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Classy, stylistic, fun and great music to boot!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: December 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Most of the time, when you see a game in the bargain bin for almost nothing, it means it's either outdated or it wasn't that much fun to begin with. Of course, every once in a while, you can find a gem. Freedom Force is one of those.

Freedom Force is a team-based classic comic-book action-RPG that doesn't compromise with its audience. No corners were cut in this game. You won't see any modern slang in here, or any lame attempts at out-of-context humor. All of the dialog in this game is strictly what you would expect from a rerun of the original Batman or Superman TV show. You get as convincing a 60's comic environment as possible.

This game is brimming with style. From the moment you first start playing, you're instantly immersed in a 60's comic book world. A great amount of detail was put into each and every environment, allowing your super-heroes to manipulate and destroy the environment ... everything from skyscrapers to cars and telephone poles can be used in combat, or destroyed little by little into a pile of rubble.

Characters advance by gaining experience on missions, and learn new super powers. You can either use the ones you're given in the campaign or create and import your own using a character creator that looks like it's straight out of one of those 200 pg table-top RPG creation guides. The possiblities are almost limitless, though the creation editor allows somewhat over-powered super-heroes early in the game. You can also play this game or compete online with your friends, in multiplayer mode.

On top of the great gameplay, style, and class that Freedom Force provides, there is also a killer soundtrack. The music was composed by someone truly in-tune with the style of the game itself. I found myself humming the overtures provided in some of the final battles days after playing the game.

Although the game is a little short, and can be beaten in a week or two, it is worth playing for the incrediblely accurate dialog, style, gameplay and music. Personally, I enjoy RPG campaigns that cap off before I *want* them to cap off. Being short and sweet keeps them from becoming monotonous.

It is not hard to believe that Freedom Force was made by the same great minds who brought us the wonderful System Shock series. Irrational Games is quickly becoming one of my favorite dev teams.

A Good Game, Practically Free

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: July 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I rate this game at 3.5 stars, but since I don't have the option of saying 3.5, I'll use 3 stars. At ten bucks, it's worth trying this game out to see if you like it. That was my thought going in. I found the game to be a lot better than I expected.

The game has many innovative or semi-innovative gameplay features, that help to separate it out from the masses. The ability to recruit fighters, move from one area to another and back via the sewers, the ability to affect the enemies maneuverability, the number of possible ways to approach an objective, and others, all combine to make the game seem fresh by comparison.

The graphics are great, with the exception for character animations during gameplay (the cutscene animations are ok). During gameplay, I initially got a feeling of shooting in an arcade. But I got used to that quickly and it didn't significantly detract from the game.

The gameplay itself is great, if short. I was dissappointed when this game was over, which is an indicator of both the fun-factor and the short length of the game. Some other games, you can't wait to get through, some seem to end at just the right time.

My only real complaint about the game is in the save model. This had a big impact on the enjoyability of the game and dropped it down about half a star in my estimation (I would have given it 4 stars, rather than 3.5). Every time you move from one map to another, your game is automatically saved, but the map you just left is also repopulated with enemy. You don't have the option of saving to different files for later retrieval; you have one game, with its savepoint that you can restart from. This lack of control is unacceptible in a PC game. Twice I had bad experiences with the save model. The first time, I got part way through a map, left it to go to another map to get some explosives, and came back only to find that all the progress I had made had been lost because of the repopulation. Worse, was later in the game where I completely cleared out a level (I thought). My objective was not complete, but I couldn't figure out why, because I seemed to have done everything. After wandering around and finding nothing else to do, I went back to the rebel base and lost all my progress. I realized what I had missed, and had to repeat the entire map from scratch. During a map, you have a handful of locations you can go to and do a "quick save" and you can recall those save points, but only until you do a true save by moving between map locations. Then your quick save is lost. The simple ability to do a regular save at these points, rather than a quick save, would have made most of the save issues go away. The game limits your ability to save every 5 seconds, which I like as I think it makes for more exciting action, but the save model in this game was poorly thought out.

All in all though, I thought the game was very fun and well worth the bargain bin price. Pick up the game, figure out the save model, never leave a map unless you understand the implications of doing so, and you'll have fun.

Matching wits with villians of all shapes and sizes

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: March 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is EXCELLENT. It's not something everyone will like. But for those who can appreciate a good spoof, this game is perfect. It takes the cornball diolague of the old 60's comics and the very stylistic art and mixes it into a pause/real-time strategy game. You can fully customize and create your own heros and take that hero into multiplayer games. The customize feature is VERY open-ended, you can even edit the levels. The plot in the single player is the stuff of comics and the voice acting is perfect for the style. The game looks and FEELS like a cheesy comic...but it's so cheesy it's hilarious.

Spot on

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: March 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Well, it's clear from the demo that Freedom Force nails the look and feel of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby era of gung-ho superheros vs the red menace. The art work is spot on and the entire look and feel of the product is bright, bold, and outlined in black. The voice work is overly dramatic as it should be. If you grew up with the comics being spoofed in Freedom Force then playing the game is a joy. You really feel like you're creating the book as you go. I loved that the hero,Minute Man sarcastically refers to a thug as ' my Red friend', and that Nuclear Winters henchmen beg Lenin's forgiveness as they go down for the count. Such non-PC banter does my heart good. I can't wait for the full scale product which will allow you to create your own heros. One final thing the environment are fully usable. It's great fun to rip up a lamp post and whack a group of thugs, or throw a mailbox and nail a gun carrying thug on the roof tops. Kudos to the developement team for so fully realizing their vision. They have delivered an original and entertaining game.

Comics Live!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: May 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

A friend of mine bought this game a few months ago, and one night while over at his place, he decided to show it to me. He said he'd picked it up for cheap somewhere, and was just raving about it. At first, it looked really cheesy and kind of lame, but later I found out that Freedom Force is actually one of the most fun games I've played recently.

The actual storyline is really cheesy, but no more than the stories from the Golden Age of comic books. At one time or another, Spider Man, Superman, The Green Lantern, and Captain America have all been thrown into poor plotlines to battle a less-than-intimidating villan, and use really bad dialogue to get their point across. And let's not forget all the "Bam!", "Biff!", and "Socko!" onomonopieas saturating the artwork. Even with all this, comics survived because of their ability to create fantasy for the reader. Comics don't need to be realistic, because the reader is well aware it is fictional. With this in mind, I think the game designers decided to reproduce those elements to be comical, as to give the player a bit of a laugh at how lame the image of the comics was in those days, and how much we have evolved since then with our ability to write.

Putting that aside, the game itself is actual very clever. Your characters will be thrown into a multitude of different battlegrounds, such as the urban streets, city parks, underground tunnels, and secret labs. Much of the terrain is destroyable, so you can have some fun by bashing the sides of a building, or smashing up some guy's car. Also, certain pieces are even usable; you can lift light poles, oil barrels, and trucks up, and wield them as weapons.

The RPG genre is perfect for it, since your characters "evolve" as you play, gaining experience. After gaining levels, your characters will be able to learn new abilities, and increase their stats to better equip them to fight the baddies.

Perhaps the best feature of all is the customization of the characters. On the web, I found several private and public sites of game fans who have designed their own skins for characters, such as Marvel and DC superheroes. Also, there are a few original skins that look really nice, as well as new "meshes" of characters they couldn't normally make, like making it so you have Nightcrawler with his tail.

There are, of course, flaws with the game, as there are with any. The bad writing and voice-characterization (which is done on purpose, I realize) can get very annoying. Sometimes you just want to slap them and make them talk normal. Also, the stock characters you are given gain experience slowly, and their powers don't always catch up with the power level of the stage you're trying to get through. This means you may have to spend seven, eight, or even more tries to get through a level after getting defeated over and over again.

So, let's do a quick synapsis:

Pros: Good, colorful graphics, full-functional environments, customizable characters.

Cons: Bad dialogue, hard levels.

Overall, I'd say that it's worth the [money] I paid for it. Definitely a lot of fun, and it's online capable! So grab a copy and get ready to save the day!

Great Game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: April 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

If you are a fan of comics, and appreciate the tongue and cheek camp of comics from the 60's and 70's you'll love this game. Play as "Minute Man" defender of "Truth Justice and the American Way" or as the fiery and witty "El Diablo" or even customize your own character or join in multi-player mode with friends. This game has it all. Do not be put off by the campy voice-overs at the beginning... This game proves to be quite a fun (and addicting) experience!

Things to love about this game: The great angles... And everything in this game can be picked up, moved or destroyed. Yes you can 'leap over' buildings, scale walls and lift dumpsters! The character generation mode is quite complex and detailed allowing for many intricate character combinations.

Dislikes: My small, if only quibble with this game, is that the female characters have abnormally large heads, and that there are more 'body types' available for male characters than females characters. Also, minute man's "Dudley Do right" sounding voice, can grate on the nerves after a while.

Definitely a must for comic fans, or fans in general who enjoy campy melodramatic super hero comics! =-)

Big Dumb Fun

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: June 20, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Remember the Fantastic Four? The seriously cheezy superheroes? EA has done a great job of bringing the campy, over-the-top superheroes of the 60's and 70's to life. Everything is dead-on from the voice acting to the music. (The narrator's voicework is especially wonderfully cheesy.) Graphics are great as well. You really could create a comic book from the screenshots. Some of the missions can be tough; the final one is of the "yeah, right" variety. This is one of the few action games that I would let my kids play. The violence really is of the comic book variety (no-one dies, just gets knocked out). Some, but not a lot of replay value. A mission editor would have made this a solid 5-star game.

Behold the power of Energy X !!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: July 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The one thing that is not stressed enough about this game is just how many things you can *do*. Super powers come in all varieties. One hero can clone himself. Another throws grenades that detonate when an enemy (or friend) goes near them. Heroes can also fly, leap onto buidlings, teleport themselves, and climb the sides of buildings. Then again, other heroes can only walk, and very slowly at that.

This may be the best part of the game: it's well balanced. Things don't always go right. Your hero tosses a car toward a villain, only to have it carom off a lampost and KO an innocent civilian. It's frustrating, but pretty funny as well.

Not "Impulse"... "Instinct."

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 15, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I made this purchase purely on a whim in an out-of-town store. A true set-up for disaster. I am what we would call a "comic book geek," at least when it comes to Batman, and I feel as though this game is everything that a 1960's homage should be. The script is perfectly over-the-top. The "secret origins" made me laugh out loud. ("Hey, that's O'Connor! From the Manhattan Project!" "Damn! I've been caught!") There is plenty of Commie-bashing fun (The "Nuclear Winter" theme song also left me smiling). I couldn't be happier with this game. I'm tough to please with RPG's, because nothing ever seems to stack up to Chrono Trigger for me, but I'm completely taken by this game. I even created and imported the famed Batman, which is nothing short of awesome. Its like a Bizarro-JLA. This game is easily 5-stars, I'll be playing it until I memorize the script.

Great Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: October 06, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is great fun with a great sense of humor. It's the superhero game that Marvel and DC should have made but for whatever reason could not pull it off like these guys. It is surely the best superhero game ever made. Only catch is they should have given you a couple of different single player modes to play. After you finish the campaign mode(which is great) there is not much else other than a somewhat lacking multiplayer mode that does not give you all the options of a Starcraft. But the campaigns and heros are good enough to carry this game to a must have. One of the best things about the game that all game developers should take note of is that everything on the screen can be destroyed, moved or used.

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