I finally played this after putting it on the back burner for a couple of years. The visual presentation is still very impressive and I love the landscape, sunsets and car designs. In terms of gameplay it is unfortunately very basic. The camps are all too similar, I liked the one that was stationed on a bridge which you can snipe out from afar. That kind of variety is very rare. I did most of the side missions but the overall story is not very engaging and quite short. There was a lot of potential here but they did only the bare minimum. Max is incredibly unlikeable and all his choices feel unnecessary stupid. Choices, that would have been nice to be in the hands of the player. This feels like watching a bad movie where the protagonist does the worst decision on every little corner. It would have been nice to be able to pit certain factions against each other too. This felt a little bit like they had three years to make a game but then cut it down to half, so a lot of features got axed along the way. All the bosses are the same guy with a different costume, just add more henchmen. I liked attacking convoys and that should have been the real boss fights in my opinion. It would have been great to attack several different heavily guarded war rigs or switch cars mid-chase, join Scavengers or jump unto a truck. The movies have all these great ideas what to do during a chase and the game gives us the bare bones. Instead we get artificial little fetch quests like all these mini scavenger spots. The map is littered with them, but I wish we got less of those and more high memorable enemy encounters. A game that needed much, much more polish to compete with the best open world games out there. 5 out of 10
Freedom Fighters is a mix of a tactical shooter and 3rd person action bonanza. It is neither great in any of those two areas but the combination of those two, weirdly works pretty well. The tactical aspect is very, very simplistic in away that you have only three commands (defense - offense or regroup) but the game encourages you to go flank the enemy. And there are good spots to do that if you're willing to explore the area before going in guns blazing. Nonetheless the limitations, I think it's a good game for people who want to dip their toes into the tactical genre. For those who like more sophisticated tactics in a shooter should go for the Brothers in Arms series (although it's a 1st person shooter). FF story and voice acting is preposterous. But it comes with the era when video-games weren't being taken seriously. Hackneyed stories and over-the-top voice acting was still the norm back in those days. I kindaiss these kind of games though. Although I have never played this game back then, I have played it for the first time now on GOG. There were a few bugs I encountered, like crashing during a rescue mission early on. Which was resolved through playing in admin mode. There was trouble with the aiming mode on some of the last missions, especially when your standing in front of an object, box or peeking from a wall, the aiming glitched and I had to shoot from the hip for the rest of the mission. Overall I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it's also very short, I finished it in almost 2 days. I wish there were some custom missions or boss fights, or other playable rebels with different attributes to extend the playtime. I think this game could have benefitted from a sequel where the mechanics could be further developed. Still a recommend from me in sale for the nostalgic gamers or for casual gamers who like their games simple.
I commend the game for mixing genres and trying something new. Unfortunately they haven't really finetuned the gameplay and forgot to include explanations for several mechanics. All the items you loot will weigh you down until you move as fast as a turtle, but you can't sell 90% of them, even though they looked valuable to me (elite weapons). The side quests are way too long and stretched out all over the map which feels like doing fetch-quests rather than engaging in a side story. I know it is to familiarize with the terrain and the different regions, but exploring new areas is not as fun. Since everytime I want to get to a certain place, it's often only possible through a 10min detour to another region (you'll be walking A LOT). I like the idea of activating traveling trains via sneaking into the enemy's base. But they are so heavily guarded it's going into a hornet's nest armed with a spoon. Shooting your way in is suicide, which leaves only disguising yourself as a guard. Tried it several times, the guards often spot me from far. The game never establishes guidelines what works and what doesn't. I like the isometric perspective but for parcour climbing, sneaking, breaking-in it can be a nightmare. It needed at least better color design to distinguish upper levels from lower ones. Figuring out how to enter a building can be a puzzle of the frustrating kind - everything is so small that you can miss a vent or opening. I really wished there was a better zoom function. This game would play probably gangbusters on a Nintendo 3Ds where you can take advantage of the stereoscopic depth of field. The story didn't grip me so I left the game after completing roughly 25%. The world building and the apocalyptic factions and religious groups seemed to me indistinguishable from another. I didn't know exactly who I'm doing favors for, nor did I care. It's too bad since there is a really good game here that gets bogged down by the mechanics buggy quests and an unreliable map.
I have to admit that I'm new to this kind of games. Since it was cheap on sale I wanted to give it a shot. Of course my decision was influenced by me playing the old The Thing PC game from the early 2000's. But I was well aware that this is clearly settled in the tactical genre, with a rogue like twist. But overall there was such a lack of direction that it left me cold (no pun intended). The objectives are vague, not really engaging either. The characters have slightly different attributes but I wished one of them had some kind of special ability, like one is pretty good in cooking, one is a very good mechanic and needs less resources to repair devices and so on... It is also lacking in creating an eerie atmosphere, be it with music/sound design, settings or with the monsters. Overall I expected more interactive elements like one character can block the door while the other searches for loot, or the possibility to get out of a window. Since it's a rouge game there isn't a compelling story that sucks you in either. Like I said, I'm kinda new to this micro managing games and this one didn't really inspire me to delve deeper into the genre.
