The post Freedom Finger Review (Nintendo Switch) – Flipping the bird first appeared on Killa Penguin.

Freedom Finger is a 2D space shooter that lands somewhere between Gradius and Parodius in terms of tone and feel. It introduces entirely new mechanics, too, like the ability to grab enemy ships and use their weapons instead of your ship’s default pea shooter. Your ship is hand-shaped, with its middle finger out (which has led to the cover art being censored on the Nintendo eShop page), and in theory, this ship design allows for the grabbing and punching of ships. In practice, however, enemy ships frequently launch bullets directly in front of them. Enemy ships can inflict contact damage, as well. Since it takes time to complete grabs successfully and punching makes it easy to lose track of where you’ll end up once the punch motion ends and your ship has shifted closer to enemies, neither are practical outside of a handful of boss fights. Freedom Finger takes its idea of a no-nonsense space shooter with political overtones and oodles of profanity and builds off of it in interesting ways, but “interesting” and “fun” don’t always overlap, and I didn’t have as much fun with Freedom Finger as its outlandish concept appeared to promise at the outset.

Freedom Finger‘s story says nothing in an interesting, profanity-laced way

You play as Gamma Ray, the pilot of a giant middle finger ship called the Eagle Claw. Major Cigar, an over-the-top, anti-Chinese nationalist, recruits Gamma Ray to help with a top-secret rescue mission that as a matter of course leads to all kinds of hijinks. Meanwhile, loading screens contain embarrassing quotes from presidents and other U.S. politicians of the past. This raises a question that bothered me throughout the game: what is Freedom Finger trying to say? Taken at face value, it feels like a game releasing in 2007 at the height of Iraq War fatigue. Major Cigar’s paranoid enthusiasm is vaguely reminiscent of an updated Jack D. Ripper (of Dr. Strangelove fame), however. Whatever the case, Freedom Finger‘s bombast feels oddly anachronistic given its release after almost two full presidencies that have strove to step back from needless military engagements.

I eventually decided that Freedom Finger wasn’t trying to say anything at all. In that case, Major Cigar exists less to send a message than to have voice actor Nolan North ramble profanely about the Chinese, liberals, and other bugbears.

The story is filled with stereotypes and characterizations ripe for internet people to get mad at, but let’s be honest—Freedom Finger walks the line between humor and poor taste intentionally. Its exchanges between Major Cigar and the helpless mission assistant are frequently amusing as a result.

The endings, however, are another story. Not only do your dialogue choices dictate which stages you play, but you can also get a good or bad ending. These are strangely serious, with the bad ending especially coming across as a giant “tsk, tsk.” My certainty about Freedom Finger‘s motivations suddenly faded, and I still have no idea whether it’s moralizing or not.

Many of Freedom Finger‘s interesting mechanics are too dangerous to use

It’s important to start off by pointing out that Freedom Finger‘s difficulty can be customized. Your health can be tripled, for one thing. A couple of annoying features (stealth and losing powerups when damaged, both of which I’ll get into later) can be turned off, as well. Depending on your base difficulty level, collision damage will be set to either “some” or “all,” though inconsistency is such a problem in Freedom Finger that I can’t help but suspect that “all” is the easier option. That comes down to there being no indication of what will and won’t damage you. It’s also rare for the game to be clear about which objects are background decorations. You’re forced to dodge everything because there’s no way of knowing. Another important thing to mention is that this custom difficulty goes out the window if you opt to take on extra stages at the end of the good path, which throws you into a long level in which a single hit kills you. This is the point where it finally dawned on me that I was merely tolerating most stages.

The Eagle Claw moves far too slowly for my liking, meaning it’s difficult to avoid enemies who move faster than you. It also moves too fast for precise positioning when you’re surrounded by bullet hell numbers of projectiles or lasers. Grab and punch are both mapped to two buttons each, yet a slowdown input for more precise movement would have been a much better use of at least one of those buttons.

I became increasingly convinced of that as both grabbing and punching proved increasingly unreliable. Despite a gif on Freedom Finger‘s Steam page claiming that every enemy is your weapon, some enemies will damage you when you try.

Most enemies who can be grabbed don’t even give you their weapon. You end up with junk in your hand that you have to throw away most of the time. It can be glorious when you grab an enemy with a great weapon and turn it against its allies, but a single hit is usually all it takes for you to lose that weapon.

You can’t rely on enemy weapons at all on the normal, unmodified difficulty. Punching is even worse, because while it does more damage than shooting, that damage is offset by the enemy bullet and/or contact damage you’re bound to take in the process. Only a couple of bosses are stationary and predictable enough for punching to be a realistic strategy. You’re left with a weak pea shooter and the hope that a health refill or shield appears before your ship’s durability runs out for most of the game. It’s insane that Freedom Finger‘s best mechanics can’t be used reliably.

There are some pretty significant difficulty spikes that come out of nowhere

Freedom Finger is balanced well up to its second or third boss. After that, the difficulty ramp suffers a malfunction and takes you through maddening highs and strange lows. Part of this has to do with the game’s stealth mechanic; enemy ships that aren’t defeated and successfully make it from one end of the screen to the other increase your stealth score, and allowing this to fill up causes the mission to fail automatically. You’re forced to play aggressively, then, and the screen can become so unreadable thanks to the art style and number of enemies/bullets that many of your deaths will be directly attributable to stealth score-related aggression. Meanwhile, some stages have relatively few enemies and can be flown through with little difficulty. It feels all wrong to be stuck for half an hour, only to blow through the next stage on your first attempt.

Bosses are another cause of difficulty spikes. Early bosses are stationary for the most part, but later bosses move around unpredictably. This forces you to memorize their patterns by repeatedly dying and replaying the same phases, except you don’t have the time to learn because you’re on a timer.

Freedom Finger‘s boss fights are unique in that you’re automatically defeated if you don’t beat them by the time the song ends. Since this forces you to be aggressive, it becomes hard to watch and become comfortable with attack patterns. Early boss fights are easy enough that you won’t even realize that there’s a time limit, but that changes when you come up against the finger boss; this stage spawns a ton of helper enemies who block your shots, and the only way I found to beat it was to punch wildly while eating a ton of damage.

Normal enemies toward the end suffer from a different problem, that being gimmickry. Some enemies reflect your shots or perform a kamikaze attack. Another took out the remaining third of my health bar in a single touch. Figuring out enemies in late-game levels that have a penchant for hiding spinning lasers and spamming giant beams or boulders from the sky isn’t a fun process. Even if it were, I’m not entirely on board with the hit detection. Most games give you a little leeway, but the slightest graze deals full damage to you in Freedom Finger. Bafflement was my constant companion as I took damage from things that should have barely missed the ship. It just feels unnecessarily clunky. That clunkiness is compounded by enemy bullets traveling through some—but not all—solid objects. As I said earlier: inconsistency is a problem.

Objective and personal taste problems with Freedom Finger‘s art/music

I really like some things about Freedom Finger‘s art and music. Many stages are incredibly colorful, for one thing, and there’s at least one track—the dark, synth-based one in the second embedded video—that I genuinely enjoyed. The busyness of the art makes it needlessly difficult to tell what’s part of the background, though. Backgrounds are often full of dots that resemble bullets just enough to disguise real ones, and the entire art style is topped off by a noise filter that compounds the problem while contributing nothing positive. This noise effect doesn’t show up in compressed screenshots and videos, but many of the screenshots at the end of this review capture it. That just leaves Freedom Finger‘s soundtrack, which blends a bunch of different genres, most of which I personally can’t stand. The tracks that are nothing but people smashing their heads into electric guitars and screaming are particularly difficult to get into, and that’s a problem because this is vaguely a rhythm game. Bullets and enemies occasionally freeze to the music’s timing, and figuring out that timing amid a torrent of screaming isn’t an intuitive process.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10, and add an extra 1 if you like the music in the first embedded video
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Freedom Finger Review Screenshots

*A Nintendo Switch key was provided for this Freedom Finger review. The first embedded video is on an easier custom difficulty, while the other two are on the normal difficulty.