Gumwall GP has a Freedom Mode now, and it comes with a shotgun
There is a new button in Gumwall GP. It is pink, it says FREEDOM MODE, and when you press it the course you have been riding grows a crop of "Flop" cameras, delivery drones start buzzing the pack, and your rider takes one hand off the bars and picks up a double barrelled shotgun.
That is the whole idea. You still ride the lap. The trainer still does what the trainer does. But now the ride has targets. I wanted to take the ideas of Quake II combined with the Starsky and Hutch PC game, and add it to my free Zwift alternative. Since I was a kid I always wanted to play a shooter game while riding a resistance-sensitive bike trainer; this is that.
Why
If you have ridden or driven anywhere in this country lately you have passed a little black box on a pole that photographed your plate, your bike rack, and the back of your head, and sent all of it to a company you have never heard of. We cannot do anything about that from a bike shop. We can put them in the game and let you ride past them with a shotgun. The drones are a parody. Any resemblance to a rocket company's parcel service is on purpose and that is as far as we will take it. Down with fascism and the surveillance state!
Nobody is encouraging anyone to do anything to anything real. It is a bicycle game. Ride your bike.
How it plays
Turn it on with the pink button on the ride, or the + button on a controller. The crosshair is a free cursor, the way the old Starsky and Hutch game did it: the mouse (or the right stick) moves it anywhere on the screen, the camera stays where your camera keys put it, and the shot goes where the crosshair is. Move the crosshair near a camera or a drone and it locks on and rides the target until you push it away. If you would rather do it the hard way, AIM ASSIST: OFF is in Ride Options.
| Mouse and keys | Controller |
|---|---|
| Move the mouse to aim | Right stick aims |
| Left click fires | ZR / RT fires |
| Right click aims down the sights (both barrels on the coach gun) | ZL / LT |
| R reloads | X |
| 1 to 0 or the wheel picks a gun | Bumpers |
Cameras are 100 points. The tall Condor units at the high point and the sprint are 200. Drones are triple. One camera in eight is a printed plastic decoy worth nothing, and the feed will let you know. Hit a rider or a car and you lose 200 points, because that is a person!
The guns
You start with the coach gun. Points unlock the rest, and they are lifetime points, so they stay unlocked across rides: a .357 at 1,000, a pump shotgun at 2,500, then an SMG, an assault rifle, a big pistol, a bolt action sniper with a real scope, a light machine gun, a crossbow you charge by holding the trigger, and at 50,000 a rocket launcher.
Explosions
A third of the camera poles have red barrels or propane tanks stacked at the base. Some of the traffic has a barrel strapped to the roof and keeps driving like that is normal. A barrel lights the one next to it, which lights the next, and anything that goes down in the chain pays double, then triple, then more! Woo points!
The big drones drop their parcel when they get knocked out. The parcel is also a bomb. Haha.
Posse and free for all modes
The riders you have been drafting off all month now ride with coach guns of their own. By default they are your posse: they take the occasional shot at the same cameras, helping you clear the roads of fascism.
Press POSSE once and it becomes FREE FOR ALL. Now they want the same cameras you do, there is a lap board in the corner, they will take a potshot at you, and you can put one of them on the ground for ten seconds. The lap goes to whoever scored most on it.
The board
LEADERBOARD now has a MOST WANTED tab per course. Finish a ride signed in and your Freedom score, cameras, and drones go up.