The superhero genre has defied game programmers for quite a while now. Some would-be games died quickly and cleanly, such as Microprose’s Agents of Justice which disappeared with its creators, Master of Orion’s Sim-Tex. Others lingered and changed shape time and again, only to finally fail to reappear one time too many. The story of Hero Games’ Champions is likely the longest such tale, spanning several years and several development teams, but in the end it, too, met its fate.
The difficulty in making such games is often ascribed to the scope of a typical superheroic adventure. A good physics engine is necessary for the thrown cars, flaming beam attacks, and triple-flips between buildings to come off as realistic. A totally dynamic environment lets buildings crumble/detonate and is the only way to make use of all of those potentially lethal weapons disguised as innocuous items like streetlights, pickup trucks, and manhole covers. Excellent graphics help make the whole “blowing stuff up” motif more appealing, and of course helping the adolescent male demographic determine whether “those” are natural or not as accurately as possible doesn’t seem to hurt sales.
There are greater problems to be found relating to scale and balance. A typical superhero with an energy blast is expected to be a great deal more powerful and flashy than a schmuck with a gun; otherwise it’s boring. But a schmuck with a gun is already very dangerous to the average person, so the difficulty quickly becomes making a mighty hero (beams that can “punch through a mountain” or whatever) who doesn’t accidentally kill many, many people the moment he is slightly angered. Many, many comic-book “hero organizations” would probably face the National Guard within an hour of their first serious fight as lightning strikes fry entire phone and computer networks, occupied homes and offices crumble left and right, and cars are crushed like beer cans underneath the weight of falling superheroes who just keep getting back up. Creating a complete, cohesive game that is fun, interesting, and consistent both to the game itself and the subject material it draws from has proven to be a daunting task.
Whether because of some nascent, resurfacing optimism or merely a self-immolative round of hubris, several potentially quality superhero games have made themselves known and are preparing to take their chances. The great thing for fans is that it’s a strong start—beating the competition to the punch, and leaving them quite likely to be compared to it, comes Electronic Arts’ Freedom Force.
Freedom Force is set in the nonexistent-but-familiar metropolis of Patriot City. It chronicles the adventures of the titular group of superheroes and their struggles against a variety of colorful, atypical villains. The game starts out following a single septuagenarian scientist who is zapped by a strange, alien energy and reborn a fearsome warrior for good called the Minuteman, but more heroes become available quickly, and villains and henchmen abound. With a number of law-abiding citizens roaming the streets, cars commuting to work, and well-meaning police protecting and serving, the city comes to life nicely.
Borrowing directly – even the name – from SSI’s Panzer General, the game uses a system of “prestige points” to determine how the player is faring and to reward him for his good deeds (or punish him for his wicked ones.) Defeating villains, accomplishing goals, and so on, raises prestige, while destroying buildings and knocking out unsuspecting citizens lowers it. Prestige can then be spent recruiting new heroes, and the team’s numbers by the endgame can be quite impressive. While storing up a great deal of prestige raises the group’s reputation to lofty heights, there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to keeping the reputation high, so the team tends to grow more often than not.
Stylistically, the game is more wacky than grim: likeable and relentlessly over-the-top. In other words, this is The Tick, not Vampirella, although anybody who has seen “Batman” on TV with Adam West will have the picture closer yet. Breathless hyperbole is the order of the day (“All I need is a spaceship! And courage!”) and bright, almost gauche colors help round out the cheery, 70’s-TV atmosphere. Stereotypes and character simplifications abound, but it’s all done affably and very tongue-in-cheek, and the dizzying array of villains are suitably absurd. Similarly, the city can be completely destroyed without too much trouble and nobody in the game is ever killed in a fight, only “KO’d” and thus out of commission.
The sound is both excellent and irritating. As subdued and even heroic as the music sounds, it still somehow comes across as shallow, but it’s understated enough not to offend too badly. The thwacks, booms, and crunches that accompany heroic combat are varied and usually satisfying. Where the real horns of the dilemma become apparent come with the voice acting. Most of it is enjoyable – even inducing audible laughter – and almost all of it is competent, but it tends get repetitive as heroes offer their battle cries EVERY TIME they use an attack. After beating the game, Minuteman’s twin cry of “For Justice” will never, ever, ever be forgotten by most players, typically to their great dismay. Minuteman’s aren’t the worst, either. That honor goes to a purple, cloning poet who feels the need to utter entire quatrains every time he does anything at all of note. Given that he clones himself and that the often-numerous clones can wander all over the map, well, that is one annoying villain. Fortunately he only shows up a couple of times.
The interface is something of a cross between X-COM and Sanity: Aiken’s Artifact, another Lithtech game that Freedom Force is reminiscent of in several ways. The character(s) are generally viewed from an isometric view; while the camera can be moved, there’s usually not much need to do more than adjust the zoom during the action. Of greater concern is the way teams are handled: basically, they aren’t. The interface feels like it was designed to be wholly focused on manipulating a single hero, and then the ability to switch between multiple heroes was added. In pitched battles involving numerous closely-matched adversaries, the best option for victory seems to be to continually pause the game, give an order to each of the heroes (which can thankfully be done while the game is paused,) unpause the game long enough for the quickest of those actions to take place, pause the game again…
The problem is severe enough at times that there have been reports of gamers simply playing entire combat sequences at one-quarter or one-eighth speed. Unfortunately, any stylistic semblance of a superheroic slugfest gets lost when the fight just … crawls … along … This seems like an incomplete solution at best.
As to the question of scale, the game seems to favor melee-oriented strongmen. Ranged attacks tend to be very short-ranged (a “long range” projectile doesn’t even cover a whole city block) and melee powerhouses can often wade into a group of henchmen and send them flying helter-skelter like so much popcorn. Furthermore, stronger characters are capable of picking up garbage dumpsters, police cars, or whatever and flinging them at their opponents, so the lack of a ranged attack doesn’t really seem to put them at a disadvantage. All the same, beam attacks can burn through more than one car to blow up the villain behind them, grenades bounce off buildings and occasionally around corners, and the number and variety of special attacks is simply incredible.
Buildings are never entered but are easily scaled by fliers, jumpers, and wall-climbers, and terrain matters a great deal less in this game than in many others. Even characters with no real way to get to the roof can still knock the building down easily enough, if it comes to that. And soaring over the city faster than the wind just feels right.
The game ships with a remarkably powerful and flexible hero creation tool, and it is here that the truly inspired parts of the game’s design are seen. Nearly any superhero can be created, utilizing whatever superpowers and special effects the player can dream up. A number of fan-created meshes and skins of famous characters have already appeared on various web sites, and creating their likenesses in the game is almost always both simple and believable. Prestige plays an important part here by balancing the various powers and helping the player keep his perspective about just how powerful this new character is becoming. In-game prestige, as was stated above, can be spent in the game’s campaign to recruit new heroes, either built-in or custom-made; a high-prestige custom-made hero is a force to be reckoned with and can immediately unbalance gameplay from the midgame on for those so inclined. Irrational Games is to be commended for devising a system that is internally consistent to the game itself, not required learning to enjoy the game, and still allows the players to decide how balanced they want the game to be. The flexibility of this tool can hardly be overstated: its subtle elegance makes it fun to simply make heroes for no other reason than to have made them, and the creative and numerous abilities, special effects, and attributes that a player can select makes nearly any effect possible.
Which, ironically, leads us to the most infuriating part of the game and what is easily the weakest element in the game: its replayability. The basic campaign, though carefully prepared, is a little on the short side, and when it’s done that’s it. Fin. Done. No new campaigns, no skirmish mode, no campaign editor of any sort at all, not even a featureless gray arena that lets the player try out the heroes he’s made against a preset AI foe. Nothing. The best the solo player can do is replay the given campaign with different characters and tactics, or destroy barren multiplayer cities that only have one player in them. Given the effectiveness of the hero generator and the good-natured fun of the campaign, what would have been a disappointing oversight in this department becomes instead a frustrating omission.
It’s not a Truly Great Game, but it’s still a lot of fun, and the design team has been offering excellent support, including answering tech and design questions on the game’s website forum. With that sort of continued support, it may yet attain Greatness. In the meantime, if you’re feeling interface-patient and you’re not looking for more than one ride per ticket, then by all means get this game. The designers have studied: comic book fans that want to see their favorites come to life should get this game. Fans of Sanity who didn’t feel that that game was “superhero-y” enough will probably like this game a great deal, as well. But for those who aren’t especially interested in the genre or (worse yet) those who think that this might be X-COM: Day of the Mutant or Crusader: Now He Flies, do yourself a favor and skip it.
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Reviewed by Joel Rasdall.
