Freedom Finger (PS4)
When your video game is based around piloting a flying middle finger, you’re going to run into a few issues when designing a game box. Even though Freedom Finger’s physical release was handled by the wonderful Limited Run Games, getting flipped off by your game collection still feels a little rude, but Freedom Finger went with a wonderful solution after being denied the right to flip everyone the bird. The box art may not be indicative of the contents, but it does carry over a wonderfully comedic tone by having the box appear almost like it was hastily slapped together in an editing program, important elements still present and the cool kid in sunglasses meant to evoke generic stock photos. Even the game disc on PlayStation 4 has an old man gasping on its top side to continue with this silly aesthetic born out of necessity, but beyond the box, Freedom Finger still has a lot more humorous ideas to offer.
As mentioned, the game is all about controlling a giant hand curled up to give the middle finger, but this is actually a strangely designed space ship known as the Eagle Claw. Taking on the role of its pilot Gamma Ray, you fly this giant mechanical finger up into space to blast away whatever lies ahead as part of a side-scrolling shoot ’em up. While shmups generally aren’t known for their plots, Freedom Finger not only pays a lot of attention to its tale but to a thematically appropriate art direction. During the scenes where characters talk, the game gives off an Adult Swim vibe and even features voice actors who have worked on the kind of adult-oriented animated comedies featured on that network. Most of the game is hand drawn save for deliberate breaks from that art direction, and while the game starts off with you flying the Eagle Claw to the moon, it goes to an incredibly wide breadth of locations that vary wildly in appearance. You might fly into an asteroid to contend with aliens or face off with some Russian space colonies as something somewhat reasonable, but when things get wild you’ll find your spacecraft carted around a child’s play area killing toys, thrown into a tribute to 80s video games, or even going through a set of shmup levels based around the retro aesthetics of the vaporwave music genre.
The adventure begins when you are told the Chinese have a moon base where they’re holding hostages you need to save, but pretty early on its clear there’s a bit more going on behind the scenes for mission. Your superior officer Major Cigar, voiced by Nolan North going hard on the character concept, is such a concentrated dose of patriotic American machismo that you won’t even need to be told his solution to whatever problems arise with the mission will be to kill everyone, grab a beer, and say it’s all justified under the nebulous idea of “freedom”. To serve as a cooler counterbalance to the barking military man is the down to earth character of Mission Control. Voiced by Sam Riegel, this intelligent and reasonable fellow starts to pick up that there might be more to this oddly unprofessional mission you are attached to. Before you even begin to see the story start to call out Major Cigar for his tirades, the load screens are already assuring you this isn’t trying to be the kind of action film released during the Cold War that assured Americans they were always in the right since almost all of the load screen quotes are U.S. presidents and politicians embarrassing themselves in one way or another.
That’s not to say this is a biting political commentary, especially since it leans into some well-tread national stereotypes for its story line. While bordering more on caricature than anything that’s trying to be incredibly offensive, the caricatures are also rather familiar ones that dampen some of the efficacy of the rapid fire jokes hurled at you during dialogue scenes. Things definitely lean into silliness more than sharp wit, but that lack of subtlety actually feels rather appropriate for a game where you’re piloting a middle finger through space and the continued embrace of ridiculousness means it can draw out laughs from strange lines, unusual action sequences, and unexpected swerves away from the kind of familiar nationalistic jokes you’ve seen before in works of a similar tone.
While at first the scenes seem mostly there to inject more chances to be absurd or deliver quick jokes, these do actually begin to play into a plot you can choose the path of. As Major Cigar rather appropriately becomes more and more like a character from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, you’ll be given a few choices that completely shift which stages you’ll be playing through. There are essentially two major paths to follow even though there are points where you can hop from one to the other depending on the dialogue choices you make for Gamma Ray, and they both end at pretty different finales that can be divided pretty clearly into a bad ending and a better ending. Both are still delightfully absurd even though the two swing between morally right and morally wrong in their tone, and if you aren’t interested in playing through the story again due to the inevitable bits of repeated content you can access every unique shoot ’em up level to play individually. These don’t carry any of the story scenes or mid-level dialogue into the stages though so you might not have any clue why you’re fighting a boss or how you ended up in that stage, but on top of some extra levels unique to this option, it is still nice to have the ability to check out the levels you missed during the linear campaign.
This has been a fair bit of discussion about a shoot ’em up’s story, character, and visuals, but thankfully the quality of the visual direction and intriguing choices for story construction aren’t the only thing making Freedom Finger an enjoyable play. The Eagle Claw is a versatile ship that asks for more than just holding down the fire button to really make the most out of clearing levels. Your regular shot is indeed a continuous spray of small energy pellets from the tip of your hand-shaped craft’s middle finger, but you also pack a literal punch that can be used to deal swift and heavy damage to enemies or barriers if you’re willing to get in close. The punch comes with that inherent danger of moving in to face something that’s probably trying to fire back at you, so picking your targets or finding the window of opportunity for this attack is important without the fist feeling so important that always feel you need to get in close and finish foes off with it.
A bit of a shakier addition to your repertoire though is the grab feature, this interesting in theory but a little rough in practice. By grabbing objects or enemy crafts, you can hurl them back to deal heavy damage and potentially tear through a wave of foes. What’s more, if you grab certain enemies, they’ll become your new weapon for a while, lasting until they’ve been destroyed while in your grip. These shots come in a variety of types such as a shotgun firing an appropriate blast, a stoner’s van that puffs out slow but damaging clouds, and many different spreads and speeds of enhanced laser fire. Not everything can be grabbed and grabbing smaller objects can leave you vulnerable whether it works or not, so besides some high value targets it can often lead to damage that isn’t worth the danger. It is just successful enough as an idea that it is worth engaging with occasionally, but the game’s high level of energy bullets, speedy enemies, and even instant death dangers encourages caution that might make you shy away from taking a risk for a new weapon type.
Luckily you do have a fair bit of health in Freedom Finger, and even if a level gives you trouble, Freedom Finger’s difficulty can be customized at any time through the pause menu. More health, not losing grabbed weapons on death, and other settings can be tweaked to try and lessen the pressure on you in a game that is definitely aiming to be rather hard. There are certainly some moments where it feels like you will first learn about what a boss can do or what dangers a specific area has by dying to them, and a death does lead to a full level reset. Levels do often come to a rather abrupt end though if they’re not boss stages, but that is because every level of Freedom Finger is actually set to music that helps clue you into how the enemies will behave. Tracks from various genres and artists are on show, the hip hop artist Aesop Rock perhaps the biggest name but there are many quality tracks that match the action to be found even if some might get a little too intense to really match to the rhythm focused fights. Attacks will stick to the tempo of the song, meaning heavy metal or aggressive rock tends to come at you faster but more relaxed music tends to favor slow moving foes who still pose a challenge either due to their numbers, durability, or the damage they can deal if they succeed at their slower attacks. If the music stops or has an abrupt quiet period, the enemies and all their bullets will even freeze, sometimes giving you the time to find the safe spot or even clear one yourself, and learning to dodge with the beat as attacks activate in a pattern that aligns with it definitely gives the dodging and enemy shooting more depth than one might have initially expected.
Taking out enemies in general is important as well. A stealth meter exists that goes up if you let enemies by without blowing them up and will lead to a loss if it fills up, and while you can disable this in the menu, an aggressive approach to taking down foes means this meter might as well not be a factor. The game isn’t absurd with its requirements, and usually as long as you’re blasting whatever you can you’ll be fine. Since many levels often feature split paths where you can’t quite possibly shoot down every foe, it’s clear you’re not expected to do perfectly either, and this mostly exists to motivate you to always be firing on enemies and fighting back rather than finding the safe parts of the screen so you can focus solely on survival. In a sense it works like old platform games with level timers, where you often only encountered them if you were playing at a slow and steady pace out of fear rather than enjoying the level design and challenge. Freedom Finger’s varied enemy concepts mix well with the continuous shift in area concepts and you’ll actually mostly see new content as you move forward from major setting to major setting, so being encouraged to get in there and be aggressive certainly seems like a good fit for this action-packed shooter.
THE VERDICT: While some of its jokes and characters feel a little trite, Freedom Finger is clearly a game looking to embrace the absurd, even the premise alone amusing before you add in the strange dialogue and fighting in absurd shoot ’em up levels. It’s a game that brings much of its creativity to its enemy and level design, setting all the action to music that makes the difficulty easier to handle while still being a compelling challenge. The Eagle Claw has a good set of tricks to pull from even if they’re not all perfectly realized, but Freedom Finger’s small deficiencies are easy to sweep away because it hits enough of the right notes with its enjoyably silly story, distinct art style, and exciting shoot ’em up action.
And so, I give Freedom Finger for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating. While an embrace of ridiculousness can often lead to a few dud ideas, it’s easy enough to shove away some of the cliches Freedom Finger leans on because the rest of it brings enough to the table. The action is definitely where it needed to be its sharpest and the design behind the levels and enemies manages to stay fresh both in terms of how they fight back and from a visual perspective with the different directions pursued and the mix between attention to detail and comedic exaggeration. The punch maneuver gives you a useful tool without feeling like it must constantly be resorted to, and the grab, despite the little issues in pulling it off, can give you a brief bit of variety in how you fight that is still valuable enough to sometimes take the risk of grabbing a foe. Extra layers like everything moving to the beat of the music to help with dodging properly and the stealth meter encouraging aggression slip in there without overcomplicating things as well. That music focus does mean some levels peter out in an odd manner, and as mentioned areas like the grab and certain approaches to humor feel like they could have been improved on with a bit more thought, but Freedom Finger definitely succeeds in most departments since the highs make it easy to look past the minor lows.
Freedom Finger is irreverent, stylish, and mechanically sound, a crossroads of talent where you can get voice actors like John DiMaggio putting in quality performances, musicians providing music that mixes with the level design wonderfully, and art by a talented team that makes it all compelling to look at while still appropriately comedic in design. For a game that will perpetually give you the middle finger the whole time you’re playing it, it turns out pretty easy to like, and thankfully it didn’t just rest on deliberate offensiveness, instead making a well-rounded shmup I would give a thumbs up.