The Classic Game You Couldn't Remake Today

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]You can't go far on the games internet nowadays without coming across all sorts of talk about which games from the past need to be brought back in the form of remakes. Nowadays, the excitement at even the possibility that a company might mention an old game often eclipses what fervor might exist for those newer ideas. Especially when times are so tough, people love to look back at what brought them joy in their youth. And people seem to want remakes of absolutely anything. And honestly, one of the stranger examples of this, as I see it, is 2003's Freedom Fighters, a game I'm frequently seeing listed as a forgotten gem that people are desperate to have brought into the modern era.

[00:00:46]Putting the straight re-release on PC a few years back to the side, on its face, this is an understandable impulse. That gray on red on white cover with the grit etched onto the faces of its characters is to me somewhat iconic in the PS2 library. I played through this game dozens of times back in the day. I get those exact same nostalgic pangs when I think back on the time I spent with it.

[00:01:12]Hazy memories of blocky Hitmanstyle character designs. Despite the game's grim setting, those memories are as comfortably fuzzy as the New York sunrises your makeshift crew repeatedly battle under. And it was exactly this nostalgia that led to me picking it up again. And as enjoyable an action game as it still is, as interesting as its ideas are, on multiple levels, I really don't know how you'd remake something like this nowadays. Everything about its structure and indeed its politics seems somewhat alien to modern sensibilities.

[00:01:51]For one, it's a remarkably simple game.

[00:01:54]Of course, in some ways, this certainly adds to its charm rather than detracts from it. But at its core, Freedom Fighters is an action game made by a team whose prior work features gunplay awkward enough to be utilized as a last resort, a kind of failure of intended play. and that here becomes the main event. Don't get me wrong, it's hardly anywhere near as finicky as the Hitman combat. Freedom Fighters is perfectly functional in its intended purpose. It is, however, very little more than that.

[00:02:27]Indeed, the entire thing hinges on a gimmick that felt pretty revoly in an era where functional was the main descriptor you could apply to any number of bigname action titles, but nowadays feels more than a little quaint. The ability to round up comrades as your notoriety grows in the fight against the Russians certainly lends a mechanical weight to the game's premise, allowing you to see and feel to a certain extent how your actions are affecting the world around you. For its time, it represents a neat marriage of mechanics and story.

[00:03:04]It's just that with a central conceit to that novel, it's a little shocking how well little of that story there is. I'm not talking about the story itself being insubstantial. Although it certainly isn't a masterpiece by any means. Part of the reason a remake of this game seems like an odd thing to ask for is that it would represent a whole lot of time and effort put into a thing that takes a few brief hours to beat. It really is over and done with in a flash.

[00:03:35]And what is there is perhaps slightly insubstantial, showing immense potential, but never seeming to fully utilize what it's got. In line with its mechanical predecessors, for example, there's a sense at least of nonlinearity in mission structure here. Hitman allows you to approach a target in pretty much any way you feel. While Freedom Fighters, in its attempt to center you as strategist as much as action hero, makes out as if you have control over which areas of a map you're going to focus on first, chipping away at an overall main objective. The issue is that, well, there still exists a certain way in which things need to be done a lot of the time. you might come across some fuel canisters that have to be blown up in order to take out a sniper nest at the top. Of course, however, you can't just use any explosive on it. And so, after wasting a bunch of grenades and ammo, you head via the game sewer system to the bit at which you find C4 and then head all the way back. It just feels a little more rigid than it perhaps lets on. But, you know, for as insubstantial as its campaign may seem, there is indeed a vibe to it. Free of the modern need to aim down sights, there's something rather delightful about screaming your way through what feels like Arctic tundra and the sun-kissed, ravaged remnants of the America that was vaguely pointing in the direction of enemies and holding the trigger down until no bullets remain.

[00:05:10]When you mow down as many enemies as you do here, it's not hard to see why your character develops such a cult of personality despite him lacking much in the way of it. I mean, his name is Chris Stone. It's hard to think of something more generic. All that aside though, even if you decided to put all the time and resources into remaking an action game that is so simplistic at its core, what you would butt up against, perhaps more intensely, is the dissonance associated with playing a game like this with this story and plot in a year where the very notion of America as an institution is in a weird weird place.

[00:05:55]See, Freedom Fighter alternate timeline, as detailed by the intro, in which the Soviets nuke Germany to end the Second World War, and the Union becomes the great world superpower, leads to a powder keg moment in which the US must fight against the now invading overpowering Soviet force. Of course, America taking on an encroaching communist threat is nothing new in media, but freedom fighters take on it is intriguing. if perhaps a little muddled. In media of this kind, there's this sense that the American side is fighting to preserve the sanctity of the status quo, protecting glorious capitalism from the scourge of the filthy reds. And in a way, similar to the surality of navigating your home base in the sewer, a vibe cultivated in no small part due to the excellent soundtrack from Jesper kid. The plot of Freedom Fighters is this warped American fever dream. The power to grow and self-actualize under the banner of the stars and stripes lies within the hands of even this everyman plumber interested in little more than getting the job done and maybe getting laid at the weekend.

[00:07:08]But the thing is that despite this shifting of geopolitical power, the US pre your new role as guerilla leader doesn't look much different to what we'd recognize as realworld New York. It makes you wonder what we're actually fighting for here. For a right to self-determine within a post 911, post Iraq war America in which freedoms would gradually be chipped away. Anyway, look, I've had the opportunity to go to America in recent months, and I've turned it down. I probably wouldn't be in any immediate danger myself, but there's something absolutely wild about a nation that infamously speaks so fervently about freedom and the American way. Also being the place where a masked secret police force is gunning down citizens in the street and rounding up countless others to put in, for all intents and purposes, concentration camps. Trans friends have spoken about having to essentially smuggle themselves into the country via more forgiving checkpoints. Families torn apart, dissident met with militaristic force.

[00:08:18]When you consider America's storied history with exerting the kind of power not dissimilar to this game Soviets, it becomes difficult to imagine that an America free of Soviet tyranny would be free of other tyranny. These so-called socialists are socialist in the same way the Nazis were apparently socialist in name only. It's an increasingly evident reality of power more generally. And with freedom fighters painting of America as inherently the good guy. this alternate history absolving America of realworld atomic guilt, attempting to paint the American flag as this kind of radical symbol of revolution rather than what it actually is. Perhaps the symbol of imperialist oppression and bloodshed to so many around the world. Playing this game in the year 2026 feels downright surreal. Freedom Fighters pretty strongly says that when fascism comes for you, the only option is to fight it headon. It mechanically incentivizes the necessity of community and sees that community navigate the rubble of the old American dream, using it as cover against the onslaught of your enemies. It just also feels like the much clamorred for remake of this still very enjoyable, simple, brief little action game would inevitably butt up against the notion that its plot as is might similarly act as cover for the realities of how power actually works, potentially rendering it critically in congruent with the political age in which we live. And with the state of media discourse in that same moment with morons complaining that things are too woke or political or whatever, I just do not think that's a political quagmire IO Interactive would be particularly interested in wading into.

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[00:10:45]Special thanks go to Alistister Dunn, the hottest tour manager ever to be Holbeck, Alex O' Sullivan, All right, Brendan Hess, Bryce Snder, Cameron Sineros, Charles Dailyu, Charlie Kimell, Christopher Far, Dallas Keen, Dannis Sakowskis, David Burke, David Buckkas, Dolly Bowman, Euan Patterson, Leia Chinello, Lyn Browning, Luke Shaw, Mark B. Writing, Mason Miller, Matthew Grover, Michael Trit, Rickety Cricket, Thomas, Timothy Jones, Weatis Guitarsus, Young Condor, and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games. Thank you all so much for watching. Stay safe and I will see you all next time.