Freedom Finger is an edgy side-scroller that has heart. It is led by raw rock music and visual design while toting a typical side-scrolling shooter underneath. It’s a good game that will definitely keep you challenged and amused.
Shoo the kids out of the room, close your blinds, and prepare for a middle-finger ri— nope! Freedom Finger is a side-scrolling shooter that doesn’t apologize for its outrageous intentions, while at the same time presses the pedal to the metal with its badass rock music. Funny on the outside, complicated fun on the inside, and over before you know it. Not bad for a $14.99 price tag.
Before we get into gameplay or discuss the wacky-ass story, you should know that Freedom Finger’s soundtrack, led by several artists including Aesop Rock, is one of the major driving forces behind creating entertaining gameplay for the title. Each level of the game runs on raw, unapologetic rock, and doesn’t let up throughout the entire experience. It creates a rhythm for enemy introductions and actions and somewhat gives you a heads-up through its music of your progression in levels. It’s a fascinating driving point to the game that will have you feeling motivated to kick ass over and over again, while at the same time giving you some weird timing that can be used to strategically understand and expect what is coming next in the game. It’s essentially the eggs in the cake mix, where it is squarely keeping everything together and intact, and tasting good.
The music works so well. It’s like getting into Beat Saber when everything is hitting at the right time.
Stepping back a bit. Getting back into a less fanboy mode here, while the music is vital to enjoying the game, there are some other aspects of that game that add and subtract to its enjoyment.
The nitty-gritty of the side-scrolling shooter here comes in old school style power-ups and waves of enemies. While Freedom Finger does a creatively delightful job of making enemies unique, playful, and artsy as hell, the initial construct of the gameplay design is nothing too unique. As mentioned above, you get power-ups as you side-scroll your way to huge bosses. The power-ups improve your health, how you shoot, and how powerful your ship shooting is in the game can be. You blow something up, you snag a power-up, and you move on. This is the same concept you would find in old games like Vanguard, 1942, the Thunder Force series, and Galaga ’88. It is what you would expect from side-scrolling shooters, and Freedom Finger doesn’t disappoint with delivering that blueprint. It doesn’t do anything particularly unique with it, but it certainly doesn’t disappoint.
The niche of FF is a feature called ‘Grabbing’. See, you’re a hand. No, don’t be distracted by the finger, it’s still a hand. Your ship, the hand, can actually grab bigger ships from mid-air and use them to take down other enemies. Each grab-able ship brings a different type of ‘power-up’ to the game. When you’re not grabbing and using an enemy ship to your whim, you’re punching ships. This might be the first time melee has been introduced in a side-scrolling shooter. Usually, in side-scrolling shooters, when you hit another ship, you explode. Freedom Finger literally allows you to punch the hell out of ships. When it’s timed right, it’s hilarious fun. It also uses this melee ability to unlock places on levels, so there is a strategic element of this mechanic.
Speaking of which, the level designs are as badass as the music. You have a lot of different levels that throw different enemies and obstacles your way. While the uniqueness of the enemies sometimes falls short, sans the bosses, the level design adds some strategy to keep the experience fresh. As mentioned above, you sometimes have to use the punching ability of your ship in order to unlock parts of levels, otherwise, you will die in the game. The levels are moving constantly, so it’s not really controlled you, so you’re going to have to think quickly and solve designed level puzzles to progress. The devs at Wide Right Interactive didn’t hold back. This leads me to the game’s difficulty.
Dying in the game is a thing you should come to expect because of its difficulty. Even playing on a middle-of-the-road level of difficulty, you’re still going to run into hard road/space bumps. The level designs account for some of that difficulty, especially the ones that require you to do more than just fly and shoot. The other part is the non-stop waves of enemies, and the variety of enemies that will fire at you all at once. The game is no joke and the humor does help diffuse some of the frustration it does create. It will certainly attract people who enjoy a good challenge.
All of this said the game does wear a bit in redundancy. It can only give you so much for what it is. While the levels are certainly designed to the teeth with creative drawings, level complexity, and personality, the movements and attack abilities of enemies seem to redundantly fall into each other as you progress through the story. Again, as mentioned above, this is the nature of side-scrolling shooters. For decades this is how they were designed and people loved them. It’s expected they act this way, but also expected that the bosses end up unique to help break that up, and Freedom Finger doesn’t disappoint in that category. The bosses are out there and quite amazingly drawn.
The puppy-upper of gameplay redundancy is the story, which is something out of the head of Tim Burton fan who really-really-REALLY enjoyed Mars Attacks!. The story is raw and goofy, as you play the commander of a space ship that has been tasked to protect democracy through rescuing Americans on a lunar space station. It has an attitude, it has a Beavis and Butthead simplicity to it, and, if it were a rock star, it could firmly be compared to Slash from Guns ’n Roses playing a badass guitar, while hair runs down his face in where a cigarette hangs out the middle of the cascading hair waterfall that silently whispers in a condescending voice that it literally doesn’t care what the hell you think about it. Gosh, that might have been a 10-mile trip for a 1-mile explanation, but it certainly fits the bill, if you can imagine it. Here, the power of YouTube will help you (:54 second mark).
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Overall, Freedom Finger is an edgy side-scroller that has heart. It is led by raw rock music and visual design while toting a typical side-scrolling shooter underneath. It’s a good game that will definitely keep you challenged and amused.
