It’s only $7.49. I’m a fan of superheroes and computer games, so this seems like a perfect fit. Is it any good?
It’s awesome, grab it. Third Reich is also pretty damn good.
Both are excellent games. They play from a top down perspective and you control a team of up to four heroes at a time. The game takes place in real time, slightly reminiscent of an RTS, but you can pause at any time to give orders and such. Most of the heroes have interesting powers, so it’s fun to play around with different combinations. There’s a feature to let you design your own heroes, but it’s very poorly balanced in the first game. If that’s important to you, I’d suggest skipping directly to the sequel (if you’re buying it off steam, $7.50 gets you both games). In case it isn’t obvious, the game is very, very campy. I haven’t played either in a long time, though, so I can’t guarantee they haven’t started to show their ages.
And if I recall correctly, Bullet is very overpowered as a hero.
I would highly recommend the original game, though I never got around to picking up the sequel. If you ever played Baldur’s Gate, the basic play style will be familiar to you - it’s a turn-based game presented in real time, where you can pause at any time to issue orders. For any given mission you have to choose four out of an ever-larger roster of heroes, so there’s a tactical element in deciding which characters to use - some have very powerful attacks but get knocked out easily, whereas others can stand up to a pounding but don’t deal much damage, and others still have very situational abilities depending on what kind of enemies you’ll be facing. It’s just difficult enough to keep you trying over and over again to beat a mission, without making you pull your hair out and give up. The plot is pretty derivative, but as it’s a Silver Age pastiche it comes with the territory. You’ll recognize most of the characters - there’s the Captain America expy, the Iron Man expy, the Aquaman expy, and so on. If it’s that cheap on Steam right now, by all means go for it.
I would also highly recommend them both. Third Reich commits one of the big sin of sequels, which is to say it needlessly streamlines complexities and as such does away with some of the strategy, but then it also corrects some imbalances, overpowerdnesses and annoyances so it’s a wash.
Both of the single player campaigns are pretty good and manage to be both hilariously camp and surprisingly tense, and while they can seem rather short (esp. Third Reich) there are some pretty awesome fan-made ones out there so if you do get hooked with the gameplay, you can keep playing for a long time.
And yes, Bullet is completely OP :), but then you get him fairly late in the first game ; and he’s out of commission for much of the second so he’s not that bad.
OTOH Tombstone, the Spawn spoof of the second game, is just ridiculous once you unlock his possession power. He can possess anything, up to and including bosses. Pummelling possessed foes does not break the possession. The possession lasts long enough for the “mana” used to cast it to regenerate entirely. So, um, yeah…
You can usually pick up both of them for 5 bucks or less during a sale.
Yeah, speed in general is utterly broken in the first game. Then again, I like to munchkin the hell out of it…creating a custom speedster with flying, ranged blasts and a low level super-low-cost melee attack makes me giggle.
I’d definitely recommend both games.
And in my opinion, Microwave was the overpowered one. One of his abilities (I can’t recall which one, off the top of my head), when only slightly overcharged, makes the final boss vulnerable to everything with a 100% hit chance. There was a reason he was always on my team for the final mission.
Microwave was certainly OP in the first game, if only because all of his attacks dealt Radiation damage and pretty much every last enemy type was vulnerable to it. That he could add other vulnerabilities was just a cherry on top of him and his clones destroying everything.
That being said, he was also painfully slow-moving so he was not as OP as some other top tier characters and a poor choice on many missions because of it (until you got his teleport, in which case he was chronically short on energy instead. Unless you tag-teamed him with Manbot for maximum cheesage, that is :))
Thanks for your info everyone. I’m downloading them now (got both) and I’ll report back when I’ve played them.
Man, I hadn’t thought about this game in a long time. It captured that one element that nearly all superhero games up to that point had missed - fun.
For Freedom!!!
Loved the first one, bought the second one - never installed the second one, because of its odious copy protection. StarForce or SecuROM, I forget which.
Both FF and FFvt3R are awesome games. After you play through the first few missions, you’ll earn enough XP that you can start thinking about creating custom characters and recruiting them. In both games, you can make entertainingly OP characters.
There are still many good sets of skins and meshes (character models) out there - search for “freedom force skins and meshes” to get a wide range of options. You can have all sorts of copyright-infringing fun in the privacy of your own home. 