Irrational Games released Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich this week, which caused my productivity to crater. The original Freedom Force was the first game to break the superhero curse that had condemned previous attempts to produces a superhero-themed PC game to oblivion.
Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich could have also been called Freedom Force 1.5. Essentially what Irrational did was improve the graphics, update the AI, make some minor tweaks with controls and a few other changes.
That might sound like a criticism, but all the original Freedom Force needed were some tweaks here and there to go from good to great.
The graphics have been heavily tweaked. The 3D effects are much better, with terrain and buildings doing a much better job of handling multiple heights. This makes playing flying characters even cooler than before. The destructability of the environment has also been expanded, and awesome smoke and debris effects have been added. Nothing beats watching smoke rise and debris fly as your superhero squad takes on the supervillains in a crowded urban environment.
The AI for the first game was heavily criticized, and that has been addressed quite well in Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. In the original game, characters would just sit around and get beat to a pulp if you didn’t give them direct orders. In Third Reich, you still need to micromanage to be most effective with your characters, but if you’re in the heat of a battle and a character without an assigned action gets attacked, it will respond semi-intelligently.
In all, the changes in control, AI and graphics simply add to the feeling that you’re actually in a comic book duking it out with supervillains. It completley fulfills every fantasy I’ve had since 13 (well, at least all the ones related to comic books).
Whereas the “Danger Room”-style feature in the original game was a post-release kludge that was never very satisfying, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich ships with a fully integrated “Rumble Room” option which lets the player set up all sorts of one-off battles to test out new character designs or just have fun smashing giant robots over and over again (smashing giant robots just never gets old in my book).
I’m not really a fan of multiplayer, but Third Reich does offer Internet and LAN multiplayer support. Unlike the first game, which had multiplayer added on almost as an after-thought and offered only deathmatch-style play, Third Reich has a variety of multiplayer styles and even a basic scenario editor to try to give more of a comic book feel to the multiplayer battles.
One of the biggest elements of the original game was the mod community. For Freedom Force vs. Third Reich, Irrational delivered mod tools for download the same week the game was released. Last time Marvel got all pissed off and sent out cease-and-desist letters to Freedom Force mod sites that included likenesses of their characters, and Irrational at every turn discourages users from using the mod tools to create Freedom Force versions of trademarked characters. Some of the best mods for the first game, however, involved the JLA and other well-known characters and its likely that will be repeated this time around.
Bottom line — Freedom Force vs. Third Reich addresses pretty much every single complaint that players and reviewers raised about Freedom Force (which was still a great game, all things considered). If superheroes are your thing, its a no-brainer — you must have this game.