With the recent release of Champions Online there’s the palatable taste in the air of tightly clinging spandex suits. Though I’ve always been one for spandex and the generous support it provides, I simply don’t have the time needed to invest in an MMO. So where am I meant to go? Where can I get my cheesy superhero gaming fix? I needed to venture along the 4th dimension and travel back in time to the year 2002. That is now shockingly 7 years ago, a fact I had to re-check as I still forget it’s not 2000. Yup, seems we’re in 2009. Fuck. So why did I travel back all that way? As my memory nudged me to pick up and try a game that piqued my curiosity at the time; Freedom Force.
Freedom Force is almost a turn-based game masquerading as an instant action click-em-up, all with lovingly eccentric superheroes bandying about. I say this as it can be somewhat misleading in terms of how it plays. Recent games like Mass Effect can be forgiving if all you want to do is play on the fly, with the pausing and issuing orders only necessary for the harder difficulties and certain situations. With FF, you can perhaps last a few levels trying to play it outside of the pause menu. Theoretically it should be possible, as there’s a mini pause system where you right click to bring up your character’s abilities and can supercharge or undercharge the powers. In practice though you quickly lose track of your heroes, which proves fatal all too easily.
Invincible protagonists seem a trope of the superhero mainstream genre (and indeed increasingly games in general), so the frailty of Freedom Forces’ zeros turned heroes can come as a nasty shock. Used to your recharging health bars? Nope, none here. A healer frantically patching up your wounds in battle? Guess again. Bloodshot eyes the only mild indication of major bullet mutilation that can be casually blinked away? If only this game was as simple as real life. Each hero starts off with one cure that they can use only on themselves to restore health per mission, gaining perhaps a few more uses as their level increases. This leads to every minor skirmish needing careful pause menu planning, as it’s not possible to recharge health and those little grazes soon add up to heart failure.
The create a hero options will also sadly disappoint everyone trotting merrily along from Champions, as you have to choose one of the game’s preset character models rather than assaulting sliders with vigour to create a midget scientist. A nifty feature though is that you are able to buy your custom made hero in the main game and include them in your band of four. Though it is bizarre when you create your hero with an enemy character model to come up against that enemy yourself. Idiot as I am, in at least more than one battle I occasionally shot my custom hero Gunny McJim with a fireball when I wasn’t paying attention to what the target name was. Sorry Jim.
As I’ve touched upon so far, the combat in this game is a tad on the unforgiving side. Sometimes this is intentionally imposed limitations or difficulties, others just plain annoyances. For instance, when sending multiple heroes in to punch one foe they don’t automatically stand in a place they can all hit the damn enemy. Instead you have to manually click a little to the side of who you’re targeting with one hero then click to attack when they’re in position, in order to prevent all but one of your team standing around helpfully spooning during combat. Another frustration I want to air is the lack of auto-react, which makes live action fighting impossible. I thought normal reactions to getting punched might be to block or punch back at least, but in the Freedom Force Academy these reactions are overridden with rigorous training to stand around gawping. It turns the fighting to about 1/3 tactics based, 2/3 mastery of chaos theory and putting up with inappropriate misses and silly AI on both sides.
It’s a shame, as the style and setting ontop of all this frustration and difficulty is lovely and well-defined. When attacks do connect the game provides satisfyingly cheesy POW BAM OUCH bubbles that Adam West would be proud of, and this cheesy 60′s comic book nature is carried over everywhere. Bombastically voiced characters and superbly over the top designs help lend to this cheery silly feel along with the intermission cutscenes presented in comic book panel style.
Still, I have to think I’m judging a seven year old game here, one made by the esteemed Irrational Games. If you have to scratch your head to think who they are they’ve made the following; System Shock 2, Tribes: Vengeance, SWAT 4 and Bioshock. So there’s a fair pedigree behind this game too. After I got over the limitations and perhaps my own expectations, I did start to have some fun with Freedom Force. I can’t think of another game quite like it before or since, as the closest I can get is X-COM but not quite turn based and with super heroes. It hasn’t aged as badly as others games from the era; another masterful game from just a year before that I played recently was Max Payne 1, and I was shocked by how badly it stood up to modern standards. I can’t help but feel that this game to some will be a joy, as that minute action juggling does have an audience. However it may just be me, but the constant need to stop start and manage feels like a slogging chore, detracting from the fun and zany characterisation and POW sound effects.
Freedom Force then wants to be an accessible friendly game yet falls short. It has a brilliantly vivid style but ends up being far too harsh and demanding in terms of micromanagement in a way that only serves to obscure the fun. In terms of aging it manages to still be a pleasant experience but not amazing. For most this is probably a definite miss nowadays, no matter how much you have those superhero MMO subscription fee blues. Or just turn broody and go play Batman when it comes out on PC, as you should be planning on doing anyway.
