Freedom Force: Time For Someone to Get A Big Justice Sandwich.

A few months ago, I came across an article in a gaming magazine about the MMORPG called City of Heroes. (http://www.cityofheroes.com) I was excited because this looked like it be pretty cool, and the fact that the guys were the development out of pocket, and were nearly complete, meant that...*gasp!* a Superhero game might actually make it to market.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the whole superhero game curse, this has been around since about the time Hero Games released their popular, yet incredibly complicated pen & paper RPG, "Champions". Several attempts to bring Champions to the PC failed, and the last game to try was Guardians: Agents of Justice, a game developed by the guys who did X-Com. This one died, and there was a great big silence on the hero game front for a long time.

Immidiately after hearing about City of Heroes, I heard about another superhero game, Freedom Force, and this one was actually ready to ship. After playing the demo, I could tell that developer Irrational Games had put their heart and soul into this game, and they wouldn't ship a low quality product.

Plot

The plot of the game has Earth facing invasion from an unknown force. This force decides to have Earth's inhabitants fight it out for their amusement rather than just stroll in and destroy them all. They plan to do this by seeding evil groups of the population with canisters of mutagenic energy dubbed in true pulp comic style as, "Energy X".

One servant in this alien empire decides to stage a 1-man rebellion, and steals the ship loaded up with the Energy X, and makes a break for Earth to try and dole the powers out to the just among the population. His ship is shot down and the canisters get randomly seeded across the world, with a large number of them apparently landing in Patriot City, where the main hero, "Minuteman" resides.

I'll leave the description of each of the individual heroes for you to learn as the game progresses, as that's a big part of the fun.

Each of the characters will have their own animated and voiced "secret origin" and these add a lot to flavor and feel of the game, without forcing you to have interminably go through a section of the game that teaches you about your character's dark past.

General Overview

The game is, for the most part, pretty stable. I had some crash issues with it playing on my roommate's Win2K machine, but aside from that, no real difficulties.

Control is not that big of a deal. You can usually have anywhere from 1 to 4 heroes on a particular mission. The AI is particularly stupid when deciding to control your characters, and if you're not watching them, they'll actually stand there and let themselves be killed before striking back.

You can control then in typical RTS fashion, click and dragging and directing them where to go. Clicking on an item will perform the most logical action, or you can right click to get the full array of options you have.

If you've got a particularly strong character, you can pick up taxis and cop cars, and chuck them at would be evil doers. Depending on your strength and speed, you'll notice a signifcant drop in speed as you're carrying things up over your head in order to chase down people.

You can also pretty much break anything in the entire game if you were so compelled. A word of warning, though. Some items don't appear to have any gravity attached to them...like Energy X canisters. Break a building with a canister on top of it, and unless you can fly, you ain't getting it.

Graphics

While nothing to write home about, especially in the lipsyncing area, you really can't complain too much. The cityscapes do get a bit repetitive after the 4th or 5th mission, but they do a good job of trying to keep things interesting by having people pop up in different areas, or having you fight different types of enemies. Also, you may notice a fair amount of textures not getting loaded properly, as I seemed to have happen every time I went into the character editor.

Glitches

There were some minor annoyances, like your being unable to carry over extra exp from level to level. I.e. if you need 100 points to level up, you will only earn the base amount of exp for that mission. If you pick up a bunch of Energy-X capsules, you're still going to end up with 2 or 300 point, depending on whether or not you took that character along for the ride.

In another mission, you'd get bonus points if the guards were never alerted. So I went up and destroyed the guard house...and then the thugs ran to the guard house, and alerted the guards. Er? Hello! Any guard in there is dead! At the very least, the alarm doesn't work anymore.

Also, multiplayer is limited to deathmatch, which is pretty hokey. Granted a big part of playing Champions is trying to figure out which one of you can beat each other down, but honestly, that's a small portion of the game copared to the part where you actually have to work in a team environment.

If you're looking for an intellectually stimulating game, this isn't where you're going to find it. Everything in Freedom Force is linear to the extreme. You're locked in a story and that's where you're going to go. Want to take out Nuclear Winter while you have him down already? Nope. Chase down scripted fleeing enemies? Nice try. Your characters won't need any skills or anything, you'll just build them to have buff attacks.

And therein lies my biggest gripe with the game. I ended up building the supercharacter that could destroy the game with only 6000 Prestige. So, basically, at the first moment I could put my character in action, at about the 3rd mission, there was nothing in the game that would take me more than 3 hits to kill, including the evil last boss. Yes, WebMaestro and his Beatdown Transfer Protocol were just simply unstoppable. I rarely had to use my SPAM, and Dot-Bomb powers.

I didn't have any stat above 7, and the fact that you could add your powers into the character later just made it stupid to purchase them with your prestige points...because you can't buy stats later on in the game, and without any powers to buy, you can't spend any of your character's Exp on anything.

What the game makers needed to do was create a cap for the points you can create your character with at the beginning, and force you to spend the rest on building powers for use later in the game. Say you can only use 2500 Character Points max to create a character. That'd force you to come up with a much more balanced character.

Another game balance flaw comes with the fact that making your powers do elemental damage costs nothing at all, while picking up elemental resistances for your characters does. So, I can declare the simplest punch to do electrical damage for free, but if you want to be resistant against it you gotta pay.

The End...?

So, if you can resist the urge to make the character that will easily break the game, (I wasn't going to go back and reload my older saves just to not use my character, especially with the threat that the game might crash.) this'll be a game you enjoy. Give it a whirl, and you may just find yourself shouting "El Diablooooo!" everytime you smack down someone.