It’s official — the superhero computer game curse is finally over. Freedom Force arrived in stores for this week and it is getting extremely good reviews from gaming web sites. I’ve spent the last two days running through the game’s 25 missions until my eyes are too blurry to focus. Freedom Force is largely what I expected, but it still has a lot of unrealized potential.
FF is basically a squad-level real time strategy game coupled with an RPG-like character creation system. The player takes up to four characters into missions. This can get pretty hairy, so pressing the space bar or right clicking pauses the game and allows the player to issue orders to the superheroes. Much of the game is spent pausing to give orders, letting the game run to see your characters carry out those orders, and then pausing again to issue new orders.
Some people have complained about this style of gameplay, but I think it worked great. A strict turn-based system would be completely unwieldy. FF achieves a nice balance that is half-turn based and half-RTS.
The graphics and sound are both excellent. There’s nothing quite like watching one of your heroes hovering above the din, throwing lightning bolts down upon an unsuspecting villain. The game is well-balanced and, just like in the comic books, requires figuring out how to get your 4 superheroes to work like a team to defeat the enemies.
The character creation system is superb. You have to play the first several missions with the characters included with the game, but can create your own characters and bring them into missions later. Characters are created based on a system that very closely resembles the sort of thing common in pen and pencil games like Champions. There are point limits to characters, and attributes and powers are purchased from that point pool. The power creator, like Champions and other RPGs, offers numerous basic attacks and allows the user to modify them such that pretty much anything you can imagine from the comic books. In fact, there are very few comic book heroes or villains which could not be constructed with this system, and certainly the few stragglers will be addressed in the inevitable expansion packs.
A player could spend hours just creating characters. The main drawback with Freedom Force is that the rest of the game is not quite as well fleshed out as the character creator is. Many of the missions were, frankly, tedious. Rather than the enormous superteam battles from comic books, much of the time in missions is spent picking off low-powered underlings. That’s okay the first time through, but there is not a lot of replay value in most of the missions.
Unfortunately there is no basic single player skirmish mode. At a minimum many players assumed they’d be able to pick a map, through a few super villains on it, get their superteam together and just be able to go at it. But there is no option to do that as of yet, though so many people are requesting it, such a mode will almost certainly be offered via a patch at some point.
Similarly, there are a lot of complaints about the multiplayer. For a number of reasons — mainly the pause and go method of gameplay — I’m not sure FF necessarily lends itself to multiplayer that well anyway. But for those folks who were really looking forward to it, the multiplayer is hampered because a) the only option is deathmatch and b) multiplayer over the Internet uses the much-hated Gamespy, which is difficult to use if you are behind a firewall (and even if you are not, Gamespy is still a pain).
FF could also benefit from improvements in its control system. Even with only four characters to keep track of, controlling the heroes can be difficult. There is no way, for example, to tell what action a particular hero is trying to carry out. There is no queuing or way point system either, so players end up doing a lot of micromanaging. Allowing even a 3 or 4 level queuing/waypoint system would dramatically improve the experience. Again, though, it seems likely this is a feature that the developers will add via a patch at some point.
At the moment, the developers are working on cleaning up the map and game editors before releasing them to the modding community. That is where this game will really take off. The positive reviews mean the game is going to sell like crazy so there will likely be a lot of people working to add different mods (already, the number of superhero skins available for downloading is just amazing).
Freedom Force is not there quite yet, but it is clearly going to be an excellent platform for all sorts of superhero goodness. Is it worth $40? If you’ve waited for more than a decade for a decent superhero computer game like I have, the answer is yes — buy it ASAP. People not so enamored of superheroes might want to wait a while to see how the issues above are addressed by the game developers and/or the FF community.