quick description that illustrates the gameplay of Freedom Force: while running a psychic character called Mentor, the player has the hero run down an alley and pick up one of three boxes of dynamite that just happen to be lying there; it is that sort of game world. The player is hoping that pitching dynamite will give Mentor an attack at range that will actually knock out the thugs he is fighting. Mentor has just hoisted the box of TNT above his head when the thug on the roof of the building beside him drops a grenade on the hero. Not only does the grenade go off, but so does the box of TNT in Mentor's hands, as well as the two boxes at his feet. The resulting explosion knocks out Mentor and collapses the corners of the three buildings around that part of the alley, one of which the thug was standing on. The fall, and being buried in rubble, knocks out the thug as effectively as the explosions took out Mentor.
Gameplay in FF is continuous, but players can pause at anytime. The player controls up to four heroes as they battle thugs, henchmen, minions and villains in and around Patriot City. Each battle opens on a big map, and the player guides the characters about it using a very simple mouse-based system. Everything on the map is destructible, which, of course, is different from being interactive. The characters can pick up a car and throw it, they can pound it into scrap, but they can't drive it or even get in it. Villains make as much use of the terrain as the heroes, and it is not uncommon for the heroes to be forced to flee in the face of an avalanche of cars, rocks, cargo containers or trees.
Heroes can do just about anything the player would want except talk to the villains or each other. FF is billed as a role-playing game, but except for the cut scenes, the characters only interact by fighting. A villain appears. The player puts together a squad of heroes to fight him. When they win, they gain prestige points that can be used to attract other heroes and to buy new or improve existing powers for the current roster of heroes. Then another villain appears, and the heroes are off again.
Brawl in the four-color family
One of the many good things about FF is that its designers did it in the style of the Jack Kirby comics of the '60s, comic books' Silver Age. The game is very black and white—lots of stentorian denouncements and evil cackling—but it never slips into parody.
There are two things that keep FF from being a perfect simulation of battling superhero teams. Foremost is fact that players can't start the single-player game with a character of their own creation. Eventually, after assembling a team of four built-in characters over six levels, players can begin to add characters of their own creation. Thanks to tools on the Web as well as the huge number of powers built into the game, it is possible to create nearly any character the player wishes, but it would have been nice to have done this from the word go.
The second thing is the multi-player game. It allows up to four players to assemble squads of heroes and battle each other over either LAN or Internet. These characters can be modified versions of those provided, or they can be heroes of the players' own creation. That part is good. The bad part is that these squads can only battle each other. There is no option to fight computer-controlled bots, or (even better) play the campaign game cooperatively.
Red arrows on the map point the heroes toward their next main objective, but there are also secondary objectives, and the game isn't so helpful with those. For example, on some levels random gangs of thugs patrol the edges of the map, mugging civilians. The heroes will be fighting the main villains, and the player will hear a woman screaming for help. The player has no idea where she is and because of the fog of war, they can't find her by scrolling around the map. There is little choice but to let her get mugged, which means that at the end, where the prestige points are calculated, the player doesn't get the points for "saving civilians." A mini-map or arrows pointing to the secondary objectives would have been a big boost in playing satisfaction.
Irrational did such a good job on the elements that are in Freedom Force, it is unfair to fault them for what they left out, but I really miss the cooperative campaign mode. It would have been tremendous fun to bash the game's four-color villains with three friends along to help.
— Eric
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