“Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare” is a game I have praised in many of my articles. I praise it because the game has been handled extremely well and the developers are not money hungry monsters. Once again, they have listened to their fanbase and have delivered what the customers want. Vehicles are soon going to be entering the fray.

For some context: “Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare” is a military shooter that pits you and your personal army of mercenaries against the warring factions of a country in ruin. You have full command of your troops and can equip and upgrade them as you please, fighting roving bandits and warlords to further increase yourself and your soldiers’ skills. You do this all while capturing towns and villages to increase the strength of your faction. The only thing that has been missing up until now has been vehicle combat, which is soon going to be a reality.

“We are finally adding combat vehicles and anti-vehicle troops to the game,” KK Game Studio, the game’s developer, said in a news post on Steam. “In the next version, you will be able to buy combat vehicles from the vehicle dealer and deploy them into combat just like your infantry squads. Your enemies will also have vehicles so make sure to take some anti-vehicle weapons such as an RPG launcher to the battle. We are planning for many different types of vehicles such as an armored anti-personnel vehicle, truck or technical with a mortar mounted and anti-vehicle guns.”

This is tremendously exciting for those of us who have been playing the game since its release last year. When most people think of guerrilla warfare, they think of rugged militias complemented by pickup trucks with .50-caliber machine guns attached to the bed. So why should that picture not make it into a computer game based on that idea?

Two things about this update that have given me something to worry about are how the new vehicles will look and behave when commanded to do something.

Look-wise, the vehicle models that are already on some of the maps currently in the game look all right. They add some variety to the mostly foliage-based environments. I have no doubt the base models will look decent. What I am worried about is how they will look while moving or using their weapons. Will the guns rotate to aim in a direction, or will the vehicles look as though they are sliding across the ground rather than driving over bumps and rocks in a more realistic way?

Commanding infantry in “Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare” so far is simplistic, but it works. Command a squad to rush an enemy position and they will do exactly that, and they will go in a straight line. Vehicles will not be this cut and dry, unfortunately, because unlike a human, ground vehicles, excluding hovercraft, must rotate their entire body to go in a direction. Sometimes this issue causes terrible pathfinding within the programming of vehicles in games.

An example of this can be found in the game “Star Wars: Empire at War” developed by Petroglyph. The larger capital ships, if they are in an enclosed space, in space, might go the completely opposite way you want it to because the pathfinding cannot figure out a way for the ship to maneuver, even though there is ample space for it to do so.

Having the vehicles moving is one thing, but getting them to go exactly where a player wants may be a little bit more difficult than their infantry counterparts.

“Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare” has been steadily updated with patch fixes and small improvements to the gameplay. The upcoming vehicle update, however, is the most extravagant and awesome update so far. Even with my worries, as stated above, I believe that KK Game Studio will not leave any of the bugs, which will inevitably come with the new update, unfixed. It will just take a little more time.