Freedom Force (FF) is a game for which I've been waiting for a long time. When I was a kid, my friends and I got into a role-playing game (RPG) named "Champions" for a while, largely as an alternative to other RPGs we played like Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, Boot Hill, Gamma World, etc. The hook for Champions was that it allowed the player to assume the persona of a superhero, customizing his powers as desired—hey, what kid wouldn't think that was cool?
Over the years, there have been plenty of attempts to make a video game along exactly those lines, but few have ever seen the light of day and those that have stunk. Fortunately, somebody at Irrational Games realized that the technology to do it right had finally arrived, and FF is the resulting product. Fortunately, I'm happy to say that it does justice to the original idea. Read on to find out why FF is a pretty good buy for most gamers.
FF doesn't use the prettiest and most capable game engine out there, but it manages to do a surprisingly good job with the NDL engine, which has recently been renamed "Gamebryo" (yuck!). The visuals in FF are truly well done, with very convincing animations, richly detailed and vibrantly colored textures, and a stunning panoply of special effects. To be sure, this game isn't as pretty as more recent games like Unreal Tournament 2003, Splinter Cell, or Command & Conquer: Generals, but it's darned good looking in its own right.
I'm sure there are some gamers who will grouse about one thing or another with the game's visuals, but I think they're missing the point. FF isn't supposed to be a knock-down gorgeous slab of eye candy; it's supposed to be a comic book! To be more specific, it's supposed to look like something straight out of the golden/silver age of comics (depending on which historian to whom you listen and to which features of the visuals you pay the most attention). Having said that, it succeeds remarkably well at accomplishing what it sets out to do.
Most of the cut scenes seem to be rendered by the same engine that powers the in-game missions, while the superhero biographies are handled by what I can only assume is a different set of code. Somehow, though, it all comes together in a nicely unified whole, capturing the whole "campy" spirit of the comic books from which the game draws its inspiration. Me, I'm still waiting for the perfect implementation of Frank Miller's Batman, but FF looks far better than it needs to look to get the job done.
Are you ready to laugh? Seriously, are you ready to laugh? With many games, I have various complaints about the audio. Though I do have a negative comment or two for FF, the audio is almost uniformly hilarious. The whole project exudes exactly the kind of world shattering self-importance that superheroes and their fare imply. Everything from the dynamic and suitably campy music to the ridiculously over-the-top dialogue is very well done. I can't think of anywhere else that you can hear dialogue this banal being given such life by the voice actors. Truly, they've done an outstanding job of bringing the characters to life.
In fact, the only complaint I have with the audio is that the game really needs more of it! By about the fourth or fifth mission, you've already heard Minuteman yell "Right makes might!" several hundred times (if not more). The first hundred or so will still bring a smile to your face and maybe even a laugh; after that, it grows a tad old. There are too few basic sound clips for each character compared to the number of times that they're uttered in my view. Still, this is a relatively minor complaint in the grand scheme, and the audio overall is good.
The interface is both good and bad. On the one hand, the developers have done an incredible job of making sure that the plethora of character powers and such are available in an intuitive and easy-to-use fashion. And believe me, that's no small order when virtually everything in the game world can be used in one way or another, depending upon the situation. Yet on the other hand, I found trying to right click rather annoying in the midst of combat. You can pause the action of course, but it removes a certain amount of excitement from the whole thing and goes against the feel of a superhero game in my view. Still, this too is a minor complaint.
The menus all work pretty much as you would expect, the customization options are pretty good (I personally wished for dedicated keys to adjust the camera, rather than relying upon holding down the Alt key), and the various other portions of the interface are informative and well-themed. It's somewhat surprising the amount of features that the developers managed to pack into such a compact interface. Other development companies could clearly learn a thing or two from their example. On balance, I would have to say that the interface succeeds far more often than it fails, and that's pretty darned good.
The game mechanics are almost as good, though I think they could use some work in a couple of respects. First, the good stuff: FF really brings superheroes to life. Black & White (B&W) really bugged me because it forced me to play as a largely impotent god. Seriously, if I'm playing as a god for crying out loud then I ought to be able to rain down some serious hellfire on the unrighteous, but B&W was a joke in that regard. I didn't feel like a god at all; I felt like some eunuch servant, always on call to a bunch of whining villagers.
In contrast, the characters in FF really feel like superheroes! When Manbot hits overload stuff goes flying! When Minuteman smacks somebody with a lamp post it has exactly the effect one expects. In short, the characters feel larger than life as they should. I imagine this was a very difficult thing to achieve, as so many other games feel kind of weak by comparison. It hasn't been done this well in other games to the best of my knowledge, and that's a feather in the developers' caps.
Unfortunately, the main problem is that it's too bloody hard to control these larger-than-life heroes effectively. It makes perfect sense to me that using an explosive area of effect power like Diablo's Inferno will require some caution to make sure your own heroes don't get caught in the blast. But the characters often do as much (or more) damage to each other as they do to the bad guys! I can't tell you how many times I've had Minuteman bash fellow heroes into unconsciousness in a wildly uncontrolled Strike for Freedom. Worse, your heroes don't react intelligently to anything, but I'll say more about that later.
This wouldn't be such a bad thing if your heroes were a little tougher, but in this respect they don't seem that much larger than life. Diablo, for example, can have his flame extinguished way too easily despite all his tough talk. A few simple thugs with pistols can put him down for the count far too rapidly. I realize that guns do damage, but come on, man, he's a superhero! The result of all this is that the player will spend a fair amount of time just fighting to control his heroes. Several of the game's missions leave little room for error, and there are few things I find more frustrating that fighting my own units rather than fighting the bad guys. The game could really use some polishing in this regard.
Less obvious but more unforgivable is the problem with hero recruitment. During my first game, I must not have done a very good job because I didn't accumulate prestige points very fast. By the time I had enough to recruit a hero I was pretty geeked about the game, so I quickly recruited Man O' War. Though he didn't turn out to be a complete disappointment he wasn't the cool addition to the team for which I was hoping. Far worse, however, was how badly I screwed myself by recruiting him.
A few missions later I got into a real jam with all the robots ravaging the city. To be more specific, they were trashing buildings too quickly for me to get to them and stop them. After I consulted a game guide from PC Gamer magazine, I discovered that the hero I really needed on my team was The Bullet. The problem was that I didn't have nearly enough prestige to recruit him because I had already spent it on Man O' War. When I tried to retire Man O' War, hoping to regain that prestige, I discovered that I couldn't. In effect, that mission practically requires The Bullet to be successful, and because of my previous choice, I was essentially screwed. The player really ought to have more freedom to make mistakes.
Nevertheless, the game mechanics work pretty well aside from these complaints. Deserving of special mention are the character-creation facilities. It is difficult for me to believe, but the developers have managed to allow the player to create almost any hero that can be imagined. The character-creation tool supplies a wide selection of basic models and meshes, and still more may be imported for use, but it's the specification of attributes and powers that really makes my day. Heroes can be customized in a plethora of ways, right down to the special effects their powers will use. That's amazing! The only substantive limitation is on the characters' sizes; fans of The Atom might be disappointed, but almost any regular-sized hero that can be imagined can be created in FF.
The story is like something ripped straight out of a comic book, which is exactly what one might expect. What I find most surprising, I think, is that the developers managed to incorporate all the old standbys (e.g., run-of-the-mill thugs, supervillians, giant robots, dinosaurs, and even a Greek god) into the mix while maintaining a largely coherent plot. Once you grant the existence of Energy X, with all its bizarre properties, the rest of the tale falls together pretty well.
In a surprisingly cool bit the final battles make for an escalating retrospective of the entire single-player campaign, a sort of video game adaptation of a literary flashback. But by that time, of course, the heroes are more than ready to make mincemeat of their former foes. The final bad guy and encounter therewith makes for a wonderful close to the story, as does Man Bot's ultimate fate. It's a touching end to the tale and the player feels it keenly after all that Man Bot has been through. It's not Crime and Punishment, mind you, but since when was Raskolnikov this much fun anyway!?
Plenty of other games could take a lesson from FF in terms of the amount of content it provides. Ultimately, FF consists of a series of discrete "issues", each of which can be divided into a number of "chapters". All told, there are thirty-eight different scenarios in total. That's a lot of game for the price, especially when so many other games today are clocking in at under a single-digit's worth of playing hours. You can expect to spend a solid forty (or more) hours playing FF, and that's one heck of a value.
Better yet, all of those many missions are genuinely interesting. The environments are very diverse, there are lots of different enemies, each of the heroes you'll gain automatically has a host of different ways in which he can grow more powerful, and the objectives vary sufficiently to keep the player's interest. Not only does FF pack a lot into the game, the majority of that material is good stuff. This game isn't a one-hit wonder at all. It provides a wide variety of playing experiences.
My only serious complaint with the content of the game is the artificial intelligence (AI). When it comes to your own heroes, they're a pack of idiots. They do one thing and then they stop. Seriously, you have to watch these morons like a hawk. Let's say you tell Minuteman to bash a thug. He'll stay focused on that task until said thug is out of commission—even if he has to knock out all of his teammates to do it, should they get in the way (and they typically do). But once he's finished he stands stupidly in one place. Yes, that's right: heroes won't even fight back if fired upon! That is a simply inexcusable failing, in my estimation, and it makes the game far more tedious than it would be with some intelligent AI.
The enemies are barely brighter, I'm sorry to say. When you smack one of them he'll come after you. But he's not terribly flexible once his ire is aroused; i.e., you can have one fast hero (e.g., The Bullet) run up and smack all the bad guys and then run them back and forth across the map. Your other heroes can then stand off to the side and fire away with relative impunity. Should a bad guy actually lose his concentration and go after a different hero, having the fast character smack him again should do the trick. In short, the AI is kind of lame overall and the player ends up fighting it too often.
The multi-player aspect of the game seems pretty clearly to be an afterthought, and that's a crying shame. Yes, you can play against other people, but you're limited to a variant of deathmatch. FF is a game that practically cries out for cooperative play, for it would make the game tons more fun if you could play the missions with a friend. And think of all the possibilities for capture-the-flag, domination, king-of-the-hill, invasion, or other sorts of game modes. I guess we should be thankful that we do at least get deathmatch from it. That's something. It's just a pity that the developers either overlooked the other modes, or more likely didn't have the money/time in the budget.
As I've complained with other games, however, the biggest problem with the multi-player aspect of FF is a simple lack of opponents. I guess most players aren't all that interested in the deathmatch mode provided, for I've never found an opponent. Now that a friend of mine has the game, maybe he and I can try it out together one of these days. As things stand I wouldn't count on getting a lot of value out of the multi-player aspect. Maybe if the game sells well enough we might get some goodies in an expansion? I guess only time will tell.
Overall, FF is a good game. It tries to be a strategy game, but I think there are too many control issues for it to succeed in this regard. Instead the game typically devolves into an always-on-the-edge-of-disaster brawl. That's fun in its own right, of course, but it's not as good as it could have been. For fans of comic books, though, it's easily the best game in town, and for those people—you know who you are!—the game is a no-brainer must-buy. For others, I suggest trying the demo. If you can get past the quirks of the control scheme then the game will very likely be a fun, engaging, and worthwhile purchase. Here's hoping that we get an even-better sequel or at least an expansion pack.
04/10/2003