Freedom Fighters

"Brilliant but short ..."

Introduction
Freedom Fighters is a new third person shooter/tactics game published by EA and developed by Io Interactive. It takes place in an alternate history where Russia drops the first nuclear bomb during WWII and then proceeds to conquer the globe.

The game starts out in New York City, under invasion by Soviet forces. The first ''stage'' is a brilliant blend of tutorial and story that gets you up to speed on use of the controls, moving around, doing things.

After the first ''tutorial'' you continue as a ''freedom fighter'', liberating sections of New York City from Soviet rule.

Graphics
Nothing mind blowing, but good enough with dynamic lighting, rag-doll physics, etc. to not be a distraction. As it's a multi-platform game, you sort of get the multi-platform graphics. The textures are extremely well done, though, but the characters could have been slightly higher resolution and some of the Xbox's features could have been put to great use here (bump mapping, reflection, etc).

Gameplay
The game has a superficial resemblance to Brute Force. You control ''Chris'', the freedom fighter, but as you progress through the game, you can enlist up to 12 other freedom fighters to join you. You can control the fighters by sending them towards a target, defend a particular position or rally back to you. It's a fantastic feeling to sit in a machine gun nest giving covering fire to your squad as you order them to take out a squad of Russian fighters.

Control is pretty tight and intuitive, although I would have liked an option to assign a button to a secondary weapon like a grenade or molotov cocktail. Movement is similar to halo, where you use both thumbsticks; one to look, the other to move/strafe.

There isn't a wild variety of weapons available, you'll end up using the AK-47 for most missions because it's the easiest to get ammo for. However, there are sub-machine guns, machine guns, rocket launchers and sniper rifles. Not to mention grenades, molotov cocktails, a wrench and C4 explosives.

Story
The story is a little silly and far-fetched, slightly xenophobic, but fun and funny at the same time.

The missions are extremely well-designed and require you to shuttle around locations to get the equipment you require, or to blow something up so that something at another location stops working, etc.

The cut scenes are well done and use the in-game engine for rendering. The dialog is pretty good and the voice acting is a cut above the usual.

Play Time/Replayability
My only real major complaint is that the game is way too short. I was able to finish the game in just under 10 hours of play. I'm certainly hoping this is one area they extend upon in a sequel (and there better be one!!!)

Replayability is pretty limited, because even with harder enemy A.I. you already know the correct things to do, what order to do them in, where to stay out of, etc. so it loses the excitement of the first go around.

Multiplayer
I try to stick to games that my girlfriend and I can play together, so games with deathmatch/CTF/etc. really don't do much for me. Multiplayer in Freedom Fighters is basically capture the flag where each player controls a squad of troops and tries to keep their flag raised. I could see this being a good deal of fun with someone who knew how to play the game, but, in general, it feels a little tacked on.

My other beef is that this game would have been absolutely brilliant with a coop story mode. Here's hoping that makes it into the sequel.

This would also be another good game to get the Live! treatment.

Closing
This game is close to a 10, but it's so short it's hard to justify purchasing it, which is unfortunate. Just a few more levels to the game would have made it a must-have purchase, but I can only recommend this as a must rent.

Graphics: 8
Gameplay: 10
Length: 6
Story: 8
Multiplayer: 6

Overall: 8

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/07/03