Freedom Fighters

"One of the best squad-based games"

This game is a great buy. Anyone who is longing to find a tactical squad-based game that isn't impossible will find it here.

You are plumber named Christopher Stone. Chris is a middle-aged humble man when the Russian communists invade his home in Manhattan, NYC. It is his job to wake up the people of the United States and push the Soviets back to Russia!

This game runs at a nice pace, it lets you ease into the game. You start out with only 2 men by your side. To get more though, you have to earn charisma points by completing objectives, healing innocents, and capturing strongholds. This game brilliantly blends game play with storyline and cut scenes. The downside is that the game is short, when playing it on easy you'll beat it in 2 or 3 days. But if you play it on hard you'll be sure to be hooked on this game for many weeks.

The easy-to-use squad commands really make this game great. The three squad commands are attack, defend, and regroup. The regroup command tells your soldiers to come back to you. But luckily IO was smart enough to not only make them come back to you but also fire at the enemy while they run back to you. The defend command makes your men defend the place you're standing by taking cover near your position and firing at any enemy soldier that comes by. The attack command makes your men go to whatever you’re looking at and kill all the enemy soldiers that are near that position. Another smart thing that IO did was put in a look-and-command system. When you look at something though the aiming system and give a command, they'll go to that particular spot and carry out the command.

The AI in this game is absolutely superb, you will almost never find a guy trying to run though a wall or jump off a building. If there is a mounted machine gun near, they'll take hold of it and say things like, ''Say hello to my little friend!''. If there's a wall near by they'll take cover behind it and pear out to take a shot at the enemy. The enemy AI is smart too though, depending on what difficulty setting you play the game on. If you play the game on the easiest setting then hordes of enemies will be stupid enough to run head on against a mounted machine gun your using. But if you’re playing on one of the harder difficulties, the enemy is smart enough to know that they should wait for you to attack them. Also, the enemy, no matter what difficulty setting your playing on can go anywhere on the map. If you're sniping from a building they'll send a couple of scouts to flush you out, or attack you from behind. Also, if your laying down fire on the enemy soldiers they'll take cover so you can't attack them.

There are always several ways to approach an encampment. There is always the frontal way, to run up against heavy machine guns and hope for the best. Or you could go though a building and attack the encampment from the side, where there are no machine guns. The developers were very smart in hiding the things you can climb to get into a building.

This game's graphics are great! The cartoon style look and detailed environments blend perfectly to make you feel like your actually in a communist-controlled NYC. Unfortunately the camera can be very hard to get used to. Every so often the camera will get snagged behind a wall, and sometimes the camera gets uncomfortably close to your character inside small rooms, giving you a limited view because your character takes up half the screen.

The sound is very good in this game, especially if you have stereo. The music really tops off this game. When completing an objective the music gets loud and sends great chills down my spine.

The multiplayer seems like they threw it together in a couple days. Not to mention the fact that there is no online option.

Unfortunately, in the end, after finding all the secrets, beating it on all the difficulties, and with no online back up, you might want to return it after beating it a couple times.

Overall this game is very good! I loved it to the very end of the last cut scene. The only downsides to it is the hard-to-use movement of the camera, the multiplayer is bad, and the fact that it's a short game. Other then that, this game is great! Any squad-based game player should go and buy it!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/07/03