Irrational Games was on hand at E3 2004 to show off Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, the follow-up to the studio's award-winning 2002 tactical role-playing game Freedom Force, which let you command a squad of swaggering comic-book superheroes that could have come right out of the Silver Age of American comics of the 1960s.

　　While the original game was good looking for its time and had the impressive feature of partially destructible environments (buildings that could be smashed by supervillains, lampposts that could be torn out of the sidewalk to swat thugs, and so on), the new game will feature a host of technical improvements. These will include better textures, dynamic lighting, enhanced destructible environments, and improved artificial intelligence for your heroes. In the previous game, unless you manually issued orders to each of your heroes, they would stand around and not react when attacked by enemies. In the new game, they'll act on their own and defend themselves according to their personalities (so more-timid heroes may retreat, while more-aggressive heroes will definitely fight back).

　　The new game will herald the triumphant return of all the heroes from the first game, with the possible exception of the noble Man-Bot, whose whereabouts and status remain unknown. However, according to the game's story, Alche-Miss, the clairvoyant sorceress has been having nightmares that involve Man-Bot (perhaps born of her lingering feelings for the missing hero), while the Freedom Force is enlisted to thwart a scheme hatched by Nuclear Winter, the dastardly Soviet mutant who has somehow captured the Time Master (the chronologically empowered menace from the previous game) and traveled through time to steal away a cache of nuclear missiles (of Cuban Missile Crisis fame). However, in thwarting Nuclear Winter, the team finds that it gets double-crossed, and instead of returning to their present-day home of Patriot City, they return to a German military state. It seems that a new group of even more-dastardly villains has traveled back in time to World War II and imbued the German army with the mysterious "energy X" (the source of Freedom Force's power)--which allowed the Axis Forces to win the war. Now the Freedom Force must fight back against this new menace and somehow correct history.

　　To accomplish their goal, they'll enlist the help of six new playable heroes, three of which will be Silver Age comic-era heroes (who wear bright costumes and despise communism) and three of which will be Golden Age comic-era heroes (who are exceptionally patriotic and despise the Axis Forces) from the 1940s. In turn, they'll fight three new enemies, each of which comes from an Axis nation of origin (Germany, Japan, and Italy). The new heroes include the Green Genie, a whimsical female heroine who rides a magic carpet and has a tendency to turn people (friend and foe) into flowerpots, and Tombstone, a wrongly accused man who was convicted of murder and whose electrocution took place during an energy X storm. Tombstone, like the other heroes in Freedom Force, will have his own cinematic sequence that shows the origin of his powers.

　　Freedom Force will also have a number of intriguing new features, such as vehicles (like armored tanks) that can be both fought against and driven by your own heroes. In addition, the game will have what Irrational's Ken Levine describes as "really cool comic-book style multiplayer" options that the studio is not yet ready to divulge. In the meantime, we'll be ready with more updates when they become available. And Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich will be ready to play sometime after the development team finishes work on it.