Freedom Force Preview

Are you a Marvel Comics fan? Have you heard of Stan Lee, or Jack Kirby? Is my age starting to show? Well, I guess there's no such thing as being too old, or too young to enjoy good superhero soaps. Fortunately, that is exactly the logic that Ken Levine -Creative Director, and the Aussie branch of Irrational Games had in mind when they decided to create a tactical combat game with RPG elements based on the classic 60s superhero comic book characters. Although all the characters in Freedom Force are original, which means there'll be no Captain America, the superheroes in this game are for all intents and purposes mirror images of your favorite do-gooders and villains from the Marvel Comic series.

Great balls of fire...

Too quick for ya!

And as is the case with those famous comic books, Freedom Force world is just this wacky, polarized breeding ground for numerous colorful and yet black and white characters (no oxymoron there). Not much is known on them yet - the developers are planning to include around 25 unique heroes altogether. So far, Irrational games has announced: The Minute Man, his sidekick Liberty Lad, The Bullet, The Ant, Law, Order (Cloak and Dagger?), and Microwave. The Minute Man for example, is Freedom Force's figurehead (and, most would add, its out-and-out leader). His reluctance to be in the public eye is often offset by his outspoken patriotism, and his discomfort in the role of Freedom Force's leader usually takes a back seat to his feelings of responsibility towards the other members of the team, and especially to his trusted sidekick Liberty Lad. The Bullet, on the other hand is not much of a team player. He is able to move at blurring speed, and can land a 100mph punch, and then be gone before you finished saying "ouch". Unforltunately for the rest of the team, the Bullet is something of a media hound. With a penchant for playing to the cameras, his attention-seeking ways have sometimes landed him (and even the entire team) in hot water. Needless to say, there has to be some antagonism between the rest of the team and The Bullet.

This side of Freedom Force's wacky character design reveals some rather mature (hmm... wait that's not the right term), more complicated relationships among heroes, and it exposes the protagonists as "super," but with a couple of quirky character flaws. The Minute Man - I wonder what hmm... his flaw might be. Maybe the fact his, cough, timing is a little off, and he likes to help Liberty Lad over the fence a tad too much. According to Project Lead, Jon Chey, there are plot flaws that show up in the story but there are also in-game flaws that cause your characters to do things that you might not necessarily want them to. This of course implies that these "character flaws" play an important role during gameplay. For instance, Minute Man isn't going to let anything happen to his sidekick Liberty Lad, and he'll drop what he's doing whether the player likes it or not if Liberty Lad is in trouble. Meaning, he can run off on you in the middle of a fight if Liberty Lad gets into a tight spot (is it just me, or is there something fairly silly about this term).

I bet the same goes for the villains, although there is precious little info on them at the moment... Rest assured though that the villains will always give away all the tiniest details of their evil scheme before they send you to kingdom come (or so they think), and are sure to laugh like madmen before they order their henchman to execute you in some over-elaborate and inefficient fashion. Hey, you have to remember that classic villains never win no matter how tough they appear at first.

These kinds of positive clichés are also an integral part of the game's background story --- It seems that some aliens are keen to add our little planet to their conquered list. They have devised a rather elaborate plan to make us kill each other off without breaking too much sweat --- in order for them to go about destroying Earth and humanity. The aliens decide to pick the vilest representatives of human species for this case, and give them superpowers through a substance known as "Energy X". It's like: give the bad guys superpowers and see what happens; you can just walk in and collect the spoils afterwards. However, even the aliens are not all immune to the concept of guilty conscience. Some of the "good" aliens decide to push that "Energy X" stuff to a couple of good guys as well... The only thing is, the alien that was supposed to deliver XTC, sorry "Energy X" ("Red Bull" on speed) gets into some kind of trouble and the magical potion ends up in the hands of average Joe citizens who are now faced with the responsibility of saving the Earth from its impending doom. I must say - nice plot work, guys...

As I have already mentioned, Freedom Force is a tactical combat game with the added bonus of some great character development and customization features... All of the heroes posses their unique skills, which are inherent to them and their "development" is mostly quantitative. Meaning, your heroes will get stronger in time, and their inherent powers will become more powerful as you gain experience. The developers have opted to focus on the inherent superpowers instead of giving players an option to pick a bunch of new ones later in the game. All superheroes are more or less what they are because of their powers, so it's only natural that the focus remains on their unique skills rather then some power-ups they can pick up along the way. Nonetheless, the developers will include an option to acquire bonus items by collecting "prestige points" (besides the basic character points, which are given at the end of each mission). "Prestige points are gained by completing optional secondary objectives and not enraging the civilian population. You can complete the game with nothing but character points. Prestige points can be used to buy new characters or other cool bonus items."