Freedom Force Review

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Freedom Force

Review by Mike PhillipsJune 2002

Are you the sort who channel-surfs past CNN in order to watch the Justice League on Cartoon Network? Still have your Marvel comics stored in the closet? Seen the Spiderman movie more than once? Then you’ve already played Freedom Force and are far more enlightened than me.

I had serious trepidation over buying Freedom Force—even the box looked like it should reside next to Spongebob Squarepants: Operation Krabby Patty. Freedom Force is a comic book–styled superhero game, for heaven’s sake. It would surely be fun for kids to play, but no well-adjusted adult should give it a second glance.  I loved comic books as a youth, but I also had a fascination over staging battles with my GI Joe dolls, and both are a distant memory now. Okay, maybe on rainy days when I can’t play outside, I do get out the GI Joe dolls, but that’s not my point.

Eventually I caved and purchased Freedom Force, fully expecting to give it a brief glance before throwing it on my “I’ll finish it when Hell freezes over shelf” … right next to Jekyll & Hyde. What I got is easily the best game I’ve played in quite some time. Freedom Force is fun, period! For anyone who suffers from my antiquated ways of thinking, get over it and buy this game already. Irrational Games has crafted something that will appeal to everyone, and as a bonus it just oozes polish—it’s the little things that will lift this title into classic status long before it disappears from store shelves.

Installing the game gives you an idea what a treat you are in for.  Several comic book covers are displayed featuring the heroes and villains that you will be meeting while playing the game. The covers have an aged, read look to them, a fantastic touch. The people behind this game thought of everything.

The opening intro provides an explanation of how Frank Stiles, an average citizen of Patriot City who was working on the Manhattan Project long ago, gains his super powers. An alien ship drops several canisters of Energy-X on the city … because Lord Dominion wanted to rule the Earth … and, well, Mentor kind of foiled his insidious plan by … then the evil Mr. Mechanical enters the picture …  but then the Timemaster runs amok … Forget about it, I’m not going to spoil the story. The plot is very well conceived even though a tad bizarre, as it should be considering the nature of the game.

The graphics aren’t anything special, but in no way am I implying they’ve been beaten with an ugly stick. We’re talking comic books here, folks—they don’t have to be cutting-edge. If you are expecting bump-mapping, cell shading, or even trilinear filtering, you won’t find it. What you will find is a very crisp, detailed, alive, 3D world with automobiles and citizens going about everyday activities.

Virtually everything can be interacted with in some fashion; buildings can be destroyed if you so fancy. Every citizen will reply to you, although in most cases only a few offer any valuable information beyond a scant canned sentence or two. Objects such as cars, mailboxes, traffic lights, street lamps, etc., can be thrown or wielded as weapons against foes. Pedestrians often cross streets in front of speeding cars, and obviously that’s a bad thing. Again, the attention to details elevates this title to something special.

Cutscenes are something to be Marveled over (pardon the pun). These cutscenes are comic books in action. When a new superhero is introduced in a mission, at the end you are treated to vignette as to how he or she acquired his/her powers, how those Energy-X canisters affected his/her life. The legendary Jack Kirby obviously played a major role in the inspiration for this game, and I’m sure he would be proud of the effort.

Sound is where Freedom Force really shines. The voice acting is some of the best I’ve ever encountered in a game. The cast members accepted their roles with an incredible degree of professionalism, as campy and over-the-top as the roles were. This group grabbed their parts and ran with them; they lived them—how refreshing in a computer game. I’m compelled to mention the narrator by name, Ian Vogel. If one conducted a nationwide search for someone to fill the narrator role, I doubt if anyone could pull it off with more aplomb than Mr. Vogel.

The music is also something that can’t be described in printed word. Each level has its own score, and the music is mostly sung, with a baritone, foreboding chorus. How someone could sing “Nuclear Winter” as if it were going to be a Grammy contender is beyond me, but they did it, giving another aspect of the game a polished, finished feel.

The game is played from a rather indescribable perspective. In most instances the game world is viewed from something resembling a 75-degree isometric view, until you zoom the camera in; then it’s more of a standard third-person, over-the-shoulder view. The camera control definitely takes a while to get used to, but I can’t think of a way it could have been handled any better. When viewing the game map from a distance, buildings, trees, etc., get in the way of the action. Quite often, in order to fight an enemy you have to zoom in and get up close and personal. Using a scroll wheel mouse is the best way to accomplish this. When you zoom in, said obstacles become transparent so you can view the action transpiring behind them. It’s very disorienting at first, yet with a little practice it becomes effortless.

Undoubtedly everyone who plays Freedom Force will have a favorite character. Mine happened to be Man o’War, not because he was the best to go into battle with (he was a useless laddie), but rather because of the outrageous remarks he makes. Stephen Russell (who provides several voices in the game) does a Sean Connery impersonation that is hilarious. I often found myself pausing the game, hoping to regain some semblance of composure before I continued playing.  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Mr. Connery should embellish the work of Stephen for all it’s worth.

Humor is a very subjective matter, but if you happen to get some chuckles while watching Batman (no, not those recent imposters—I’m talking about Adam West, the Batman), you’ll be doubled over while playing Freedom Force. The dialog and plot give new meaning to tongue in cheek.

Ah, the gameplay, you ask. Irrational Games refers to it as a tactical RPG, and, well, it is, sort of. By no means is it your standard Dungeons and Dragons kind of RPG, although the basic structure is present, in a limited fashion. Before starting a mission you have to choose your party (squad, team, or whatever name you prefer).  Each mission has both primary and secondary objective(s). The secondary objective(s) are optional—they are there for you to gain prestige points, which in turn can be used to recruit new members to the FF fold. Primary objectives must be completed in order to advance, and depending on your success rate these determine how many experience points are gained. Experience points are used to “level up” team members upon completion of a mission.

During missions, there are various Energy-X canisters lying about.  The flavors include power, health, experience, and prestige. It’s a good plan to search the entire game map for these canisters before completion of the primary objective. A side note: the game’s initialization file can be easily edited to add bonus characters, change the zoom factor (which I highly recommend), or enable the console so cheat codes can be used if necessary.

Does it seem complex? It is, but the first level of the game serves as a tutorial, replete with an explanation of most aspects provided by Mr. Vogel. Beyond that, mouseovers are used to give a text explanation on options screens. A thorough reading of the manual is imperative to understand the finer points of the game, such as creating a custom character. Speaking of which, the manual is a sixty-page document that covers everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask about Freedom Force. It would have been further icing on the cake if the manual had been printed in color, but I’m just being nitpicky.

The good news for point-and-click fans is that the game can be played using only the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts make things much easier, but they aren’t needed.

If multiplayer is your thing, it works flawlessly out of the box.  You choose your characters and have at it with other gamers on differing maps. Hosting a game couldn’t be any easier, or if you want to join a game, meeting other players can be accomplished using GameSpy Arcade, which is included on the disc. I must confess that I’m not a multiplayer lover, but this game has me warming up to the concept.

Want skins, meshes, wallpaper, or have a question about the game?  A game-dedicated forum can be found here if you need tech support, strategy advice, or just want to offer an opinion. Feel the need to do a little modding? An editor is available for download here.  Tutorials are available to ensure designing your own levels is as painless as it can be.

Further good news from Irrational Games: Freedom Force is designed to be a trilogy. While this game takes place in the early 60s (the Silver Age of superhero comics), the sequels will traverse the 70s to present day, offering much “grittier” subject matter. An expansion pack is also being considered.

Of course I have some complaints—my inherent desire to whine.  The save game utility is the most confusing I’ve ever seen. There is a quick-save/quick-load option that works fine. But your hard saves are stored alphabetically—no thumbnails, no date and time, just alphabetically. It makes figuring out where you left off quite a chore; I’d love to know why the programmers did this.  It’s a very disturbing flaw in an otherwise excellent game.

The traditional methods of adhering to particular characters and leveling up as quickly as possible don’t work well. You may find your favorite characters unavailable for some missions, and doing battle with weak characters can result in restarting the game from scratch. Not much of a complaint, but I’m trying my hardest to find anything to bitch about.

Odd tech bits and stuff: For whatever reason FF was a bit unstable (a few random crashes) for me while playing it under 98SE.  On the same system with the same drivers, ME handled it with no problems. I also briefly played it under 2K, and it ran smoothly with no problems.

In an age where you thought everything has been done before, along comes Freedom Force, shattering genre lines, daring to do something different, and instilling fun for all ages into a game—you can’t ask for anything more. Grab a copy now, because it just doesn’t get any better than this. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Irrational Games Publisher: Electronic Arts; Crave Entertainment Release Date: March 2002

Available for: Windows

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Windows XP/Me/2000/98 (Windows 95 and Windows NT not supported) 300 MHz Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-2 processor (600 MHz or faster Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor recommended) 96 MB RAM (128 MB or more recommended) 4X CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive (16X recommended) 31 MB free hard disk space 16 MB Direct3D capable video card (32 MB recommended) DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card (Environmental Audio capable sound card recommended) Keyboard Mouse

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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