Freedom Fighters Preview

1945: Soviet air force drops the A-bomb on Berlin, ending WWII in Europe.

1953: Britain reluctantly joins the Communist bloc, the last European country to do so.

1961: Despite US protests, midrange nuclear missiles are placed in Cuba.

1976: The Soviet Union sends thousands of military "advisors" to Guatemala and Honduras.

1996: Mexican Communist party celebrates disputed victory in presidential election.

2001: Foiled assassination attempt on the US president--an unnamed foreign power is implicated.

Yesterday: Reports of low-flying drones from all over the US. The government dismisses the sightings as weather balloons.

This chain of events forms the ominous preamble to Freedom Fighters, a squad-based action game being developed by Hitman creator Io Interactive. What if the Soviet Union had dominated the Cold War era, spreading Communist ideology and influence around the world and becoming the dominant superpower? What if the United States' own infrastructure had crumbled during this time period, allowing the USSR to invade the nation at its weakest moment? What if a simple plumber from New York rose up to lead a resistance movement against the Red invasion? Freedom Fighters answers these questions with objective-based gameplay that's heavy on both shootouts and strategy.

The core gameplay mechanics in Freedom Fighters are pretty simple to grasp. You control the main character, Chris Stone, from the third-person perspective, and you wield a variety of weapons and military hardware against the invading Soviet forces. As you conduct your guerilla operations against the enemy, you'll acquire an array of weapons, including pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, grenades, and Molotov cocktails. Thankfully, the game provides a significant degree of auto-aiming--you really only have to be facing in the general direction of an enemy and Chris will automatically fire at him. You can also switch to a first-person viewpoint to take shots at enemies who are hiding behind cover or go for a headshot. Thanks to the aiming assistance, you're free to spend less time adjusting your aim and more time finding cover, maneuvering around, and setting up squad-level tactics, which lends the firefights a satisfying cinematic quality.

The teammate mechanics set Freedom Fighters apart from other action games. As you might expect, Chris is hardly alone in his desire to liberate New York--there are plenty of other common citizens willing to pick up a rifle and join the fight. You can recruit these would-be soldiers to fight alongside you during your missions, and the game features an easy-to-use interface for issuing orders to them during the action. There are three basic orders--advance, fall back, and defend--and each one is mapped to a single button. If you tap a command button, that order will be issued to the nearest teammate, but if you press and hold it, the order will be issued to the entire squad. The advance command causes your squad to move forward and attack nearby enemies, and if you're looking at a particular enemy, they'll go directly for him, which is useful if there's a particular soldier who's causing you problems. You can further fine-tune your orders by switching to first-person mode, which allows you to target specific points on the ground for your soldiers to move to or defend. The interface for directing your teammates is easy to get used to, and you'll be moving your squad around like it's second nature pretty quickly.

The members of the resistance won't trust your command right off the bat, though, so you'll have to work to earn their respect. Freedom Fighters' charisma system keeps track of the good deeds you've done, such as helping out wounded soldiers, and you'll gain a charisma level after you've done enough good. Each level adds another member to your squad, and eventually you'll have a team of 12 at your disposal. The teammate AI in the current build of the game is pretty good, and your allies will often make it possible to overwhelm enemy fortifications that you'd have no chance of taking on your own.

Lately, multiplatform games have become so common and the differences between them have become so obvious that when picking a platform, you automatically want to play a game on the Xbox or the PC simply for the increased graphical fidelity. That said, Freedom Fighters is actually looking very good for a PlayStation 2 game, even in its prerelease state, and we'd have no problem with the visuals if it were the only version we were allowed to play. The embattled streets of New York are suitably wrecked, with debris and junked cars everywhere, and the lighting model looks very good and adds a lot to the atmosphere that an occupied city ought to have. As time passes, you'll even see the seasons change, so the visuals will have quite a bit of variety as you progress toward liberty.

Judging from what we've played so far, Freedom Fighters is a damn cool game. The combat is incredibly intense when you're running for cover amid a hail of bullets, yelling commands at your troops, and watching a frenzied firefight unfold. There are a lot of little touches that enhance the "wow" factor of the game--for instance, you can spray a parked car that enemies are hiding behind with weapons fire, causing it to explode and send the soldiers flying in every direction. Freedom Fighters' combat is fast, dynamic, and fun, and we look forward to seeing how Io improves the game as its September release date approaches.