I ran into this sweet little gem around July 5, 2005; I visited a gaming store in the Rivercenter Mall in San Antonio, Texas and purchased a PC four-pack of unknown-to-me games for a hair under ten dollars USD. At first, I was quite daunted and intimidated by the game, but I quickly became more than merely familiar with it. Now, I literally know every square inch of the game, and even so, I still enjoy playing it from time to time.
The premise is somewhat overlooked in PC gaming, alternate history set in contemporary America wherein the Iron Curtain never fell. The Mario Brothers take on the Evil Red Empire. Okay, they're not the Mario Brothers explicitly, but they're plumbers, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see a kernel of related inspiration here.
For its time, the game was a technological marvel, and the AI was astoundingly sophisticated. I paid attention to the little blurb on the game cover attesting to the fact that the game was developed using technology responsible for gamers' experiences in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, yet another game [franchise] new to me. Once I bought that game, I was hooked.
Now, at the time that Freedom Fighters was new, but had been out of development for a while, the Hitman franchise was well on its way with the recent release of Hitman [3]: Contracts, which was actually a much-needed remake of the first game, Hitman: Codename 47. Back to Freedom Fighters, though:
Freedom Fighters was very well-received, especially in Germany, and some Russian (Ukrainian, actually) girlfriends told me that their boyfriends back home were familiar with the game and thought it was hilarious. There's a lot of seemingly-authentic Russian dialogue, but, frankly, the voice actors were pretty hit-and-miss with their pronunciation, and the messages were often puzzling. "Death to the Reds!" was a phrase often hollered by the invading Soviet soldiers, "Smiert greesam" supposed to be understood as "Smiert Krisam!"
Many users of that game were eagerly discussing the sequel in development, Freedom Fighters 2, and fairly salivating at its publication…but, alas! The fourth game in the Hitman Franchise spelled its premature death; IO Interactive announced that there would be no Freedom Fighters 2, that it's development staff had been reassigned to the Hitman: Blood Money project. It was a sad day in Mudville (baseball literary allusion).
There are two different versions of the PC demo; the scrapped one features a vehicle that was dropped from the final version of the game, a terrifying creation, an armored little thing with a terrible machine gun.
By today's standards, it's a terrible game. But, I started electronically gaming before there was even such a thing as personal computers, with my Atari Pong console back in 1978. Freedom Fighters is actually a pretty cool game. I probably have somewhere between three and five thousand hours of its gameplay under my belt. The only bad thing I have to say about the PC version is NO MULTIPLAYER—it's singleplayer-only.