Freedom Fighters

"Simply amazing."

First off, despite what everyone says about the Xbox version crashing/freezing up/glitching out, I bought it anyway.. And let me say it has been nothing but a pleasurable gaming experience since my purchase.

On with the review...

Story - 8/10

Russia and Britain decides to invade America for whatever reason and are setting up shop in New York City. You happen to be a plumber in New York, and soon your plumbing job becomes a thing of the past... And you take on the role of ''Freedom Fighter''.

Graphics - 10/10

GREAT graphics on this game... nothing really more to say. Animations are smooth, gunfire looks realistic, and it shows they spent plenty of time buttering this baby up.

Sound - 10/10

Easily THE best game soundtrack I've ever heard. The music is random and is far superior to any other game. It sounds like eerie Christmas music... The gameplay sounds such as guns and grenades are perfect... Realism is the name of the game in Freedom Fighters.

Controls - 7/10

The only drawback to Freedom Fighters has to be the controls. I thought the aiming was very difficult until I figured out you don't really have to manually aim... It controls very similar to Halo, but not as intuitive.

Gameplay - 10/10

First off, I HATE SQUAD BASED COMBAT! But honestly, you can go through this whole game without directing one soldier to do something. Although it is very easy to direct them on what to do. The ''X'' button makes your fellow soldiers ''hold back and follow''. The ''Y'' button makes them ''seek and destroy'' (the cool part about this is you can manually aim at someone and press ''Y'' and they'll go kill that person for you :) ). And the ''B'' button makes them ''defend this area''. To get people to join you in your fight, you have to build up your ''charisma'' points. You do this by doing random acts of kindness (i.e. rescuing innocents, healing wounded people etc.). Once you gain a charisma level, you can hire on a new person to fight with you. You start off every mission in the ''Rebel Base'' which is just an underground hide-out from the Russians. You look at your map and choose which area (mission) you'd like to go to. From then on it's just kill or be killed... Duck behind cars, throw grenades, run and gun, send your buddies in to kill, or do all the killing yourself...

Multiplayer - 7/10

This is OK for multiplayer, but what sucks is there's NO CO-OP!! You'd think a game of this genre and caliber would have co-op... but nooooo... All you can do in multiplayer is a capture the flag type game. Boooo!! This doesn't really matter because the single player is what really shines.

Overall - 9/10

The controls and no multiplayer co-op are the only things bringing this game down. I still love it, and recommend an immediate purchase for anyone who likes war type games.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/14/03