Imagine waking up one morning to find that all the precious freedoms you Americans take for granted have suddenly vanished. Imagine an oppressive jack-booted presence scrutinizing your every move. Imagine if Senator Joseph McCarthy wasn’t full of crap. In short, imagine what the world would have been like if the Soviet Union ended up being a practical and, dare I say it, effective experiment.
Freedom Fighters is an unapologetically “Woo hoo! Stars and stripes, baby!” -themed story that follows the travails of Chris, an everyman New York plumber who finds himself in the midst of a bizarre situation in which he must survive or perish – sort of like Super Mario Bros. without the mushrooms or giant turtles. More specifically, the Soviet Union somehow managed to slip nuclear subs and their entire freaking army under the ever-vigilant American defense system.
Before you know it, the Reds have taken up residence in the Big Apple, the propaganda flies like hummus at an Israeli food fight, and decent, hardworking New Yorkers are feeling the commie burn.
So far it sounds typically EA, right? You’re more or less right on the money if you answered “yes” – it’s patriotic, and it’s full of gun-blasting action. FF wouldn’t have merited the score it did, however, if there wasn’t some redeeming factor beyond the satisfaction of widowing a legion of women in St. Petersburg (or I guess it’d still be Leningrad, you know, if the USSR didn’t crumble like dry feta cheese).
To aid you in your widowing, you can take on up to 12 AI-controlled squad mates. It is here that Freedom Force absolutely shines – the AI is some of the sharpest I’ve seen to date. Once you “hire” your teammates (the number of which is determined by your charisma, which in turn is raised by performing acts of heroism which range from healing a sick person to destroying an important structure to raising an American flag over certain key points), they’ll be loyal rottweilers. Once an enemy comes in range, your team will spring to attack, diving for cover, providing covering fire, and basically making war like they’ve got a modicum of grey matter, all on their own.
If you prefer to take a more personal touch, you can issue commands to your team – these commands are limited to Attack, Defend, and Follow, but this is more than sufficient, since, with these basic guidelines, your team will perform as best they can. You can issue commands to each individual under your command by pressing the appropriate button (you can also use the first-person targeting mode to target a specific enemy unit or area), or as a group by holding the button. The whole process is very streamlined and intuitive, and the AI is of such a calibre that, in the early levels, you can simply sit back and let your little squad of Freedom Fighters do the work for you.
The level design is also rife with original touches. The game moves in stages, i.e. certain areas or campaigns in New York. Each stage consists of several smaller levels, and each level contains certain objectives. Every level within a stage affects every other – for instance, destroying a bridge in one area will reduce the number of enemy soldiers in the others, because their avenue of transport was cut off. Destroy a helipad and you can kiss those destructive helicopter attacks goodbye. This adds a very slight degree of strategy to your level selections, provided that you want to make the skirmishes a little easier on yourself.
Once you’ve selected your level, it’s time to fight. There is nothing noteworthy here – it’s your average third-person shooter with your averagely vague auto-aim, numerous weapons, and lots of baddies to ventilate. Certain levels offer numerous avenues of attack, for instance, you can choose to run a gauntlet of tripod-mounted machine guns, or climb a ruined building with a sniper rifle and pick off the gunners in relative safety. You can direct your squad to attack certain key areas while you provide covering fire. You can lob grenades until there are no more signs of movement. While the strategy is hardly on a par with, say, playing chess against Anatoly Karpov, it keeps things tolerably interesting.
The audio is decent enough, with clear, crisp sounds, some fitting Russian-sounding anthems (akin to the theme from”The Hunt for Red October”), and some fairly good voice acting. Actually, the voice acting is a notch above the garbage dribbling out of certain brand-new games – the delivery is enthusiastic without being overblown, and helps to drive the minimal story along. The audio turned out to be the superior of the two aesthetic qualities.
Truth be told, I was disappointed with the graphics. The character models are pretty wooden and unappealing, and the environments leave a great deal to be desired – I recently played Crimson Skies, the environments in which are lush, well-drawn, and a joy to look at, and then I came back to Freedom Fighters and it was like going from a Jackson Pollock to a crayon scribble (i.e. a $15 million mess to a “aw, look at the four year old trying” mess)… or something – I’m a writer, not an art scholar. Cut me some slack.
There’s also a multiplayer component to the game which consists essentially of basic deathmatches in which teams race to raise a flag in one of the whopping three multiplayer maps. I got sort of confused and bored, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with the multiplayer. Unfortunately, the multiplayer was the only thing that had the potential to keep me coming back to this game.
Freedom Fighters is a solid enough effort from EA Games. The squad-based AI is definitely worth a look, and despite all the flag-waving, the game manages to tell an involving story. It’s a shame that more effort wasn’t put into the graphics, or more variation wasn’t put into the gameplay – I would have enjoyed cruising around in a “borrowed” Soviet tank, for instance. I picked my copy up in the bargain bin, so if you can find a used copy or can rent it, then by all means do so – after all, where will you be when the revolution comes?
… Okay, that was lame.
