But anything new with the words 'Freedom Fighters' is nowhere in sight....

Why? Why did it work out this way? Was it as simple as "this didn't make enough money"? This is the insider email I want to hear on the bombcast.

Listen I'm not sitting here saying that Freedom Fighters is the greatest thing ever made, and I'm not saying Kane and Lynch was a giant turd, but it's obvious one game was much better received than the other. There are people out there who have a real fondness for Freedom Fighters. Just how many people were genuinely looking forward to a follow-up to Dead Men?

I'm not in charge at IO and I understand they are probably busy working on fixing Hitman but there was a whole generation of games where third person shooters went through numerous refinements, where multiple games dealt with America being invaded by foreign powers, where Jesper Kyd was killing it with his soundtrack work....and instead all IO did was release a weird ass sequel with pixelated dongs.

It boggles my mind that this is how things worked out. Again I'm not saying that they fucked up by going this route, because hey....Freedom Fighters 2 could have been complete dog shit, but it's just really weird.

Why is there more than 1 Army of Two games? The world will never know what happens behinds those board room doors.

As much as I'd like a new Freedom Fighters, it's only the mechanics I'd like to have in a new game. Another country invading the U.S. and also being set in New York are two tropes I'm completely tired of. If it's a different setting with the same controls (albeit refined) then I'm all for it, or even a re-release updated version with online multiplayer would be great too.

Short answer: Kane & Lynch was a fan-fucking-tastic concept with rich, complex villain protagonists that allowed Io Interactive to sink their teeth into the kind of narratives the studio (if not just the creative leads) thoroughly enjoys; gritty, ugly, sometimes disturbing character studies.

Freedom Fighters was cool because it was Red Dawn as a video game. There was nothing all together memorable about it aside from that.

What a weird thing to randomly bring up all of a sudden.

Ya, I've never got why IO wanted to do more Kane and Lynch (and in doing so make a short ass game no one gives a shit about) instead of another freedom fighters game.

Probably for the same reason the new Thief is handled by a new team and those guys were gone a long time ago. And Freedom Fighters was EA publisher, we might see it again as something bizarre.

I have the feeling that run of the mill third person shooters are pretty cheap to make now-a-days.

But yea, it was a weird choice.

Same with Army of Three.

I think it's because Kane & Lynch was essentially the spiritual successor to Freedom Fighters. Why they decided to give it a spiritual successor in the first place than a direct sequel, however, I dunno... poor sales? In any case despite K&L's tepid reaction, they figured it'd still be beneficial to release a sequel to that again rather than Freedom Fighters because it's at least more well known. Releasing a direct sequel to a game from 2003 would seem odd by that point. It would maybe get a little hype from the niche that loved the game way back when, but K&L was probably still a much more well known brand name altogether anyway.

Plus, given that they even threw in a K&L cameo in Hitman: Absolution and that Lara Croft Guardian of Light, I'd say they're pretty fond of those characters over there, even if they're still probably in the minority on that one. A minority I am apart of I might add! While both games are pretty mediocre, I've always still enjoyed the characters of K&L all the same.

A free to play iPhone/Facebook game probably.

I'd have preferred if they'd made a decent follow up to Mini Ninjas. There was so much wasted potential in that game. Talking of wasted potential... Kane & Lynch are an interesting idea, unfortunately one they have never gotten quite right. I kinda like stuff about the first game, but the second was really poor and ridiculously short.

Spend 10 Freedom points to heal your resistance member, check back in 6 hours to see what happened.

What you say is pretty true, but the thing that made Freedom Fighers cool was growing/commanding your squad, and the way your choice of attack(attack heliport, or raid ammo depot) actually changed the future missions. Not many games gave such tangible changes like that and many still don't. Sure the shooting kind of sucked and the AI was pretty awful, but it was really fun.

Regarding the modular and reactive design of Freedom Fighter missions; I can remember the original Kane & Lynch intending to have a system for hiring mercenaries who would help on missions. Obviously nothing of the sort exists in the released game, the squad system is still there, but you can imagine that there was an effort at some point to create a similarly dynamic element to the game with an economy of expendable mercenaries with their own levels of price, skill and presumably trust. But I'm going to assume the game had a lot more compromises in it's development than just that.

The sequel didn't go for it, or anything similar, either. So it's a pretty useless point. Maybe in the case of both games they invested more into their multiplayer execution than into a complex, systemic singleplayer that tried to invoke a broader feeling of what Freedom Fighters did successfully. As for why a sequel was made at all, it does seem like IO Interactive has a sort of fondness for the characters.

It's simple: EA have the rights and therefore we won't see another Freedom Fighters. At least not a sequel from IO Interactive, but that won't stop EA from releasing Freedom Fighters II: Facebook Edition. It will also be free to play.

@vinny_says: I edited your thread title to reflect what it was actually about and moved it to the Freedom Fighters forum.

They originally planned on making a Freedom Fighters 2. Then Eidos bought IO because Hitman games were selling well and IO being busy making games for EA would have gotten in the way of more Hitman games. That's why Kane & Lynch was a spiritual successor; they don't own Freedom Fighters.