Freedom Fighters

Genre:	Third-Person Action
Developer:	Io Interactive
Publisher:	Electronic Arts
Release Date:	1 October 2003
Released On:	Xbox, PS2, PC

Amazing Ben Describes the Plot in 10 Words or Less: 

Lead the underground resistance against a Soviet invasion of America.

Overview: 

Freedom Fighters can best be described as "Red Dawn:  the video game".

The game takes place in an alternate reality future in which the Cold War never ended.  You play as New York City plumber Chris Stone, a regular guy who leads a pretty regular life until one morning he wakes up to find that the United States has been invaded by the Soviet Union all of a sudden somehow.  Mi-24 Hind attack choppers swoop overhead and Soviet troops bust into the apartment building he's working in and begin exerting their control on the populace.  You take control of Chris just in time to bust some Communist bastards' heads open with a plumber's wrench and manage to escape the carnage by ducking into the city's sewer system.  From then on, it's up to you to organize the American underground resistance and try to weaken the Soviet power base in the United States.  Good luck.

The game plays like a standard behind-the-back third-person run-and-gun, where you end up sprinting through the burned out streets of New York blasting Russkies with their own AK-47s and recruiting fighters for your cause.  The gameplay is excellent, and victory requires a good mix of strategy and aim-and-spray elements.  You can't just run through every level and not get blown into tiny pieces, but you can also take a generous amount of damage before they finally take you down, probably because you're so pumped up with USA patriotism that every time a bullet hits your flesh you sing The Star Spangled Banner and sprout an American Eagle tattoo with the phrase "Never Forget" written above it.

You are also able to take control of other resistance fighters whenever you come across them, getting them to join your squad and aid you in your full-scale assault of a Soviet movie theater/command center/popsicle stand.  The game's squad mechanics work pretty well and it's usually not too difficult to get your men into about the right position most of the time.  The AI isn't perfect and you can really only issue a couple of orders - wait, defend, and attack - but when you're standing outside a warehouse loaded with Spetznatz paratroopers and RPG troops you're really going to appreciate the fact that you can send your other guys in there first, since if they go down in combat you can always just revive them with an extra medpac.

The graphics are excellent, the controls are tight and the level design is straightforward.  Most of the voice acting in this game is pretty well-done also;  The Soviet troops all speak their native Russian and the plot is advanced via relatively-entertaining cutscenes involving news reports from the newly-reformatted television station.  These are mostly small things, but they really add a lot to the experience.

X-Tremeness Level: 

Transforming into John Rambo and punching Josef Stalin in the face with a set of brass knuckles.

Overall Badassitude Score: 

You would be incredibly hard-pressed to come up with a more badass subject for a video game.  It's a wonder nobody came up with something like this before, because it's really just perfect.  Even if the gameplay sucked (which is doesn't), this game would probably still rock the ass off of a fifteen year old donkey.  Running around the ruins of New York with your squad engaging in large-scale firefights with Russian regular infantry while you're launching RPGs at Soviet APCs and wasting enemy soldiers with a high-powered sniper rifle is incomparably cool.

Chris Stone is also pretty awesome as far as main characters go.  He's tough, and he understands enough about being a badass that he knows not to talk a whole lot.  He just lets his automatic weapons do all the talking.  It's better that way.  Even his name is tough.  You can't argue with a name like Chris Stone.  However, the only reason this game gets a 4 instead of a perfect 5 is because he's wearing a New York Yankees hat in the opening level and it's a pretty well-known fact that the Yankees Suck.

      

SCORE:  4 out of a possible 5 bikini babes with Soviet hats and Russian-made RPD light machine guns.

Addictiveness: 

RATING:  Communism to a disenfranchised college student.

I played this game through in about a week and a half and it was absolutely time well-spent.  It's about nine hours of game time which is a good length since there are only so many different directions you can go with this sort of thing without it becoming redundant or repetitive.  The levels are all varied enough that you'll always be interested in what's coming next and the rush of the heated gun battles in the later levels will keep you glued to the screen.  Once you get into it you won't want to put it down.

Multiplayer Component: 

There's a four-player split-screen king-of-the-hill mode where each person takes control of a squad and everyone just battles it out.

Hot Andrea's Take: 

"You shouldn't go into that room next time.  It's full of guys who just kicked your ass."

Awesometer Score: 

+5

Freedom Fighters is a solid game.  If action shooters are your style, you will not be sorry for picking this one up.  Once you play through it once there's not a whole lot of reason for you to pick it up again for a while, but everything works so well that there really isn't a good reason to miss this game.