Depending on your mood, you'll likely find the underachievement that is Freedom: First Resistance either overly ambitious or overly deplorable. In some ways, the game is like a fiery bag of poo-poo that Red Storm prepared especially for the doorsteps of unsuspecting action gamers and Anne McCaffrey fans. But in other ways, Freedom: First Resistance subtly demonstrates the creativity and talent of its developers.

You play the game primarily as Angel Sanchez, a Jennifer Lopez knock-off who finds herself with an offer to join the Resistance after an alien race known as the Catteni (pronounced ka-TEN-ee) have blitzkrieged Earth and killed, enslaved, or deported everyone on the planet. You'll fight and sneak your way through 18 missions of espionage, sabotage, and persiflage, joining up with different members of the Resistance at different points in the game. In addition to battling the Catteni, you'll also have to deal with an army of armored, baton-toting quislings who call themselves the Peacekeepers and a group of weasely sewer-dwellers whom the Resistance identifies as Scavengers. According to the game's introductory information, the Catteni are looting Earth and putting many of its people to work to fulfill some diabolical scheme, and Angel is desperate to put a stop to their—eee heeheeheeheeee—evil machinations and perhaps recover her M.I.A. fiancé, Dennis.

If the plot seems familiar, that's because it's been around in one form or another since cavemen began vandalizing the rock walls at Lascaux. The exception with Freedom: First Resistance is that it's not quite as clever as those cave paintings. Its problems lie not so much with the fact that its plot is unoriginal, but that there's so little to decorate that plot. One of the wonderful things about some of the best games out there is that they often take something familiar and turn it squarely on its head (as in American McGee's Alice and Deus Ex, for instance). Freedom: First Resistance only offers up the clichéd dark and dirty gamescape populated ever-so-sparsely with grotesques out of some Sherwood Anderson short story. You'll come across characters such as Miriam, the sweet, doting old tatterdemalion who knows more than she lets on; Crazy Larry, Miriam's cuckoo brother (look for his prototype in the Gyro Captain, from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior; Larry even comes with a complementary British accent—despite the fact that his sister sounds as American as a fiery bag of poo); and the game's de rigueur bald Jack Nicholson rip-off, Thon, who's like a cross between Raider of the Lost Ark's Toht and, well, Jack Nicholson. Give Red Storm its due credit, though, for bothering to give the game's many NPCs personalities, even if their personalities are mostly nauseously familiar.

The other playable characters you pick up along the way are also straight out of somewhere else. Where the game goes wrong with these characters is not in their personalities, but in their utility. Take, for instance, the burly but soft-spoken Jimmy, who seems to serve little other purpose than to pry open things Angel could probably have pried open herself. Leo, somewhat like Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict's Augur, is supposedly the game's computer whiz and demolitions expert, but because of Freedom: First Resistance's overly simplistic interface, the most Leo ever does is bend over and make twiddling motions that supposedly represent repairing a fire alarm or planting a bomb—again, things it wouldn't have hurt the game to let Angel do herself. And Angel, while perhaps less similar in ability to Dark Angel's Max than Oni's Konoko, nevertheless attitudinizes herself with the posture of Max. Thanks to Red Storm, though, for cobbling together a game without an Anglo central character.

Despite the few Shadow Watch-like mission alternatives, Red Storm manages to keep the story and the levels relatively linear. In an awful way, that linearity bleeds over into your control of the characters. Regardless of which character you're pulling the strings for, the perspective is the same. But worse, Freedom: First Resistance awakens a style of simplistic, computer-directed play not seen since the days of Star Wars: Rebel Assault. As mentioned before, there's no fine detail in the opening of locks and placing of bombs; you simply hit the space bar to complete all actions equally. If games were scored for "engagement value," Freedom: First Resistance would represent the low-water mark. It's as if the game doesn't trust you to control the action on your own correctly. Simplified, also, is the combat interface. While some beginning gamers might appreciate the fact that you don't have to aim to hit an enemy, most gamers will wonder why Red Storm even bothered to include combat at all; what fun is there in pressing your mouse buttons until either you or the bad folks fall down? Arguably, popular games such as Diablo and Age of Empires conduct warfare similarly, but those games at least employ multiple strategies and offer multiplayer options, all of which Freedom: First Resistance neglects to include.

And multiplayer could have been so good in this game. There are a variety of character types and the levels are sizeable if dreary; turning Freedom: First Resistance into a futuristic Rainbow Six might have been just the thing. Instead, you get to control one character at a time, while your weak-AI'd compatriots sometimes lose themselves in a corner or behind a door. A rare occasion when Red Storm's creativity works in the game's favor is when you find yourself overwhelmed in a fight (you can't seem to press the mouse button quickly enough) and your fellow Resistance members independently come to your aid (this is executed even better than it is in Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force). So nice to see, for instance, Angel save the day with a flying jump kick out of nowhere right before Leo is about to deep throat a Peacekeeper's night stick. Red Storm's innovativeness has somewhat gone to waste, however, with the inclusion of a multiplicity of relatively useless attack strengths. Despite the type of weapon you're using, you control all of them the same way, so being able to hit faster but for less damage naturally cancels out hitting slower but more powerfully. And situations tailored to exploit the capabilities of particular weapons (basically, range versus melee) are altogether rare.

Other annoyances are: the game seems to have resurrected the Day of the Long Load Times; added to this problem, cruelly, is the fact that you can't reload your save point without backing out to the main menu after one of your characters dies. That is, one of your useless characters. They're sometimes so dumb that they run in place while being bonked on the head by enraged Catteni. That means you should expect a bundle of unnecessary death in this game. And woe the dearth of weapon choices, too, though some of what are present—Catteni blasters and pistols, baseball bats, allergen grenades, and something called a stunrod (like a futuristic cattle prod)—are reasonably creative.

On the smart side is the inclusion of pebbles, which you can throw to distract guards (akin to Thief's noisemaker arrows; in this game as in Thief, some of your objectives also involve crouching and sneaking around). Also, the voice acting is particularly convincing, though the frenetic character speech animations rarely match what's being said, and the sound quality in general is miserable.

Freedom: First Resistance suffers terribly from an overarching averageness. The good and bad graphics, good and bad sound, good and bad dialogue and plot, and good and bad level design all balance out to blah. Nevertheless, kudos to Red Storm for making a decent effort at bringing together so many elements from other games and stories; unfortunately, the end result is that Freedom: First Resistance comes off more as an unsubtle, watered-down coulda-been than a highly original hybrid.

Install: Medium
Ostensibly, the game is easy to install: Just pop the disc in and let it the installation wizard do the rest. Complications arise, however, when you realize that to get everything to run correctly (namely, the video and sound portions), you'll more than likely have to update your drivers or tweak your video and audio hardware settings.

Gameplay: 5
Stripped down controls punctuate an otherwise refined storyline and mission structure. Except for the occasional inexplicable slowdowns, moving around the different levels (keyboard and mouse control) goes smoothly enough. However, many of the levels are bland and tired. Being able to jump would have been a swell addition. Save/reload options are limited and frustrating. Et cetera.

Graphics: 6.5 
It seems as if the developers couldn't make up their minds about what to do with the graphics. On some occasions the characters look like polygonal talking puppets—some sharp, others not so sharp. The Catteni, though, are a mess of lime green with a shapeless mass for a head. And why is it that so many 3D games require their characters to sway from side to side and bob their heads and inflate and deflate when all they're doing is standing still or talking? One of the worst of these unnaturally animated gestures has to be that of "DJ Mixmaster Angel," who scratches invisible records on an invisible turntable, moving her arms stiffly out in front of herself like she's going "Wicky wicky wicky" for the duration of just about every single conversation.

On the positive side, the cutscenes are mostly well done, rendered in the narrated still-drawing style of Thief. The opening movie, featuring Catteni fighters versus human warplanes, is exceptionally good and promises more than the game could ever hope to offer. Otherwise, textures are splotchy and resolution options don't exceed 800 x 600.

Sound: 4.5
Had the sound been better, the gameplay might have been better. The sound effects are muted and they tend to drop out completely about midway through each level. The music is uninspired and repetitive, like a sort of "actiony" white noise—all fast-paced and percussive while being almost completely nondescript. Though the voice acting is commendable, the fact that almost everyone in the city has a different accent is questionable. Better to keep each voice interesting by virtue of the timbre and inflections of the actor's voice, rather than try to distinguish each character with an unnatural, overly affected (not to mention a bit too stereotypical) accent.

Difficulty: 6.5
Having a super-simplistic combat system isn't enough to drag Freedom: First Resistance down. As mentioned earlier, some people might even appreciate the fact that "all you have to do is click to attack." What does hurt the game, though, is the AI—friendly and enemy—which is sore pitiful. Never mind that your folk can't figure out how to follow you up and down a stairwell, because their folk sometimes can't figure out that you need attacking when you're standing right next to them armed with little more than a master key. Despite the AI shortcomings and despite the fact that there aren't any difficulty settings, Freedom: First Resistance does feel relatively well play-balanced.

Concept: 5.5
Trying to bring together so many different elements from genres and stories already in existence is actually still an original idea when it comes to computer games. Red Storm scores well for ambition here, but their final product feels diluted more than enhanced by all these different elements. Being able to come up with a good idea isn't as important as being able to execute on that idea; without strong execution, Freedom: First Resistance is guilty of being one of the "just another one of those" types of games rather than something you'd expect from the people who brought us Rainbow Six.

Multiplayer: N/A

Overall: 5.5
There is so little variation to the standard action/adventure model of "hunt for keys, unlock doors" in Freedom: First Resistance that you'll start to wonder if that's all we can do with computer games. Get past halfway in any level, and sometime during one of the soundless, pantomimed combat sequences you'll pause the game and say out loud: "What? Why? Why is Angel here? Why am I here?" That's to say that Freedom: First Resistance is uninspired to the point that you'll have to talk to yourself to stay entertained. Directionlessness quickly ensues in almost every level, and after the minor sequence bugs—do things "out of order" and all of a sudden it's impossible to complete your objectives without restarting—and after wandering around like a group of stooges at Theme Park: Rubbly Earth, you'll probably just want to give up and move on to another game. Save yourself the trouble.

Freedom: First Resistance is rated T for Teen, but it should probably be rated N for No, No, Please, No.