Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

I just finished this game last week, and it was a blast.

As an overall summary, if you liked or hated the first game, you will like or hate the sequel about as much. The graphics are a little prettier and more detailed, the UI has some nice tweaks added, but basically it's the same game with a new storyline.

If you haven't played the first one yet, by all means track down a copy and play it before playing the sequel. Although the high points of the backstory are filled in by the intro movie, it's much more fun (and engaging) to play through them - especially because the sequel must inherently include some spoilers for the plot twists in the original.

My biggest complaint about the game was that it was over a little too fast - only about 20 hours of playtime, taking my time but not including time taken to find and download some new character meshes for custom characters and build their power sets. On the good side, the original game was slightly longer but achieved that by adding some relatively boring fill-in battles just before the big confrontation. This one kept the excitement curve going all the way.

As with the original, you are playing through several related, sequential story arcs of a virtual comic book. The actual time-travelling fights against the Nazis are only about a third of the overall content. To say anything more would be a spoiler.

So, what's new this time around? Probably the most important thing is a refinement on the automatic repeating attacks. In the original, any melee attack would be auto-repeated until the character ran out of endurance. This was bad because it forced you to micromanage ranged-centric characters and those with nice but energy-hungry melee attacks. In the sequel, any attack with no endurance cost will be repeated automatically. Also, the standard characters were tweaked so they all had at least one no-endurance attack to use. This is much nicer, and I found I was much more able to direct combat instead of micromanaging it.

Of less importance is a minor improvement in your characters' AI. They will no longer stand stupidly when being attacked - they will counterattack. The choice of counterattack is less than optimal, though - they pretty much use the first attack on their list, which for all the stock characters is their cheap melee attack. This is better than nothing, but you will still want to pause the game and give orders to any character who you hear saying they are under attack.

There are a few new powers, a couple of which are quite cool. There are a few new characters. In particular, the WWII-era heroes are well-realized, with voice acting and characterization as good (in the same exquisite, cheesey-but-not-quite-too-cheesey way) as the original set. One of the first new additions to Freedom Force proper is particularly handy, a support character with powers to help friends and hinder foes rather than direct attacks.

One nice touch is that the power and character data for all the first game's characters (heroes and villains) is included. This means that you can use old favorite powers even if no character you will encounter has them, and that the presence of a power doesn't spoil whether or not that villain will make a comeback.

Another nice addition which I don't remember being in the first game is a random battle generator for single-player, as well as a fully-implemented multiplayer mode. This was a fine way to playtest custom character designs, and gives the game at least a little life after the storyline is done. (Only a little life, as random battles don't give experience points for future character development.)

All in all, I am very happy I bought this game. It was worth the money and the time to play, and lived up to my expectations and most of my hopes for a FF sequel.

For Freedom!