Freedom Force is one of the most under appricated games of 2005 a real steal at this point.
We meet our heroes not long after we met them; with the majority of Patriot City’s Freedom Force enjoying some time away from the Freedom Fortress. As such you start out with a pretty limited selection of heroes from the prior game like Minuteman, Alchemiss and El Diablo. You start off battling some of your old foes from the original—mainly Soviet Communist bad guys but things will get more complicated in no time and you’ll soon find yourself fighting foes from Nazi Germany. In addition to the game’s main plot each of the Superheroes has a Secret origin much in the spirit of old comic books. The character starts off a normal guy but through some fantastical mix of science and the super natural the character will gain super powers. Blasted by cosmic rays, imbued with a divine power, you know the regular comic book stuff. These side stories provide a nice bit of information about your whole team.
The gameplay is of course one of the game’s real strong points as it mixes conventions from both role-playing games and real-time strategy genres. The game takes place as a series of missions with cut scenes framing them at the beginning and end. You’ll start off by choosing a team of heroes from a rather large group and the name of the game is balance having strength speed, flight etc is all necessary as no hero can possibly do everything. Strength comes at the expense of speed and direct attacks at the expense of more tactical moves. One of the more compelling things that Freedom Force adds to the mix is a very interactive environment that helps the game feel like a comic book. If you want to fly from rooftop to rooftop you can. If you want to pick up cars and streetlights and toss them at the enemy or swing them you can do that too. Most objectives have a multitude of solutions depending on how you want to approach it. For instance in one mission I was faced with a tank, so I polymorphed it into a vase of flowers and placed it in between some buildings where I could ignite the buildings with my pyrotechnics hero and do a load of damage to it without taking much damage. I could have done other things but this seemed like the best option.
But as I said this isn’t strictly speaking just an RTS. There are lots of RPG elements to be had here. For instance characters need be leveled up. The trick here is to buy a new power for your super hero you need to level up a previous power to past level 3 typically. So it becomes a balancing act between purchasing new skills and upgrading what you have. Further party management is really key. If you don’t get out on a mission with a well balanced party of a similar level you’re going to have characters that are liabilities. A lot of you may be thinking this sounds a lot like the original and that’s a fair point. But then again the original was one of the hidden gems of 2002 so more of the same only bigger and better isn’t so bad.
Graphically speaking this game does a very good job of making the comic book world it takes place in come to life. The key to this is a nice use of vibrant colors and a cell shaded look to the game. Everything really looks like a comic book come to life where the good guys are brightly colored and look like good guys whereas the villains are starkly colored with lots of contrast to give them that evil look. This is one of the best tricks of art used here. It may not win any awards for technical excellence as it’s not much better looking than the original.
The Audio comes much along the same lines. The soundtrack fits right in with something like the score from the original Superman soundtrack. It’s well edited so that it peaks when it should and shuts up when it should. Furthermore the Sound effects have all the subtlety of the “POW screen” from an episode of a old episode of Batman. Probably the best aspect of the game’s sound is the wonderful voice acting which is really a top rate set of performances. None of the voice actors names grabbed me for special celebrity but they were all very nicely stylized in a way which made me really identify with the voices. Everybody has a voice that fits really nicely with their comic book personality. The Green Genie sounds especially playful, Minuteman and mentor sound especially serious, and Diablo sounds like a joker and so on and so forwards. The villains all have evil sounding voices, the communists sound like they could be dead wringers for Boris and Natasha, the Nazis have the screeching sound to their voice that Colonel Clink had on Hogan’s Heroes. All these very surreal touches lend to the whimsical setting very nicely.
Multiplayer wise this game is a lot of fun if you can get a game going. It’s lan or internet playable for a few players but good luck trying to find anyone actively playing it. Sadly this game didn’t do so hot at the sales desk so it’s really LAN only in most cases as it can be nearly impossible to get a game together of people to play. That said the brawl mode is a lot of fun as who hasn’t wanted to toss a car at their friends. Even if you discount the multiplayer it’s no slouch when it comes to bang for your buck. With a long campaign with around 25 missions and a huge number of permutations of heroes possible there is plenty of content here to keep you even if you never touch the game’s single player. Even after finishing the game I hadn’t even used all the available super heroes. Further still you can create your own if you’re so inclined to create a character. Last but not least there are almost no serious bugs to speak of which is an accomplishment in and of itself in this release and it runs smoothly on a reasonable PC.
All in all this was a really exceptional game and it makes me mad as heck that it failed as badly as it did. I’d easily recommend this game for 50 bucks; but unless you just hated the original there are not many good reasons I can see not to pay the few bucks that this excellent game will run you. It is stylistically awesome, highly entertaining to play, there is also a lot to do and it’s technically polished till it shines. All things considered one of the best sequels of 2005.