Freedom Force: What were your custom heroes?

So it’s too damn bad that Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich tanked, because I’m playing it now (hooray for backlogs!) and it is really a chewy creamy slice of pure Kirby-esque campy goodness. Mentorrr always cracks me up. They’re so SERIOUS!

It’s also crappy at a gameplay level because I don’t know of any other superhero game that lets you really design your own hero from scratch the way Freedom Force did. The Freedom Force system is almost Champions-esque in its depth of character design possibilities, and dammit I MISS THAT. Try doing that in your stinkin’ Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

Anyway, just wondering what characters you all made (assuming you can remember, it’s not like this game didn’t come out in 2004 or anything). Here are mine:

DARKLAW: Kind of a Batman/Wolverine character, I gave him the Thug 1 voice. He’s reasonably tough, with claws, fast healing, sprint, and superjump. He is your standard unstoppable scrapper, I sic him on just about anybody because it’s fun to watch him get smacked all over the map, get up, and keep on wailing away.

RADEEMER: She’s a radiation sniper. Her main power is a 627-point (!) beam energy blast, with the Beam ability (which is definitely overpowered but isn’t powergaming part of the fun? Yes, yes it is), max accuracy, penetration, and zero endurance. Plus flight, of course. She just flies around at top speed (she’s fast, too) and zaps everyone all day long, she can take out your standard guard in one or two hits at the most, and when energized she’s great for bosses. You have to be careful about friendly fire with her, she’ll happily go right through a bunch of your guys, but they’ll survive, what else is Heroic Revival for?

I don’t have a whole lot in the way of backstory for these two – it’s too bad the custom character system doesn’t let you enter your own backstory. If I did, it would be something like, Darklaw was a bad guy who got in too deep with a weird gang that turned out to be a satanic cult, and found himself the unwilling star of a sacrificial ritual that went wrong after he managed to break free at a crucial moment. The ritual wound up investing him with demonic powers that he now uses for good, having seen how close he almost came to damnation.

Radeemer was a brilliant young physics student when her radiation energy transfer work was patented and sold to a military corporation that was secretly a terrorist front. She found out about it and was in the middle of deleting her files when the security forces attacked her lab trying to salvage what was left. In the fray, she irradiated herself with her own equipment, and acquired radiation powers of incredible focus and strength, as well as the ability to suspend herself on the Earth’s magnetic field. She couldn’t stop some of her work from being destroyed, and now she works to redeem herself.

Ah, it’s nice having read so many comic books, the cliches are at one’s fingertips :-) What about you all? Come on, spill the geekness, you know you want to. And for FUCK’S SAKE, game developers, MAKE MORE DESIGN-YOUR-OWN-HERO GAMES!!! Are there ANY on the horizon?




I never created a custom character. I was able to appreciate the humor of the setting, but not enough to roleplay a character of my own creation.

It’s too bad the game wasn’t turn-based and didn’t have the 4X elements of JA2. A dynamic campaign across a cityscape would have been awesome!

The mission-based structure as opposed to a free-roaming (more RPG-esque) nature kept me from getting too involved with the game.


I liked making the textures more than playing the game ;)

Quoted for truthiness.

I loved the Freedom Force games. I really hope to see more but I doubt it. There is a rumor that Freedom Force might end up on Gametap. Maybe open the game to people who wouldn’t try it.

I wouldn’t want to see a turn based Freedom Force. A free form city would of been cool but I’m not sure how adaptable the focused story would of been to that.

Here are some heroes I made for the game (the first two are “original”) My tiny graphics aren’t as good as others I know.

Electric Lady

Tom Steel

Kill Joy

The Unbreakable

Holy shit, Moore. Awesome. Oculon looks fucked, in a good yet disturbing way. Get that bastard some Chapstick STAT.

I don’t see how they could have had nearly the amount of cheesy dialogue and elaborate character introductions with a more open-world format, and without the cheesy dialogue it just wouldn’t be the same.

Still, I did spend hours building Champions characters EVEN THOUGH I NEVER HAD ANYONE TO PLAY WITH, so I apparently have some unhealthy fetish for superhero-character-construction systems. I have zero artistic talent and it never occurred to me to do any custom artwork.

Moore, care to say more about what those characters’ powers were, or have you forgotten all that tedious gameplay due to the sheer joy of your (admittedly delightful) pixel-pushery? Same goes for you, Merritt.

Did it really tank that badly? I remember really loving both the Freedom Force games. Enough that I actually finished them, which is something I usually never get around to doing.

I have no idea where to even start for making textures or models in games, but I did enjoy making stuff with the character creator. Not so much for heavy roleplaying as playing with the powers. My favorite ones were a guy who used a blast radius around him to cause everything inanimate to violently explode in flames around him, and a chick whose every power was pretty much throwing people around with knockback. Because knockback in FF is the greatest thing EVER. I never tired of powers that would fling enemies all the way across the level, or throw them into the sky.

Right! Knockback! Good point! Once I max out Radeemer’s main beam, I’ll add some kind of mega-knockback explosion to help with mob control. Maybe Darklaw will get a knockback punch too.

mine got used for a neat ff mod. i’m very proud of that. the mod author made some slight backstory changes (and major powers ones for game balance)

http://mike.va.com.au/navigator/slug.htm

the important detail, of course is the giant green symbiote worm attached to her brain that gives her superpowers.

hahaha, knockback was the greatest thing! my favorite tactic on any floating platform level in ff was to have Alchemiss push all the enemies off the edge.

Electric Lady had an electric range attack and could fly.

Tom Steel was strong and fairly tough. He is also the one I fleshed out the most and played a complete campaign with. The character is based on an actual person. The man is named Tom and he worked with steel in a metal shop where I work. His origin: Tom was a working in the Patriot City Steel Mill when a canister of Energy X fell from the sky and knocked him into a vat of molten steel. Although he hung on to the railing with his left hand, his co-workers were sure he was dead. However what they didn’t know was that Energy X combined with Tom and the steel. They were amazed that he climbed out but he was no longer Tom. He was now Tom Steel. FYI Tom in real life has a clef lip and his in game alter ego was drawn to reflect that.

Killjoy is a long forgotten superhero from the mind of Steve Ditko. He only appears in two issues of Charlton Comics’ Blue Beatle as a backup story. He was fairly fast, could climb walls. I don’t remember exactly but I gave him some sort of panic power. I think.

The Unbreakable was just really really hard to kill or knockout.

As far as I can tell, they didn’t tank but weren’t hits either. The second one did slightly worse than expect and that sort of killed plans of doing a third I guess

I agree completely. I can’t believe there aren’t more superhero CRPGs out there.

I read somewhere that the FF sequel was intended to be more dynamic/free, but due to time/budget constraints it became FFvT3R.

There are one or two free roaming mods available, and having taken a quick look at the python scripts it seems possible to make it into some kind of a JA-esque dynamic campaign. Too bad the community seems to be dying off.

If FF had been turnbased it might have been my favorite game of all time.I loved the comic atmosphere,dialogue,and characters.

But after a half dozen missions,I could no longer handle the combat.:(

I bought FF vs TR in the bargain bin for 10 bucks and never even installed it.

But I was looking for something new to play today and this thread may have inspired me to put up with the combat for awhile…

One of the expansion releases was starforced, too. Fortunately the game and expansion arrived on Metaboli recently.

?? Freedom Force had no expansions?

Well, I consider vs. The Third Reich sort of an expansion :P
(It’s late/early and my brain is not working at all!)

I know. Why doesn’t anybody get this?

Irrational, if you would have made the game turn-based and thrown in randomized missions, you would have had a classic for the ages. As it is, you have a wonderfully crafted game that not that many people really want to play. I played it up to a point, but like Lloyd it eventually got to be too demanding and tiresome. (Same with FF vs. TR, which I liked better.)

Hm. As a fellow fan of turn-based combat, I had no problem with the FFs at all. I paused a lot, naturally.

Seeing as it required texture creation, I never got terribly far with character creation in Freedom Force. If it had had a character creator ala City of Heroes, I would have been all over it.