Here's a portion of an old review posted on rpg.net years ago of the Freeport product when it was still fairly new (summer 2002). I think it's a little bit too harsh and maybe a little bit too spergy about a few things, but it clearly acknowledges the tone being off is the biggest problem with this product. I'll copy and paste a big chunk of the review, edited to fix grammar and formatting, and to exclude sections that I'm not interested in.
I have very mixed views on the book. I was anticipating this for a long time, so maybe I got my hopes up too much, but in any event, I was ultimately very disappointed with it. On the one hand, this book has a ton of content. It's packed with text, and the artwork is very good (for the most part). (ed. I'm less of a fan than he is. It still has that early 80s garage band feel of early D&D products.) The number of adventure hooks is astounding, and I really like how they formatted that part of the book. On the other hand, there are a number of problems. Most glaring is that the city of Freeport is somewhat, well, lame. Maybe I made a mistake in re-reading all the Thieves' World novels just before buying this, but I do think they deliver a city that is far more like Branson, Missouri, than what they advertised on the back as "the most larcenous city in fantasy."
For example: there is a gang of sorts of daughters of rich guild members. Apparently they are bored, and so to be rebellious, they go out drinking. Wow! Shocking! There's a beatnik wizard who runs a coffee shop. Complete with beat poetry. Gack! (From the picture of her, she's pretty hot, another problem - beatniks tended to look like Yoko Ono, this one looks like Lucy Liu. Though she has the Lennon style round glasses.) People seem to dress like it's the 1700s. I guess they are going for the pirate look, but it looks more like something from the French or American revolutions. I almost expect to see Ben Franklin and the three musketeers to make an appearance. (ed. the Three Musketeers doesn't take place in the late 1700s like the American and French revolutions. It takes place in the early 1600s; at least 150 years earlier.) This is also not very practical in a climate that averages 80 degrees or so. There is a street gang called the "Joyboys". While this is especially funny for Shadowrun players, it's mostly just a really stupid name for a gang. There is a government X-files-ish team called "The God Squad". Really. I suppose this could be a Simpson's reference, but it was meant to be silly on the Simpsons. (There's also a similarly named "Godshop", which is a shopping mall of sorts of clerics.) (ed. it's probably actually a reference to Hawk & Fisher by Simon R. Green, where there is a very similar organization also called the God Squad, at least informally. The reviewers over-reliance on expecting people to be fans of The Simpsons or other geek properties doesn't help his case. I never liked it or watched it. But, y'know.)
There's an awfully contrived insurance agency. It's contrived because they have a magical artifact that keeps people from lying to them. They found the artifact by accident. Just by whim, one of them bought a mysterious crate at an auction. And it just happened to have the key to being an extremely successful insurance company. Okay.
Conversely, there is a huge lack of anything particularly nasty or evil. There are for instance, a total of three street gangs. And one of those isn't really a gang (see above). In any event, none of the gangs is really particularly scary or even interesting, and all have fairly mundane names (The Buccaneers and the Cutthroats). Even the crime lord is fairly nice. The crime lord is a halfling that is suspiciously similar to the halfling crime boss in an old April's Edition of Dragon magazine. Eubeen Had, I think his name was. But while there is a crime lord, of sorts (he mostly seems to be into the protection business in one district); there's no thieves' guild. (ed. I've mentioned this many times before. If I adapt Freeport, I won't be adapting Finn and his dumb halfling gangsters. I'll be using Five Fingers crime lords, if I use any pre-written ones.)
Other minor items: The tabloid newspaper run by people with initials instead of first names (C.Q. and T.K.), the Pokemon doll in one of the shop illustrations (Pikachu, I think). Another illustration has what appears to be a playboy bunny (like from their old nightclub, with ears and everything, it's on page 130). I dunno, maybe I'm being picky, but the tone of the place is almost like a joke. Or campy, like the 60s Batman. (ed. exactly my complaint too. It's still somewhat true in the later, improved version of this book, but a little bit less on-the-nose, at least.)
The only really evil things in the book are a cannibal cult, a secret society of rakshasas (and someone almost exactly like it, only for decadent humans), and an orc bar. The first two go out of their way not to intrude on Freeport life. The last is just plain silly. Orcs are treated as being little more than beasts, which is not true. Also, think about it. Why would an orc pirate pay money just for a chance to get drunk (it seems in the bar they have to fight over the beer spout, even when they pay), when one could go to another place and just get a drink? Orcs might be stupid, but they're not that stupid. There are also a number of logical problems. While it's true that most fantasy settings violate all sorts of laws of physics (as we know them), and sometimes are more a reflection of modern day life than historical life in more technologically primitive times, most at least try to make some sense with the basics of logic. But not Freeport, unfortunately.
For one, the city is supposedly really, really crowded, because space is at a premium. But it's on an island that seems to be completely empty? Why don't people just live outside the city? All they have to do is cut down the jungle surrounding it! (The book even says it's more or less empty). Actually, as a result, the layout of the city is very, very odd when you look at the big map. Why would everyone just decide to stop building in an almost straight line, despite hundreds of feet of free land? The shape of the buildings are also very odd. There is actually a reason people don't live in odd polygonal or trapezoidal buildings - they're difficult to build, and they don't maximize space. Yet Freeport is full of them. (ed. the redrawn map that came out with my hardcover book is tons better. It's actually one of my favorite city maps, honestly. That said, this never bothered me. But I'm much more familiar with the better one.)
Besides that, the economics of Freeport seem screwed up. Only one shipyard? In a city devoted to trade? No farmers? Despite the fact there is ample free land outside the city and the city has had food shortages in the past? Well, I could go on and on, but I would really be getting nitpicky. The end result though is that is just doesn't seem like a plausible city, even at a superficial glance. I know many fantasy cities aren't, but this is really glaring.
Although gambling and prostitution are apparently legal, there are no casinos and apparently only one brothel (not quite true, they are alluded at, but somewhat vaguely). Now I don't want it to be a like a Ed Greenwood product where every other business is a brothel (er, "Festhall"), or like the old DMG with it's random prostitute table, but c'mon, it's a town aimed at pirates and the relatively corrupt. It should be at least on par with Las Vegas. This is more like Branson, Missouri. Did Ned Flanders buy out Green Ronin?
On a related note, the police presence in Freeport is way too heavy. There are 200 police for a city of 10,000. In North America, the largest cities have about 7-8 per 1000 people. In Freeport, they have 20 per 1000. That's just way way too many. Especially for a city that back cover calls "the most larcenous city in fantasy.". Oh my. It's actually perhaps the least larcenous city source book I've read, and going through my collection, I probably have 30 or 40 of them, from Lankhmar to Sanctuary (Thieves' World) to various cities in the Forgotten Realms to Bloodshadows to modern day fantasy like Shadowrun (or even space fantasy like Star Wars). (ed. This particular complaint is overwrought. Nobody does that kind of census analysis. That's spergy.)
So, while this book might look really impressive at first glance, on further scrutiny, it's pretty awful. The rules are the best part, but even a lot of those seem to be filler (I mean, two animated magical monkeys?). I was really really disappointed with this. I was really expecting what was advertised on the back cover, in terms of style (i.e, "the most larcenous city in fantasy", and the high editing and rules quality I'd seen in previous Green Ronin books.
I'm not quite as disappointed as he seems to be, but then again, my own "Freeport" was never "Freeport"; Port Liure, even in its earliest iteration, had its own geography, different neighborhoods, different history, etc. I borrow any elements from Freeport that I like, liberally even, but if I have to recontextualize them anyway, then making them grubbier and darker is easy enough. Oh, and even when I still played d20, I didn't care much about the rules, though. For my current read-through, I'm not displeased that there's a fair bit of stat-blocks and rules, since I just skim over those and knock more books out faster. The lack of mechanics is one of the things that I liked best about the Freeport book that I do have in hardback.
I also found a Scribd file for an old 2004 product by Ronin Arts called "Treasures in Freeport". Ronin Arts actually originally wrote and published "Vengeance in Freeport", although that seems now to have reverted to Green Ronin, and they're selling it as if it were originally theirs. I do have a few non-Green Ronin products on the list "Shadows in Freeport", "Gangs of Freeport", and more, but I never really did trawl sufficiently through the internet to see if I'd identified everything. I've done that now, and I think that's all that I can reasonably get my hands on; I'm not going to buy the Pathfinder Short Cuts for Freeport because $3 for a 7-page pdf of mechanics for a game system I don't play is $3 too much. Those should have been a continuation of the old Focus on Freeport series instead.
UPDATE: Just finished it. If you have newer books, there's no reason to read this. It is just an out-of-date and smaller version of the Pirate's Guide with some d20 mechanics, which you can get from the 3rd Era Companion. Many of them were repeated in the Focus on Freeport series, even, or in other sources. It now seems obvious to me that repetitive Freeport material was kicking around for years, and because I'd never tried to trawl through the entirety of their official content, I'd never noticed. The firearms mechanics, for example, even appeared in a Dragon Magazine 3PP special Annual edition. In any case, the mechanics were of considerably less interest to me, so I read through them fairly quickly. I don't need all of the 3e details of spells and magic items, and there were quite a few of both, for instance. I've never read the next book, "Denizens of Freeport" for instance, in spite of the fact that I've had a digital copy for decades. Just never got around to it. That's what I get for buying bundles, I suppose, which is probably where I got that one.
Also, the difference in tone was less jarring than I remembered. I'm not sure if that's meant to be an apologia for this book that I just read or a condemnation of what's to come. Either way; because my style of running the game is to use what works and ignore what doesn't, it's never bothered me as much as it does some, although sometimes I definitely notice it more than other times.
I'm probably going to add "Treasures" to the list and read it to. The revised list, then, looks like the following, with a dagger symbol over third party... (fourth party?) Freeport products:
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