Freedom Force/Gameplay

Plug in the Zapper light gun into Port 1 to be able to play. Simply point and shoot at the screen to get this game started.

Your mission is to neutralize all terrorists. Sometimes they simply disappear, but you want to kill them before they have the chance to shoot at you first. Two-player mode is alternate play. One player finishes a stage and the other one has to do the same. If one player dies, then the other one can complete the game by himself.

Enemies
There seem to be four different types of enemies. One is the normal goon with just a pistol. He takes off one chunk off your health bar when he gets the chance to shoot. Next up is the same guy armed with an automatic, which fires quick bursts and takes off around a third or a fourth of the health bar. The other two enemies have a grenade or grenade launcher. Either will kill you in an instant if they manage to hit you. Fortunately, you are able to shoot down the grenade in mid-air although it takes quite a bit of skilled shooting.

Mini-game
Every two scenes there is a Code Breaker mini-game. This is like hangman, where you need to guess letters that might be in the word you are looking for. As the white line cycles through the letters, shoot the one you want to try. You can only make five errors, but all you play for is bonus points anyway. Each second left on the clock is worth 100 points. So if you are not very good at this, then just let the timer run out or get five errors on purpose. Hitting the same letter you have used already will result in a different error sound, but won't add to the error count.

Items
New items appear in the bottom right corner of the screen. Shoot them to pick them up. It is required for reloading your ammo among other things. One item that you can pick up is the "Harder" symbol, which makes the goons tougher. This is of course for players that want more of a challenge only. Picking this up by mistake may also be a planned feature. Watch out for invaluable "Health" and "Ammo" boxes.

HUD
The display includes your health bar, which decreases with the amount of damage you take. Simple gunshot wounds only reduce it by one or few chunks, but a grenade may take out the entire bar in one go! Health is kept over from one scene to the next. You may also gain health by shooting enemies in a specific way, although it's a bit random. The error bar is your allowed limit of mistakes. This includes shooting innocent hostages. If you shoot too many, it is also game over. Points are awarded for taking down the enemies. Lastly, the ammo counter is reduced with every shot you take. Refill this by picking up more from dead goons. The ammo is reset to full after each scene.