Freedom Force Vs the 3rd Reich Review
I have previously admitted that I am outdated with games. So to combat this, I am going even further back to a more simpler time where there were two genders and people knew what bathroom to use.
Imagine you're back in 2005. You turn on the TV and Fallout Boy is on VH1 singing about going down on sugar. Your internet was barely good enough to load up a single picture, let alone an entire game. Fuck me, 2005 was when I grew first ball hair. Life was good.
It was even better since that was the year Freedom Force VS The 3rd Reich came out. This was a strange time for american video games because it was all about games like Half Life 2 and Doom 3. The game F.E.A.R. came out too, so computer gaming was mostly about FPS games for adults. I remember this was the time I was afraid of the Doom 3 cover because it had that demon thing on it and I even turned the box over to look at the back screenshots and quickly put it back on the shelf because I was afraid of the blood and stuff.
To put it shortly, I was afraid of the computer game aisle. As dumb as this sounds, I couldn't go near that area and avoided a lot of the shelves because I was afraid of the games there. Instead, I was more focused on games like Kingdom Hearts 2 or whatever PS2 game I had. I was also a big lover of the X-Men Legend games, which was almost like this game I'm supposed to be reviewing.
But before I do, I want to say that I was also afraid of the Resident Evil 3 cover because Nemesis was on it.
Ironically, Doom 3 and RE3 are like my favorite games now. These are two well known and well received games that now have more than 3 games. Hell, even Kingdom Hearts has a 3 now, after like 12 years of waiting, just so we can get the same wonderful enjoyment but with a new screenshot feature.
Games that do well are going to get a sequel no matter what, especially if it sells well. There's 16 Final Fantasy games now. SIXTEEN DIFFERENT FINALES. I can only blow my load like 3 times in a row before I get bored, but we have games that keep on going forever.
Sadly, Freedom Force is not one of those series, because it only had 2 installments, despite its premise being made to be endless.
Wait, this is a Freedom Force review?
I can only talk about the second game, because I played the second game first, while I'm trying to play the first game now. So if I really need to make a review about the first game, or an article to compare the two, then I will, but they are almost the same thing from what I understand. And that's not a bad thing at all.
In fact, Freedom Force is great, because Freedom Force... is good!
The game was made by Irrational Games, a 2K games company that is VERY well known for its System Shock and Bioshock serieseses. But apparently, they did not make Shell Shock, that was the Killzone guys.
So out of nowhere, they decided that in their down time after the success of System Shock 2, and to prepare for their supreme release of Bioshock, that they should make a comic book based game in lieu of X-men Legends. But not just any comic book game. They made one that is entirely PARODY of the silver age of comic books.
You know those comic books in every cartoon, stuff like the Crimson Chin or characters like Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy. This is a game that is just like that, but the sequel takes place in WW2, with nazis, crazy communists, and rising sun masked Japanese warriors.
So what happened?
I'll tell you what happened: the company done fucked up in the marketing department. This game was an amazing concept, with countless opportunities, it had its own comic book for corn's sake, but almost nobody knew about it. I never saw this game before I saw it on GOG. It's from a famous company, they could have made toys and shows out of it, they could have done so much. Yet, sadly, they had no... gusto.
They had no confidence in their product. It's like they just did it on a whim, threw it to the wind, put it in a bottle, slapped on some flex-tape, then set it out to sea. This game is like a priceless Mermaid Man card being used as a napkin.
No seriously, Erwin, actually talk about the game instead of Spongebob
Okay, okay, enough about Spongebob's last good episode. The thing I love the most about FFV3R (Freedom Force VS The 3rd Reich) other than how it's almost exactly like X-men Legends, is how it's pretty much nothing like X-men Legends in way of gameplay.
Here is where the game messed up on, and I really wish it didn't. You see, the game has a comic book style. It's all tongue in cheek where the writing is perfectly in tune with a comic book from the 70s. Every little thing from the Minute Man talking about how he loves america, to El Diablo talking about things that are caliente, to nazi soldiers being combined with gorillas, these are all perfect. The tone is perfect. The setting is perfect. The fucking art style is perfect.
The characters are a little flawed, I wished they did more with guys like the Minute Man and Tombstone and Alchemiss, but it's all about what their potential could be vs what we were given, and that's just me desiring more from a rushed product. Plus, what we got from the characters is awesome. They are prime parodies of our much loved and well known heroes like Captain America and Ghost Rider and Wonder Woman.
What I cannot forgive them for is the engine they chose. The chose a 3D engine... for a comic book game. Darkest Dungeon, the game I hold higher than Chris-Chan holds his bottle of orange fanta full of his own semen, is a game that is both 2D and turn based. They made that game wonderfully and with a very small budget. This game here, the one nobody knows about, fucking Freedom Force, it cost over 2 million dollars to make, because they decided to use a 3D engine. I'm sorry, I cannot forgive a company or give them a curved score from what they did in the past or the future. I have to grade them for what they did here, and here they messed up entirely.
I love the game, but it's not made for a 3D plane. X-men legends is, because the game has countless waves of enemies, and each character has its own thing, and there are all of these collectibles and secret missions and armor and stuff. Leveling up in X-men Legends feels like it can be easily customized because there's a good amount of stat points to work with and each character can become as good as possible in their own way. X-men Legends wasn't a flawless comic book game, but it had a focus on gameplay first and story second.
Freedom Force, on the other hand, has the story first and gameplay second. It's almost as if gameplay was a side product. We have stats and abilities, there are different types of attacks like mental, radioactive, physical, and magical. There's stat effects like confusion and charm to make useless female characters seem useful. But then when you try to play the game, it almost forces you to use simple basic attacks and save your powers for another time.
What's the point of having POWERS if you cannot USE your POWER??
Of course, I'm over reacting. The game has it where instead of a meter, you use your powers in "bars", and every special attack uses up a certain amount of bars. You begin with 3 bars, and I believe you get more as you level up, but I never actually saw an increase in the bars.
Wouldn't it make sense to have the bars increase, rather than have the bars replenish faster? I don't know, I am not certain with that point, and if I find out that the game does have more than 3 bars of energy, I'll edit this part, but until then, my complaint stays because if Spoony can review poorly, than so can I.
In seriousness, the energy bar dies too fast for what the heroes should be able to do, even in the late game. A lot of the fighting tends to get frustrating rather than intense, because difficulty is a strange thing to get into, but trust me, the difficulty of this game is not on purpose. And it's not really like the game is difficult, it's more that the entire thing with hitting and not hitting is by chance rather than by skill, and if the RNG is bad, you get fucked, but if the RNG is good, you rape the bosses, so there's little strategy to have and it's mostly about waiting rather than enjoying.
If there was a game about waiting in line, but it was colorful and good music was playing, it'd be about as much fun as I have with this game's gameplay. Again, it's not like the game is bad, it's just that a game like X-men Legend's was more fun, and if I own both games, I'd rather play X-men Legends. I guess I didn't really miss out on much, because I played X-men Legends when it came out, rather than Freedom Force, so I got what I wanted fun-wise first, and then later got what I never knew I wanted story-wise after.
But this is the weird thing: Freedom Force came out first, in 2002. X-men Legends came out second in 2004, then they had FFV3R come out in 2005. Legends had better gameplay, but FFV3R kept the same flawed gameplay style as its first game, which is I guess why it was left in the dust. People didn't want to copy a point and click style that relied on pausing the game a lot. It's not that I don't like that kind of thing, because I love playing a strategy game that makes me pause a lot and then resume and enjoy the result, but I know that people want games more fast pace and more with button mashing, or like a rouge-like game kind of thing.
If this game was more rouge-like, I think it would have been much better. They already made it like an RPG, and they already had a game like System Shock 2 where there's items and an inventory, yet they didn't try to add any of that stuff to this game. There was no in-game upgrading machine or fancy and exciting gadgets to mess with or anything to play around with that games like Bioshock have. Instead, it's a game where you have a map, you do the objectives in the map, you kill all the enemies, and then you fight the boss in the end.
Gameplay is simple, story is awesomely simple, and the dialogue is simple in the best way possible. Sadly, I think that's what we can chalk this game down to: simple. It's too much of a basic bitch for it's own good.
Speaking of basic bitches, the character Green Genie is fucking useless. Never use her, and she can go back to Africa where her swampy Fiona looking ass belongs.
The game looks good, the concepts are good, but there's not much to do once it gets rolling and when it comes down to the missions, they are a repeat of the previous one with a new map and different boss. I would love it if each boss was actually a challenge or had its own style of how to defeat it. I mean, when the Arkham games have more variety in combat than your game, you know you're a little behind in the enjoyment factor. I know it's not fair to compare a game from 2005 to the Arkham Batman games, but it's an idea in what not to do vs what to do.
Fun fact: Arkham actually was inspired by Bioshock with both color pallets and metroidvania style maps. So it's as if these games are sort of more related than I previously thought.
I don't know. I guess maybe I'm pissed because they call this one the 3rd Reich, but it's the 2nd game, and there's not going to be any attempt to fix what was seriously broken with how the gameplay was. It was a quick release as a second attempt, and it was made by competent people that surprisingly didn't know how to do a concept like this in the best way they knew how.
If it was me, I would have made this game 2D, make it like Darkest Dungeon with a super hero theme, and I would have put more emphasis on things like levels and lore, and I would have also released a TV show or youtube series, or even continue the fucking comic book series that nobody read. I'd also put in an "Evil Mode" where you can do missions as the villains.
That'd be fun as hell!
I still can't believe I never heard about this game until much later. The game is out on Steam and GOG, but I would get the GOG version if I was you, because I heard the Steam version is dead-ass broken.
Decent game because of concept, but boring gameplay overall and a lot of missed opportunity. I love the game, I just don't really like to play it, if that makes sense.
If it was a JAV girl, it would be Aoi Shirosaki in the particular video that this meme came from:
7/10