Considering the current political climate, developer Atomic Wolf has either picked an extremely convenient or inconvenient time for Liberated to release. It’s a game about a group of freedom fighters rallying against a corrupt government who has implemented an Orwellian surveillance network along with a social credit system that rewards obedient citizen behavior. It’s not a unique premise, but it is surprisingly relevant to contemporary events. With what’s happening in the world right now, a game about standing up to a fascist government seems incredibly prescient.
Unfortunately, while the plot could be used to make some interesting statements about politics and the dangers of giving complete control over to dictatorial leaders, Liberated doesn’t do much with this setting besides telling a so-so story coupled with some mediocre side-scrolling shooting and platforming.
Fight For The Freedom To Lose Interest
In Liberated, you initially play as a computer hacker by the name of Duke Stroud, the son of this world’s Minister of National Security. Duke’s father has turned the country into a total police state where everyone’s activities are constantly monitored and scrutinized. After an arrest due to his hacking crimes, he’s grabbed by members of a resistance group known as The Liberated, who essentially recruit him to help take down his father. Together, they work to find evidence that the government was complicit in a school bombing that led to the creation of the surveillance system and hopefully convince the people to rise up against their leaders.
I was rather shocked by the way the story played out as it took some unexpected twists and turns. While the plot itself is nothing new, I didn’t expect certain characters to die or for me to take control of characters from both sides of the conflict. While you start with Duke, your perspective changes a few times to give you an idea of all the people involved.
Although, this also has the negative side effect of not letting you get to know most of the characters, to the point that some spend significant portions of the game not involved in the action. By the time I got to play as Tim, I had to seriously think about who he was and remember that he was introduced earlier. Liberated is a pretty short game, so by switching protagonists during chapters, it makes it so you don’t really get attached to anyone. It also doesn’t really say anything new or insightful, opting to just tell a generic story about evil governments that we’ve seen a dozen times before. As a result, I didn’t really care all that much about what was going on, and while there are some good bits of dialogue and climactic scenes, it all fell rather flat.
The most original idea that Liberated has is its comic book art style. The entire game is framed as a series of issues of a comic bearing the game’s name. Each level and cutscene takes place in a comic book panel and the entire game is drawn in black and white, with the sole exception of the red blood splatters that appear when you take damage. It’s a pretty cool idea as it brings to mind the old Sin City series and gives everything a gritty look and feel. However, it can also make it tough to properly move through the levels, as certain objects or pieces of scenery can be hard to make out. There were quite a few times where there was a rope I was meant to climb that I thought was hanging in the background, or something was blocking my bullets and I couldn’t tell what it was.
Revolutions Shouldn’t Be This Easy
Liberated is mostly a 2D side-scrolling shooter with some platforming and puzzle-solving thrown in. The character moves through a level, shooting baddies in the face, opening doors, and flipping switches. There’s also the option to stealth your way through a level by hiding and then performing a stealth kill on an enemy. Occasionally, there will be some kind of hacking mini-game where the player will use their phone to rotate some circuits or guess a four-digit code.
Nothing in Liberated is especially challenging. The enemies are dumb as dirt and will often walk right into the barrel of your gun, while the puzzles are so simple that they feel like they’re just there to pad the game out by a few minutes. There’s barely a reason to even bother with stealth most of the time as combat isn’t much of a problem. The only time when hiding is worthwhile is when there’s a large number of bad guys shooting at you. At that point, you can just cheese them by hiding, letting them walk up to you, and then just take them out one by one with a stealth attack where you hit a QTE that usually ended up being the Y button.
The only difficulty I had with the combat was that it could be hard to tell where my bullets were going. The aiming felt finicky and the guns lack impact. And as previously mentioned, sometimes it could be hard to determine what parts of the scenery were blocking your shots.
There were also quite a few situations where I entered a room, and before I could even react, I was being shot or blown up by enemies that I couldn’t have prepared for. Either that or I would fall down a pit that I didn’t know was there. Liberated is, thankfully, pretty generous with its checkpoints, but it was annoying that I would go through a doorway, die immediately, and then have to slowly walk forward with my gun drawn so the same thing didn’t happen again.
The platforming also doesn’t feel particularly good. Jumping feels sluggish, climbing over obstacles doesn’t always go as planned, and sometimes your character would have trouble trying to grab onto a rope or cable often leading to yet another death by falling. Along with that, I experienced a few buggy moments where enemy corpses would freak out on the ground, and parts of the level would flicker in and out of existence. There was one instance where I jumped forward toward a flying drone and my character phased through the platform. This caused me to get stuck suspended in the air while all the baddies ran around in circles, likely because they were as confused as I was.
Not The Best Way To Wake Up The Sheeple
The idea of coming together against leaders who want to control us is a great concept for a game, but this simply doesn’t do anything noteworthy enough to recommend. While the combat isn’t the worst I’ve ever experienced and the story does offer some flashes of brilliance - especially its rather nihilistic final act - it doesn’t come together to form a cohesive or even entertaining product. The only thing that Liberated needs to be liberated from is its lackluster game design and bland story.
A Nintendo Switch copy of Liberated was provided to TheGamer for this review. Liberated is now available for Nintendo Switch, and will release later this year for PC.
NEXT: What To Expect From VALORANT’s First Season
