Freedom Fighters

EA's battle for liberty makes squad-based tactics more palatable for the masses.

By Aaron Boulding

Updated: Dec 13, 2018 5:47am UTC

For a game that's undergone so many name changes during its short marketing life, Freedom Fighters turned out surprisingly well. Whether you remember it as Freedom: Battle for Liberty Island or Freedom: Soldiers of Liberty, the third-person action shooter blends squad-based tactics with a well presented story. The whole package comes off like an entry level tactical action game for those who can't get their minds around the all-too authentic realism of games like Rainbow Six or Conflict Desert Storm. It also deftly avoids the identity crisis that undermined Digital Anvil's Brute Force (on Xbox) by keeping the basic game systems easy to understand and easy to execute.
The Russians Are Coming
In Freedom Fighters, the Cold War never really happens. The USSR drops the first A-bomb to end WWII and basically runs things around the glove, culminating with a semi-covert invasion of the modern-day United States. We pick up the story of Christopher Stone, a mild-mannered plumber, on his way to fix a leaky pipe or two in Manhattan. Things take a turn for the worse when the lady with the leaky pipes turns out to be an outspoken anti-communist leader and you're knee-deep in the middle of the US-USSR conflict.

The game does a marvelous job of maintaining the illusion of a Soviet-run New York City. The barricades on city streets, the pro-Soviet posters in the environment and the well done newscasts full of propaganda are all top-notch and every cutscene just reinforces the idea. The concept may have borrowed heavily from the film "Red Dawn" but the Russian invasion in Freedom Fighters is at least as believable as Patrick Swayze with a machine gun.

Gameplay
The main character is asked to proceed through a series of semi-linear missions where you can choose which of several objectives you want to achieve first, but you're going to have to complete the whole set before advancing to the next handful of missions. You're given one main weapon and one secondary weapon with limited amount of ammo. During missions, you can swap, say, an assault rifle with a shotgun during the heat of battle, but you'll have to find another assault rifle and pick that up somewhere in the environment if you don't like the shotgun anymore.

The run-and-gun gameplay ends up playing a lot like the non-stealth segments of Eidos' Hitman 2. And it should since IO Interactive is the developer behind both of those titles. You're getting the same physics, the same auto-aiming and a lot of the same AI from Hitman 2 in Freedom Fighters. This isn't a bad thing, especially if you missed Agent 47's last adventure.

It's the command-and-control system for your AI squadmates that gives FF it's distinctive feel. Stone has to build up his charisma by accomplishing missions, rescuing innocents and healing fellow soldiers in the field. Each time his charisma fills up, he'll be able to approach and recruit other freedom fighters in the game world and add them to his team that follows him around. The game starts you off with a couple just to let you get the feel of it all, but soon you're managing up to 12 soldiers. For this reason you only have three basic commands: move, attack and defend. Tapping a button tells one of your mates to perform one of those actions in the general direction that your main character is looking. Pressing and holding that button will send all of your teammates in that direction to perform that action. You get another layer of control by zooming in on a location and telling your teammates exactly where you want them to attack, move or defend.

The environments of Freedom Fighters are intricate and extremely detailed and thankfully, the squadmate AI is outstanding so you hardly ever them bashing their heads into walls, jogging into obstacles or getting stuck doing something dumb. They'll move intelligently and attack any enemies they see when they're on the move or when they're standing still. The difference between the different commands then becomes more tactical. Telling them to defend an area will compel them to look for the best available cover while "attack" makes them more aggressive and willing to look for trouble with enemies.

You actually end up managing this aggressiveness more than anything, because the AI fighters can be quite independent. They'll run headfirst into a hornet's nest of enemies without thinking if you're not keeping track of your squad. It ends up feeling authentic because we could imagine a battlefield commander telling his troops what he wants them to do, but being unable to actually think and act for them. In this case, your soldiers have unlimited ammo, different weapons, and they can be resurrected as long as you have a spare health pack to use on them. Keeping things simple like this is a true advantage.

Covering your teammates as they move and getting them to cover you as you move works very well. The AI guys will even take hold of mounted machine guns and automatically mow down any bad guys they see when you tell them to defend in an area that has a nest. Using the zoomed in targeting to command your troops can be problematic when you start dealing with stairs, riser and other multi-level structure, since the targeting icon can't always read what level you're pointing at. Usually pointing at the ground near a machine gun nest and giving the defend command will get your guy to grab the machine gun and start shooting, but if it's in a tricky area they've been known to walk around in front of the nest and start defending.

Having your guys on the wrong side of a sandbag during a firefight is no way to earn charisma. On the other hand, there are several parts where you can set your guys up in a nice defensive position with heavy machine gun nests and they'll have no problem laying waste to wave after wave of enemy soldiers while you do a little freelancing. This is proof that using an overwatch system is what you're supposed to be doing in Freedom Fighters.

As good as the freedom fighter AI is, the enemy AI is equally impressive and, like the villain in a good movie, it makes the whole experience worthwhile. The Russian soldiers will more or less deploy the same way you should manage your own troops. They'll stay locked in good defensive positions shooting at any body on your team they can target. Should you keep yourself and all of your mates behind cover, the enemies will send scouts to flush you out because they know they've got plenty of cover fire behind them.

You can play it conservative and just pick off the advancing enemies one by one, but eventually you're going to have to do something about those Russians dug in behind those sandbags. And this ends up being the hook of the entire game. You've got your options, you know what the enemy AI wants to do, but anything you decide to do is going to be modified on the fly. Just because you've made the decision to charge in with guns blazing, doesn't mean it's going to work the way you envision it. Once you and your troops are out in the open and attacking, something you didn't anticipate will come around the corner. You can take and then hold a perfect defensive position for what seems like hours mowing down bad guys, but when you pull your troops out and try to advance deeper into the level, the Soviets will almost definitely re-take that position and be waiting for you should you ever come back that way.

The multiplayer game seems like a bit of an afterthought and mimics the single-player game by asking players to raise the flag of their nation in enemy territory while defending their territory from the same thing. It's good but it's not the crux of the game.

Graphics
Given what this game is trying to do, the graphics are very impressive. Moving from indoor to outdoor environments and back again is very smooth even if the free camera exposes a lot of ugly little things about Freedom Fighters. Just because we have control of the camera doesn't mean that we should be able to jam it up into corner and catch all kinds of clipping and seams whenever we want. The system is very similar to the one found in Hitman 2 and unfortunately presents the same sort of problems.

The environments are very well done in that much of what you can see, you can reach on foot. Balconies, blown-out buildings, warehouse catwalks are all fair game in Freedom Fighters and will be put to good use by the Soviets and the Americans at every chance. If you're sniping from a window, enemies can infiltrate the structure and will try to sneak up on you because they can get up there the same way you did. Piles of garbage or scrap metal, not to mention stairs, can be climbed by any character in the game.

The lighting in Freedom Fighters is very good. Flickering flames, muzzle flashes and time of day all throw dynamic lighting effects on everything in the game world. The colors in the game are sharp and crisp without being too bright. This is an occupied New York City we're talking about here. The subtle differences like cold weather clothing and the leaves changing color also help convey the mood of the changing seasons in the city as well.

Sound
The voice acting is well done and you get a surprising amount of dialogue during missions from both Stone and characters around him. The battle sounds are also good with different automatic weapon sounds and various types of explosions.

The Russian accents may not be authentic but they're what a North American audience would expect and come off very well during the in-game cutscenes. During gameplay, you'll be able to hear Soviet soldiers barking orders and talking excitedly often before you even see them. Stone give a verbal command sometimes when you're issuing battlefield commands to your AI teammates. When you try to recruit new fighters and you don't have enough charisma a smart-assed answer like "Find someone else to fight the war!" tells you to takle a walk. When you talk to average citizens around, they'll have believable New York accents and attitude.

Too often some bits of dialogue will bleed into others especially if you initiate two conversations too close to one another. Talking to a citizen, giving an order and recruiting a new fighter will initiate all three dialogue streams and they will all be on top of each other.

The musical score is outstanding. The orchestral arrangements certainly sound like music Russian nobles would listen to and so that means it's good enough for Soviet soldiers walking around Wall Street. The music was a strong point of Hitman 2 and it seems IO Interactive has done it again.

Verdict

Freedom Fighters is a game that gets better the more you play it. The challenge increases at the same rate as your skills and abilities so that you're really appreciating the level of control you've got toward the end and the cool action you can create because of it. Obviously an online component would be a wonderful addition but for what it is Freedom Fighters is pretty satisfying. You just wish your running, gunning and commanding skills, once developed, could be applied in other ways against online competitors.

Even fans of super rich tactical simulations will get a kick out of Freedom Fighters's easy interface and well developed AI. It occupies that area between all of the other games in the genre by limiting you to one character to control, offering a third-person perspective and using only three basic commands. Even without a fancy license like Red Dawn or some other Russo-American themed movie or show, Freedom Fighters works as a change of pace.