Freedom Fighters, A Cult Classic From Hitman Dev, Has Returned On PC

Update: As speculated, IO Interactive's cult classic game Freedom Fighters has been re-released on PC, 17 years after its original debut. The title is available now on Steam and GOG, and is coming to the Epic Games Store soon. It's available for 33% off during its release week, and comes with the Jesper Kyd soundtrack as a bonus. This is a re-release, not a remake or remaster, so it looks and feels a lot like it did back in 2003. The game was published by EA prior to IO's acquisition by Square Enix.

Unfortunately, there's no indication of the game coming to modern consoles. It is not part of the Xbox One backwards compatibility program. We also couldn't get the game to play on Xbox 360 when we last tried.

The original story follows.

Freedom Fighters, the 2003 cult classic from Hitman developer IO Interactive, might be making a comeback. The game, which was published by EA on PC, PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, has received a new rating from PEGI for PC.

The rating, which was discovered and shared by ResetEra user dex3108, lists the publisher as IO Interactive. The studio went independent in 2017 after parting ways with Square Enix, and is currently working on Hitman 3. The release date is listed as September 21, 2020, but that could be a placeholder.

This could mean that the game is receiving a re-release, as the listing is identical from the previous entries aside from the publisher. The game is unavailable digitally, and is beloved enough that a touched-up re-release makes sense.

None of this is confirmed, but past precedent suggests that this rating could mean the game is going to be made available again soon.

Freedom Fighters received a 9.3/10 in GameSpot's original review, and is often held up as a forgotten classic of its era. The game depicts an alternate-reality version of the US that has been taken over by the Soviet Union, and players took control of the eponymous freedom fighters looking to liberate the country.