| Game Reviews From a Parental Perspective! | |
|
|
|
| Home | Forums | Review Archive | Columns | Feature Articles |
|
Home >
Review Archive >
Video Games
> Results: Freedom Force
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us Scroll down for our Kid Factor. 
The World's Greatest Comic Book Game
ﾓFor Liberty!ﾔ ﾖ Freedom Force liberates the role-playing game from the chains of fantasy and the strategy game from the stranglehold of post-apocalyptic sci-fi. ﾓFor Freedom!ﾔ ﾖ Freedom Force leaves the player free to choose their own heroes, their own powers, and lets them toss a car at nefarious and cleverly named super villains. ﾓFor Justice!ﾔ ﾖ Freedom Force does justice to the love millions of true believers hold for the super-corny conventions, quirks, clich￩s, and characters of Silver Age comic book heroes. Itﾒs a clever homage to the super hero comics of the ﾑ60ﾒs lovingly wrapped around a solid tactical strategy game. Itﾒs fantastic, amazing, incredible, and above all, itﾒs charming, even for people who didnﾒt grow up reading comic books.  Secret Origins Like a sixties era comic book by Lee and Kirby circa 1962, Freedom Force hangs on the thinnest and most illogical of plots. An alien race seeks to destroy humanity by dousing its criminals with Energy X, a mutagen that causes super powers in human beings. The idea is that the resultant super-villains will tear the Earth apart, facilitating an alien invasion of epic proportions. But one brave alien throws a cosmic wrench into this plan and escapes with enough Energy X to grant origin stories to a handful of Earthﾒs finest citizens. Irrationalﾒs clever crew of creators touch upon every comic book clich￩ imaginable. Thereﾒs the patriotic hero (Minute Man), the lothario (El Diablo), the headstrong teen sidekick (Liberty Lad), the aquatic hero (Man Oﾒ War), the alien trapped on Earth (Mentor), the mystic (Alche-Miss), the brooding hulk cursed by the very powers that make him exceptional (Man-Bot), and thatﾒs only about half the heroes available in the single player campaign. Heroes enter the story in the contrived way heroes always meet in comic books: they fight. Then they become fast friends and team up against the bad guys. The love Irrational Games holds for the medium is in every line of code and every cleverly packaged clich￩. From the cleverly named villainsﾗlike Nuclear Winter, Pinstripe the gangster, the mysterious Shadow, Mr. Mechanical, Deja-Vu, and many moreﾗto the bizarre perils the team faces: giant ants, marauding robots, commies, dinosaurs, aliens, and mythological gods gone mad. Anyone whoﾒs ever immersed themselves in Silver Age comics, or reprints of them, will instantly feel at home here. Even non-fans will ﾑgrokﾒ the references anyway, because theyﾒre so firmly entrenched in our culture. In spite of all the cheesiness, Irrational plays it straight and with ample respect. Freedom Force is not a parody; itﾒs a mushy love letter to Stan Leeﾒs hyperbolic prose and Jack Kirbyﾒs superhumanly dynamic poses.  Sequential Real-Time Art Fortunately Freedom Forcesﾒs graphics engine is more than up to the task of rendering such heroism. With eye-popping colors and enough polygons per character to ensure our heroes and villains strike poses reminiscent of the source material. Special effects like El Diabloﾒs fire bolts, or Man ﾑO Warﾒs electrical attacks look perfect, and buildings crumble into pieces when struck. Characters dodge, punch, fly, lift and toss objects, with fluid animation and impressive physics. Toss a car down the street and it might snap light poles like twigs (which your heroes can use as bats) and slam into a building. When heroes they get struck, they fly through the air like rag dolls with damage indicators and word balloons like ﾑBiffﾒ, ﾑBamﾒ, ﾑKarroomﾒ, and my favorite, ﾑVerrangﾒ, to emphasize the action. The camera view can be spun, tilted, and the action is viewable from any angle. The gameﾒs many environments look fantastic, from the streets of Patriot city, to super-villain lairs, to tunnels deep within the Earth. The game features two kinds of cutscenes, those using the game engine itself and ﾑoriginﾒ stories using single frame animation. The origin stories in particular are brilliant, featuring amusing bits of animation, fitting musical stings, and hilariously bad dialogue. The audio is clean and extremely clever, especially in terms of its variety. From the Russian ﾓNuclear Winterﾔ dirge, to the psychedelic carnival music played when facing D￩j￠ Vu. The writing is bad, but itﾒs Stan Lee bad, so thatﾒs all right. The voice acting is often intentionally bad and each voice actor does a perfect job emphasizing the wrong words to comic effect, yet avoiding the self-parody that could knock the whole atmosphere for a loop.  The Gameﾒs The Thing All the comic book cleverness in the world wouldnﾒt make up for a bad game beneath and thankfully Freedom Force is also a remarkably solid strategy game in its own right. It uses a pauseable real-time engine and a menu driven interface to great effect. Itﾒs easy to pause the game, assign orders, and then unpause to watch the action. One useful feature is that you can set the pause to slow motion instead. You can set it from a still-too-quick half-speed to an almost frozen one-sixteenth speed. The only problem with the combat system is the characters donﾒt choose new targets, or change to more appropriate powers, on their own. If you assign Man-Bot to wallop a gangster on one side of the map, and Liberty Lad to toss a stun grenade at a thug on the other, youﾒre going to have to pause and reassign orders every time they defeat their current enemy, even if another thug is pumping the Man-Bot full of lead. This gets hectic when youﾒre multitasking several heroes at once, and you can control up to four on some maps. A linear series of missions forms Freedom Forceﾒs campaign. It ranges from linked ﾓmulti-issueﾔ missions (with their own vintage and worn covers) to one-shot missions focusing on a particular character or two, cleverly aping the way comic stories are told. During the campaign characters grow and change by gaining experience, and you can choose how they develop by placing Character Points into their powers and abilities. The result is that, by the end of the game your El Diablo will be different than mine. Success in your missions gives you Prestige Points, which let you recruit in-game optional characters or custom heroes youﾒve created or downloaded from the Internet. Creating heroes is easy and already you can download skins and ﾑrecipesﾒ for your favorite licensed heroes from various fan sites. Just bear in mind that a character like Superman will be prohibitively expensive to buy with your Prestige Points in the game.  ﾑNuff Said? Freedom Force is still the super hero game fans have been wishing for all these years. Itﾒs a terrific game and it brings with it a child-like sense of nostalgia kids will respond to and kids-at-heart will eat up. Like any good comic book, it also makes you hungry for the next issue and leaves all kinds of unanswered questions. Questions like: What will happen to Freedom Force next? What will Irrational do next? Why didnﾒt anyone else think of this first? What Super-Hero game curse? Freedom Force is rated T-Teen by the ESRB because of "Violence." What they really mean is that the game has guns in it. Some heroes and most thugs use guns in the game and the ESRB has drawn a line to make games like this T-Teen by default. That's not fair because this is a perfect game for kids. Vibrant, funny, colorful, inoffensive, violent (in a 60's comic book way), and it will subversively teach kids how to play a strategy game. The story is rich, it's based on material kids have been reading since the 1930's, and there's really nothing here that'll harm even the most impressionable child. The game is about heroism and the violence isn't shocking, it's about being a superhero. The game also goes to great lengths to discourage irresponsible violence by punishing players for destroying buildings, objects, or harming civilians. The super group gets less prestige if those lines are crossed. Suitable for 10+ to play alone but also suited for 7+ to play with mom, dad, or an older sibling. This review reprinted with permission from Computer Games Magazine 
This is a perfect game for kids. Vibrant, funny, colorful, inoffensive, violent (in a 60's comic book way), and it will subversively teach kids how to play a strategy game.
Kid Factor by Andrew Bub
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Freedom Force |
Read the GamerDad 2007 Holiday Guide!
|
Please Note: GamerDad is not intended to be read by anyone under 18. We stay clean, but be warned! Content Management System developed by Redbird Solutions. |
