Freedom Force (NES)

There seems to be a fairly common template for light gun games, one that is used across many arcade titles and console games that use gun peripherals. Across the levels of these particular games, bad guys will pop out from places in the environment, the player’s goal to shoot them down before they get a chance to fire at them. However, these games try to make the shooting a little less mindless, making hostages or innocents pop out from the same kind of cover as the enemies, the player getting penalized if they shoot these targets. It is essentially a more dynamic version of a shooting gallery, and even though the NES’s Zapper didn’t have many compatible titles, it did manage to get a game that follows this template pretty closely called Freedom Force.

 

A group called The Unknown Guerrillas has taken over an airport in Freedom Force, and it’s on you as either Rad Rex or Manic Jackson to go in and blow the bad guys away with the help of the Zapper peripheral.  The shooting is as standard as standard can be, you point at an enemy to shoot them dead, every enemy taking a single shot to take down. If you do shoot one of the hostages or innocents who pop out completely oblivious to the gunfight going on around them, you end up getting an Error, and getting too many Errors will force a level restart. The punishment isn’t too bad really, and the innocents are fairly easy to spot since they don’t look like the members of The Unknown Guerillas at all. At worst, you may sometimes see an enemy holding a civilian hostage, but you don’t have to save them and you won’t get shot at by the guerilla holding the person captive. Freedom Force is definitely a fairly typical example of the light gun game template, the game carrying you through a few airport environments and the enemy base, your goals and the shooting remaining consistently average throughout.

This fairly basic light gun game has a few design decisions keeping it from being an acceptable addition to the NES Zapper collection. In Freedom Force, if you ever run out of health or ammo, it’s an immediate Game Over. The game is short enough that it’s not hard to restart, but the ways to earn health and ammo in game are a bit obtuse. During play, you’ll usually be aiming your weapon at the stage, waiting for an enemy to pop into view so you can put them down. However at times, in the bottom right corner of the screen, a box may light up, a power-up appearing in it that you must shoot to gain. The most important use of this box is to refill your ammo and health, the game being merciful with its ammo distribution but surprisingly tightfisted when it comes to letting you heal. If you are getting close to being out of bullets, the ammo power-up is guaranteed to flash in the corner, and most stages are already a fairly decent length where you’d only need a reload once if at all. Health, however, is an incredibly precious resource. Many enemies, if not dealt with quick enough, can chew through a big chunk of your life bar, and the health power-up has a terrible tendency to flicker for only a split second, making it near impossible to shoot it unless you were already babysitting the box. Ammo is also refilled between stages but health is not, meaning you have to complete the entire game on one health bar that is surprisingly difficult to top off.

 

Health and ammo aren’t the only things that can appear in the box. Three weapon types can crop up that will nominally change the weapon you’re using but are hardly worth the effort and barely have enough of an effect to be worth getting. The .38 Caliber boasts in the manual of its more accurate shot, but the NES Zapper already has the occasional issue reading just where you want to shoot (something that varies based on distance and T.V. type of course) and having a smaller shot that makes it less likely to hit doesn’t help, although the effects are hard to notice even if you do pick it up. The .44 Magnum claims to boost your firepower, but everything goes down in one shot already so it is once again difficult to tell if it has even done anything to alter your gunfire. The Grenade Launcher at least has a noticeable effect, your next shot blowing up everyone on screen, good or bad. You can’t hold the weapon in reserve to spare citizens though since if an enemy is on screen they’ll immediately start whittling down your precious life bar, so you pretty much have to fire it as soon as you get it and hope you won’t get too many Errors. These mostly worthless guns pollute the item box, but the real trap to be found is the Harder target. If you are desperately watching for health or ammo, you might get an itchy trigger finger and shoot whatever pops up in the box, especially since the Health item is almost never around long enough that you can afford to wait and see what the power-up is. If you do shoot Harder though, the level gets tougher, enemy guns get stronger, and considering the health bar issues, you can ill afford to make the mistake of hitting the Harder target.

The reason health becomes such a pesky concern comes down to the game’s most common enemy type: Bagman. Easily discernible in the environment and with designs that make it easy to tell them apart from civilians, they almost seem like a good fit for an enemy you will see across the entirety of the game, but they’re also the enemies best at dealing damage. If you don’t deal with them after they pop out of hiding, they’ll begin firing at you. If you’re lucky, they might be one of the weaker ones, even though losing any health is a problem due to your bar’s size. However, fairly quickly Bagmen acquire automatic weapons, and if you cannot react to their presence fast enough, they will mow you down in a second. Their weapons blast bars off your life meter so quickly that you can’t afford to ignore a single one, and since they’re the most common enemy type, you’re never safe from this threat of near-instant loss. The game probably wants you to be more scared of the guys with grenades and missile launchers, but they’re pretty much a relief! You can shoot down their explosives and they take a bit to even fire, and while the grenades and missile do tons of damage if they hit, they’re far easier to react to than an enemy with a fast-firing machine gun.

 

There are a few quirks to Freedom Force that help to make it just a little bit worse. If you hoped to beat Freedom Force through repetition and memorization, you’ll soon see the speed with which you shoot down the guerillas will determine when and how the next enemies or civilians spawn. Sometimes a quick shot can mean a brief break from enemies, but other times the screen can suddenly have a bunch pop up that makes it hard to prevent any damage to your life bar. Memorization would require not only knowing the levels but knowing when to shoot an enemy, but so long as you don’t accidentally shoot a Harder power up you’ll find most enemies easy enough to react to. When you’ve got your gun pointing properly at the screen, the shooting is as accurate as it needs to be to carry the gameplay, so it at least succeeds on that basic level. The weirder touch to Freedom Force has to be an unusual game of Hangman that crops up between a few levels. You’ll be asked to figure out a person, place, or thing, the game usually having it tie into stuff you’d find in Freedom Force, but the method for guessing letters is a bit odd. You have to shoot a letter to guess it, but the letters you are allowed to shoot slowly change based on the column they’re in. Guess wrong five times and you miss out on a point bonus, but waiting on the game to let you shoot the letters you want to guess changes an otherwise forgivable diversion into a bore. It is pretty much the only major divergence from the typical light gun game template and it fails to impress.

THE VERDICT: Freedom Force certainly fills a niche on the NES’s small library of Zapper compatible titles, but its slight deviations from the light gun game template only lead to it worsening the experience. A boring Hangman game, an unforgiving health system, and little meaningful variety means that, even though it hits most marks of being an acceptable shooter, it ends up less generically enjoyable than it should have been.

 

And so, I give Freedom Force for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. Freedom Force gets most of the basics down, and you can go quite a bit just gunning down Bagmen before you start to notice the cracks in the game design. The game is designed to trick and kill you and it doesn’t really feel all that fair when either happens, reducing it from an acceptable shooting gallery to one that you’ll lose interest in quickly. Had the game placed the power-ups, health, and ammo in the stage instead of a box where you have no time to shoot the good ones, Freedom Force would have certainly improved its issues with very little target variety and unjust difficulty. It certainly seems like the limitations exist mostly to pad the game’s short length, with only a few shorts stages and some awful hangman segments before it sets you on another loop of the game. Rather than making more content, Freedom Force stretches it out by adding annoying limitations.

 

Freedom Force can be a bit of fun for a noncommittal romp, but putting any decent amount of time in the game will show that it’s just a flawed execution of the most typical type of light gun video game.