I remember what I was doing the day Global Agenda initially appeared in February of last year: I was not caring about it. While the underlying story did interest me a bit, I also knew that the game borrowed heavily from Team Fortress 2, a game that I was still enthralled with upon the MMO’s release. Another major factor was that my first belief that the game had a pay to play business model, something that I thought to be a major detractor from such a mediocre title in both idea and presentation, and the fact that a scant few of my friends online dared not even get close to this title.

Fast forward a year and a half later. The advent of free to play conversions with micro transactions of pay to play games is starting to become a very popular design switch, as Lord of the Rings Online and Champions Online seem to have shown  various degrees of prosperity. Hi-Rez Studios, while adopting a very generous free demo in 2010, has completed its conversion to the F2P model with Global Agenda: Free Agent. It is a welcome sight to those who were eternally sceptical (like a certain Canadian MMO reviewer for Blistered Thumbs that isn’t nicknamed Oda) to check up what the game is ultimately about.

Congratulations! After being vat born by the Commonwealth, a corporation conglomerate that takes over all governments worldwide, your player character is released by operatives of the Agency, a resistance group seeking to overthrow the Commonwealth worldwide and return to a more tribal way of rule. Once freed, you must escape the high security compound and regroup with the freedom fighters to help retake the desiccated world back from both the Commonwealth and the horrors of the post-apocalyptic world.

While the story of Global Agenda is very interesting at the get go, it quickly tapers off and dies after about less than ten hours. Now ten hours is great for some games, but I never said that the game ITSELF was ten hours long. If you want to get into the later parts of the game, be ready to spend a lot of time on it.

The Commonwealth will stop at nothing to make sure the Agency submits to their will.

Once the tutorial mission and the only major quest line in the game end, that is where the story ends and the real game begins. While the back story to this title is quite interesting (End of the world, rise of the Commonwealth, the purpose of war between agencies (guilds)), there is not a whole lot of in-game methods to learn about it. While the latter part of the game deals with Agency versus Agency (AvA) conflict, the “introductory” story to the game is quite weak.

Once the intro story comes to a close, the real game begins: Canned arena combat. But before we get to the game’s many modes, let us take a look at your character and what it can potentially do. At character creation, you have access to four different class types: Assault (Heavily armoured class, effective at short to medium range), Medic (Light armoured healer, can use poisons to damage and leech enemy health), Recon (Light armoured attacking class, can be effective at either extremely long ranges or in melee range, stealth capable strike), and Engineer (Medium armoured support, can establish fortifications for defense, push offense, and quick travel across arena maps, uses turrets for point defense).