Freedom Fighters

"I must be missing something."

Went into EB games recently and decided to pick up a used copy of Freedom Fighters(FF) for my GC. It was only $20 and I had heard good things about it, so I gambled on that "everyone else" was right. Well, that;s what you get for gambling. I just don't see what everyone is raving about. The FF I'm playing is a very mediocre and buggy game, and just fun enough to warrant playing it at all. I noticed it was from the producers of Hitman2, which raised questions from the start, as I hated Hitman2 with a passion. Well, let's support my argument.

Story: 8/10
I like the concept of this game's "based on a would-have-been-true story". More specifically, this game takes place in a NYC if Russia had beat the US to the H-bomb and won WWII. Russia slowly took over the world and surrounded the US. Now the invasion has begun, and it's up to you and a small, poorly supplied group of rebels to win back NYC. A good concept, something fresh in a game is always nice.

Graphics: 5/10
Nothing amazing here. Lots of bland colors and boring environments. Nothing looks real or jumps out at you. Everything looks like it was smeared with gray. I also noticed that white lines sometimes appear in the middle of walls. Occasionally a pure white flash appears on the screen, as in the entire screen turns white for a split second. For a later-gen GC game, this is not very good.

Sound: 8/10
This is easily the best category of the game. There are some good songs that fit the game very well. However, this is dragged down by extremely generic gun sounds. Every gun sounds virtually the same. It sounds like the producers took one sound, and distorted it a little for each gun. For a game that relies so heavily on shooting, this is a problem.

Gameplay: 4/10
As stated before, FF relies heavily on shooting and killing the Russians. Problem is, that's ALL you do. Start a level from the rebel base in the sewer, run-and-gun through a VERY linear stage, complete objective(usually save person X or destroy this), place flag, rinse and repeat. It gets annoying after a while. Gunplay is decent, but not strong like it should be in a game like this. It seems like IO tried to make an auto-aim feature, but only did half and threw it in as an afterthought. Your character will only auto-aim at people directly in front of him. An enemy can be right next to you, and he will shoot off into nowhere, while you get shot numerous times. So if you want to aim with any precision at all, you need to enter "aim mode" by holding down the left trigger. This goes into 1st person view with an aiming reticle on the screen. However, you cannot move while in this mode, and the reticle moves painfully slow, taking several seconds to move across the screen. The only other way to shoot is to turn your character to face the enemy, and even then you still miss a lot.

The camera. The bane of 3rd person games. An obstacle many have tackled, but few have pulled off. Sadly, this game has one of the worst cameras I have experienced. IO figured that if there was NO camera, there can't be anything wrong. Right? Wrong again. The camera is fixed to one view facing your character's back. It simply follows your character's back at all times. It never moves on it own or to allow you to better see the level. So you are constantly fiddling with the c-stick to swing it around so you can actually see what you are doing. This is probably my biggest complaint of the game, the absolutely abysmal camera.

This is a squad-based combat game, at least that aspect is pulled off alright. You can give 3 commands, attack, defend, or follow, which are all self-explanatory. The partner AI is decent, but could have been better. As you play, you can gain charisma points by doing good deeds, such as helping fellow members are completing objectives. Once you get 100 points, you can recruit one new member to your party. A good idea, but it has been done better in other games.

There are 4 difficulty settings: Demonstrator(easy), Rebel(normal), Freedom Fighter(default setting, hard), and something else above FF, I can't remember.

Control: 3/10
As said above, the camera is absolutely horrible. You have to constantly fight its command to center on your back with the c-stick. If this was better, the game would be leaps and bounds better, because then you could actually see who's shooting at you and where the enemies are to shoot at. This ties in with the poor gunplay. For a game that relies, no, revolves around shooting, a weak and buggy system just won't do.

Other than the camera and shooting controls, the rest of the game plays easily enough. Controls are pretty basic: left stick moves the character, A is action/select button, and oddly Z is the inventory. No big issues there. Another trademark of a rushed game is that you have to use the pad on the menus.

Buy/Rent/Don't bother: Rent
I made the mistake of buying this game, but I'm only out $20. There just isn't enough here to keep you interested for more than a few hours. If you are into shooting/squad games(check out Rainbow 6 3, very good game), give it a rent, to everyone else, just pass this one up.

Bottom Line: You know that feeling you get when you use things from the dollar store? That really cheap and low-quality product that just barely does its job? That's kinds what you think when you play this game. Between the bad camera, the glitchy auto-aim, poor shooting and buggy graphics, balanced out by a good soundtrack, decent AI, and interesting story, you get a very mediocre game. Time to eject this game and pop RE4 back in and have fun on my GC instead of trudging through this mess. Like I said, I must be missing something. Is there a "good game" option that I forgot to turn on?
I'm sorry, but I just can't recommend this game to really anyone.

Final Score(not an average)- 5/10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/07/05