Overall: 4/5
Biff! Pow! Wham! These are the first words that come to mind when I think of Irrational Games’ Freedom Force. The game is a comic slugfest set in the Golden Age of comics when America was the Good Guy, Russia was the Bad Guy and superheroes were Heroic! The game plays in a standard 3/4 overhead view with a nice twist: if you have a scroll mouse, you can scroll in to almost ground level and out to above the rooftops (useful for when characters are fighting on rooftops). You control a squad of up to 4 superheroes as you protect the aptly named Patriot City from the forces of evil. The way you control your heroes is reminiscent of most 3/4 overhead games, where you click and drag to select units and order them around. Clicking on a unit brings up a variety of options, from selecting their default attacks to making them fly (if they can) to attacking a target. Every character gets a hero point that can be used once per mission. You can use hero points for various heroic deeds, such as health recovery and status recovery. One very nice touch is the highly destructible environment. You can knock down buildings, as well as pick up and throw cars, rocks and park benches to name just a few things. You can also use trees and light poles as baseball bats. Another great feature is the secret origins of the main characters, which are fairly simplistic, even bordering on cheesy sometimes but appropriate for the era that they are representing. Your adventures will take you from the city park, to below the city, to the End of Time itself! As your characters advance through the story, they gain Character Points (CP) which are used to upgrade their powers and abilities and Prestige Points (which represent your team’s standing in the eyes of the public). As your prestige rises, you will get access to additional heroes to recruit for your team. Another nice touch is that ALL of your heroes get CP when you complete a mission, although heroes that actually participated in the mission get more than those that did not, thereby giving you incentive to rotate your heroes throughout your adventures.
The game is exceptionally well done, however it does have a few flaws. Firstly, your team members will not automatically attack enemies close to them, meaning you have to do a lot of micro-management if you don’t want your heroes just standing around. This gets especially frustrating when you have to split your squad up to meet multiple objectives and continuously scroll around the map to make sure everyone is doing what you want them to. Secondly, characters that have a melee attack will continue to beat on a target until it is destroyed, but anyone who has a ranged attack will only perform their attack one time for every time you click on an enemy. This gets very annoying when you have two characters who are attacking an enemy and you have to keep clicking on their target to get your other two heroes to use their ranged attacks, even more so when you have a your team split up. These are the only real flaws with the game that I can see and while they are annoying, they actually take very little away from the game as a whole.
Once you get a feel for the game and how it plays, you can delve into what I consider to be the best feature of the game, namely the ability to create your own heroes and import them into the game. Just about every superpower is covered, from super strength and speed to invulnerability and everything in between. You choose your characters attributes (strength, speed, agility, etc.), their abilities (flying, wall climbing, armored, etc.) and their super-powers, which are grouped into categories (melee, beam, projectile, etc). Your super-powers are highly customizable, from selecting damage type, how much energy it uses, how much knockback it does and what chance it has of stunning a target. You can also choose your characters’ attack animation and the super-power fx. All of the powers can be named to whatever you want, making it easy to re-create your favorite comic book heroes in game. You can also download “meshes” i.e. body styles and “skins” i.e. the way your character will appear in game from the internet. There are lots of very talented people out there who have made meshes and skins for just about every superhero, from Superman to Spawn. Once you have a custom hero (or in my case, several dozen), you can import them into the game alongside your favorite in-game characters. These characters can also be used for multiplayer action, and while I have not personally played a multiplayer game yet, any game where I can field the Fantastic Four and destroy a city block is aces in my book.
In summary, if you like comic books and computer games, this game, while having a few flaws, is just about as good as you’re going to get. To quote the legendary Stan Lee “Excelsior, True Believers!”
Good Links:
Links: Alex’s Freedom Fortress (http://www.raventg.com/ff.nsf/All/)
Interceptor’s Meshes (search “freedom force mesh” thru Google)
Various Yahoo newsgroups (Yahoo groups/computer games/3D gaming)
- By Agent Sith
