Freedom Force was a special, magical game. It had charm and heart oozing out of every bit and it just felt right. Freedom Force 2 does a lot of the same things well. The main thing that changed between the two games was balance. In the original, some of your characters like Minuteman and Bullet were fast, accurate and good at dodging. They were perfect for stopping groups of gangsters and saving civilians. Meanwhile, characters like Manbot and El Diablo were power houses more suited to going up against giant robots. Send Bullet after a giant robot and he'll get smashed. Send Manbot to save a lady from a group of thugs and his slow attack animation and low accuracy will doom him to failure. But that was okay! Not all superheroes are created equal. Sometimes, you need Thor and other times you need Ant-Man. It gave the game strategic flavor and brought the story to life. In Freedom Force 2, the characters were rebalanced so that pretty much everybody had a medium strength melee attack and a low damage medium range attack. The characters were more equal but some of the heart was lost. There were no missions you needed to bring Man-O-War because a flier with electric and water attacks was especially useful, no missions where you needed Eve's ranged accuracy over El Diablo's pure firepower. You could just bring whoever. Didn't matter. The story is also less varied. While FF1 had you going up against Soviet mutants, Greek gods, alien invaders, super powered gangsters, giant robots, evil duplicates and time displaced dinosaurs, FF2 has you fighting the axis powers and that's about it. Still, it's a solid game and Tombstone is awesome.
