Freedom Force was written in March 2002 by Ken Levine. The series is a set of 2 video games that is an homage to the Silver Age of Comics, with a group of random people gaining strange powers related to their personality and surroundings from Energy X, the noble of these group forming a superhero team to protect Patriot City called The Freedom Force. The games are tactical rpgs where the heroes must complete various objectives, usually the defeating of Energy X-powered villains via strategic usage and combination of their abilities. Freedom Force is one of those games like "Psychonauts" or "War of the Monsters" that aren't super well known but everyone who does it is trying to get more people to know about it, it's a very cult classic game.
3 reasons I love it:
I tend to really like homages and parodies of the Silver Age of Comics but not the actual comics from that age. This is because comics from that age, because of the comics code, were made for children and were often slow and repeated obvious information numerous times under the assumption that the reader had the mental capacity of a child. Silver Age Homages can take the best parts of the Silver Age; it's idealism, creativity and sense of wonder and leave behind the less pleasent parts we'd like to forget.
1: Everything about these games are stylized to be like Silver Age Comics (or Golden Age for the sections taking place during WWII in the sequel) and it's just wonderful to play. The dialogue is consistently over the top and filled with silver age-y style interjections like "Stars and Bars!" "By the Goddess!" and "Rings of Rexor!" The characters powers also feel so otherwordly, over the top and impactful that it really invokes the feeling of being inside them. Buildings can collapse, cars are thrown, people can be spontanteously brainwashed or turned into chickens, and characters can race around making sonic booms. If you're a fan of the Fleischer Superman shorts or the Adam West Batman and you want to try experiencing what being in that kind of world would be like, this verse will give it in spades.
2: The games greatly encourage personalization and customization, a style which gives games nigh endless replayability. That's because the games allow you play the games with your own custom heroes you create and then recruit, plus was seemingly made to be fairly modular with a highly active and dynamic modding community with whole custom campaigns, characters, powers and so on for download. Whiel it would be a massive exaggeration to say that Freedom Force is less a game and more a platform to run numerous games to be modded in like some later games (like Skyrim or especially Minecraft, games made with the idea that they would be modded), Freedom Force is an early example of making a very personalize-able game that can have a lot more functionality then just what's in the base game and gives the user the options to make or download what they personally want to be in it.
3: The tactical rpg genre is the perfect genre it seems for capturing that style of comic book, with characters powers feeling varied and interplaying with each other in interesting dynamic ways. The gameplay feels very engaging due to the dynamicism of the many abilities both your characters have and your opponent will reveal over the course of a battle. One of the reasons I like vs debating is that I like the idea of supernatural tactics that can bend your brain and Freedom Force gives a greater degree of that in an interactive format then almost anything else. Tactics like should you hunker down behind a car from projectiles if you don't know if your opponent can make the car explode, should you try and use your ghost man to possess the tank so your blasters can get it in past them or possess one of the blasters to slow the actual damage, is it better for a character to be able to fly and thus avoid melee/some projectiles and move generally faster vs teleport where they can go straight through walls. If you want supernatural tactics, that is something this game excels at.
3 Flaws:
I wanna start by saying that yes the steam release of this game was a bit of an infamously buggy mess. I don't take that as too big a thing though because it's not really a problem with the game itself, just how it was ported to steam and the also very easily accessible GOG version lacks any of these technical issues so it's not a consideration for the game itself. Also while I do know the game is fairly easy to break if you want, you can pretty easily make custom heroes that can cheese the levels with whatever combination of abilities, that's not really something that's going to happen unless you're actively trying too, so in my mind that's more like using cheat codes to make the game easier for yourself if you want too. These are what I consider the more general problems with the games.
1: While the games have a large interesting roster of characters, they don't get too much. Alchemiss and Man-Bot get screen time and character development and some of the others get a little but most of what you get for each one is just whatever special lines happened to be put in if you take x character on y level. Those are cool bonuses but it's like having dessert for your meal, it's not gonna fill you up. Granted, maybe my wants are completely pie in the sky here. Ideally what I would have liked is something akin to the loyalty missions of Mass Effect, a special mission for each hero you can access at any time, taking place outside the main story events, when you get a character, that focuses around that hero and gives them extra experience for the main story to make the hardest difficulty a bit easier. I get that's really idealistic since FF has 24 members, and for comparison the main campaign of the second game only has 22 missions but still this cast of character's potential is really going to waste with most of them having such little stuff on them, but the games just aren't really games about characters so much as invoking the style of comics in the Silver Age. And while I get that, it is something I feel would have improved the experience.
2: The AI for this game is not the best. It's generally serviceable but there were numerous times when an enemy would basically just not notice me or do anything until I attacked them or a civilian would run right in front of my hero launching an attack. While on some level it might increase the Silver Age accuracy of having everyone act mildly silly, it doesn't really help from a gameplay perspective. When a civilian gets hurt or a building gets damaged you lose prestige which is the points you use to recruit heroes, either the premade ones or your custom ones and the fact that you can lose it for things that are clearly not something you can control like a civilian running in front of a fireblast or a robot on the other side of the map from where you spawn hitting a building is rather annoying. Although humorously enough for a game that is inspired by the Silver Age Idealism, it's a bizarrely annoying realism that the superheroes get blamed for everything even if they were not at all the reason for it.
3: These games are really difficult, especially on the higher difficulty settings, and there's one level in particular that I found just complely unfair. In the second game there is a mission where you have to protect one of your party members, Sky King, for a duration of time while he calibrates his suit. This means that instead of your normal party of 4 members, you only have 3 as Sky King counts towards your team for some reason and he can't move, use an ability or take any damage or he has to start the process over again. Challening but fair so far. Expect you don't choose your team for this mission. Sometimes the game limits you to having to pick certain heroes for a mission either for story reasons or because the mission is literally impossible without a unique power one of the heroes have. That's not the case here as the mission gives you El Diablo, a character uniquely unsuited to this mission as he has massive attack power but poor range and a tendency for friendly fire (and if Sky King takes damage he has to start over) and Tricolour who has the berserker weakness where if she takes damage she has a chance of attacking anything nearby, and if Sky King takes any damage you have to start over. It's a really really hard mission. The games are both really difficult, unless you're playing on the easiest settings.
Favorite Part:
I think my favorite part is during the second game in a desperate gambit to beat the Big Bad Entropy they summon the Big Bad of the first game Time Master and you actually get to play with Time Master and his forces for a bit, and it's a really cool face-off between the lord of time and the mistress of chaos, plus getting to control Time Master's broken abilities.
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