in the fourth and final tiers), and failing a non-Showdown immediately shifts every remaining level in that tier that's not already on High Alert into High Alert, so it's entirely possible (hell, very likely) for the player to have to deal with High Alert levels far more than needed. And all of this isn't even speaking of Hardcore Mode, where, without exception, EVERY level is on High Alert. Speaking of which...
If you're playing on Hardcore Mode, you must complete your Prestige Objective on every single map - failing a single one means your campaign is done for, not to mention the whole "every level is on High Alert" issue. Never mind how nerve-wracking a time trial or a forced Silent Assassin run can be; so much as a single lapse in memory (say, forgetting to use an extremely specific weapon type to kill your mission's one target during a tense moment) can spell the end of your campaign in the blink of an eye.
Freelancer Tools being taken away from the players' safehouse after failing a campaign is a very controversial choice dating back to the CTT. Players have noted that removing weapons from the safehouse felt inconsistent and broke player immersion, and when Freelancer went live, this mechanic caused such an uproar that IOI had to explain their reasoning on their blog, in that it contributes the Rogue like permadeath aspect of the mode, that, while breaking immersion, is a punishment for failing not out of place in other games of the genre. While this did satiate some fans' need for answers, this did not stop the sentiments in the fanbase of the punishment still feeling unfair, and slowing the game down, making it harder to start a new run. Combined with the ridiculously low drops of Merces despite being multiplied, compared to the shop's prices, makes for a frustrating experience.
The Merces economy is something that has been a recurring issue in Freelancer since its conception, primarily because the difference between a player having too many and too few Merces is very pronounced. As a player, you either have Merces that pile up exponentially the more you play the mode, eventually getting to a point of having nothing to spend them on.... or the player will have so few Merces that it funnels people into specific playstyles until they are put into a situation where they can get more, punishing those who either get bad objectives or simply aren't good at the game, while greatly rewarding those who get favorable objectives or know what they're doing. While the developers have tried to balance things in various patches (including adding a Prestige system to hard-reset the Merces gained, but even that has an effective Cap of six Prestiges, as that increases the Merces you get for the first five times you do this), which hasn't really helped the underlying issue present, in that the early-game is too punishing, and late-game, the economy doesn't scale with skilful players.
The "Collector Edition" variants of the Sieker and Kalmer Dart Guns. It's not that they perform any worse than the normal versions, and in a vacuum there's nothing really wrong with them, but the issue stems from when attempting to do Prestige levels, which involves finding and then giving up all weapons. While it makes sense why they'd be persistently recommended to players in every other part of the game, it does come with the downside of interfering with a Supplier's ability to sell regular Pistols and Melee Weapons when you aren't in the early game. Still, you can get them as rare drops from the safehouse Reward Crate to bypass this.
That One Level: Specific maps tend to be less popular than others for embarking on Freelancer missions:
You won't find too many fans of Bangkok. Its tendency to place targets in heavily populated areas like in front of the hotel leads to very few kill opportunities, not to mention the ridiculous amount of guards and enforcers regardless of your disguise. It also inherits all the issues that base-level Bangkok has; the awkward placement of the security office means disabling cameras is still unnecessarily complicated, as well as the aforementioned number of enforcers. The only good change to the level is an exit that lets 47 leave via the beach (to the point where people have asked the developers to backport it into the base game), and that's about it.
Colorado is a location famed for its hard notoriety, and it's still disliked here for much the same reasons as it is in the base game (claustrophobic level design which makes movement tricky, inconsistent cover compared to other levels, and it's a hostile area in your suit, making firefights undesirable), though it seems the dislike for the level is more of a permutation and holdover of the hate the level has had since 2016, not because of the Freelancer variant making the level worse, and the map has spawned its fair share of defenders this time around, who feel Colorado really isn't that difficult compared to the base level, as the targets assigned to you are generally not hard to reach as they patrol confined areas away from other people, making eliminating syndicate members easier than they realise. That said, it's still hard to go openly loud on the map for the reasons previously stated, and even defenders of this map dislike doing Showdowns on it, especially on "High Alert" as it exacerbates Colorado's problems.
Hokkaido is very RNG-reliant, and may actually be more hated than Colorado is, primarily because the map is not that suited for the mode. The game has a habit of spawning 47 in restricted areas (the mountain top and the morgue; the latter even has more guards to make things trickier), the targets tend to spawn in very public areas of the map, and corridors are deceptively quiet and, counter-intuitively, do not make for good hiding spots for bodies, as the glass walls all over the building can out any illegal actions the player does. And the objectives Freelancer picks for players frequently do not play well with Hokkaido's "certain disguises open certain doors" gimmick, so if the player has objectives that forbid pacification or killing anyone but the targets, it can make the core way of moving about the facility frustrating and time consuming, especially without a keycard hacker.
Santa Fortuna and Mumbai, being the two biggest maps in the series, have the issue of targets possibly being on polar opposite sides of the map, and not helping matters is that unlike most other maps, there's no master disguise that lets you get everywhere, making traversal require at least one other disguise change.
The Isle of Sgàil has too many enforcers per-disguise, which causes issues with map traversal, and the targets tend to be chosen near populated places (and the map has several public areas), limiting the kill methods.
Haven Islands' gimmick of double-length sight cones on all guards is already not fondly looked upon in the base game, but here it's in many respects worse as isolating targets where no guards are looking at you is not something the base game expects from the player (all the main game targets have scripted ways of isolating themselves from guards; Freelancer, due to the random nature of target selection, does not).
, in that it contributes the Rogue like permadeath aspect of the mode, that, while breaking immersion, is a punishment for failing not out of place in other games of the genre. While this did satiate some fans' need for answers, this did not stop the sentiments in the fanbase of the punishment still feeling unfair, and slowing the game down, making it harder to start a new run. Combined with the ridiculously low drops of Merces despite being multiplied, compared to the shop's prices, makes for a frustrating experience.