Freedom Wars Remastered PC Review
Summary: If you can break up the repetitive gameplay against spongy mini-bosses making up most of the game, there's fun action to be had with a great concept.
3.8
Wait. That's Illegal.
I felt equal parts excited and boggled seeing a remaster of Freedom Wars hit the Steam storefront. My favourite PlayStation Vita game alongside Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Freedom Wars felt like the kind of game that was fun, but probably not to the masses, and whose fate was not likely to be anything more than trapped as an exclusive on a system that nobody wants to think about.
Alas, this little beacon of light from the year my life changed completely has followed me to PC and finally made its way back into my hands, bringing with it the unfortunate realisation that 2016 was long enough ago that my memories of what to expect are now clouded in nostalgia.
Freedom Wars is a third-person action game, not too dissimilar in combat to the Monster Hunter series. Set in the dystopian near-future where the Earth’s resources are dwindling, civilisation has had to fall into competitive refuge. These panopticons are defended on the frontlines by “sinners”, those who are deemed to be criminals unworthy of a normal life. The player creates their own character and takes them through the ranks as they whittle down their million-year presence sentence through fighting and donating their resources to their panopticon. While you appear to be just another sinner born into a lifelong sentence, restarting from scratch for the crime of losing your memory, you’re also the inexplicable ‘chosen one’ for an upcoming cataclysm.
The player brings two weapons of their choosing and a grappling hook into combat. The weapons include light and heavy melee, polearms, firearms and launchers. Missions are carried out with up to three additional AI-controlled allies, and your team’s ‘Accessories’, AI guardians assigned to assist sinners in battle and keep their behaviour in check. Most story events take place in the panopticon between missions, and usually only consist of a conversation or two, getting you back into gameplay pretty quickly. The story is okay, it’s not bad but I felt largely apathetic towards it until around the halfway point, wherein the main threat starts to really show itself. The same goes for the main cast, they’re mostly likeable and their roles are diverse, they’re just quite forgettable after the fact.
In battle, most of your time will be spent taking down tanky robots called Abductors, typically several per mission. This unfortunately arches over the few mission types available; even rescuing civilians requires heavily damaging the abductors holding them captive before the rescue can begin. In my first playthrough many years ago I mostly only used the combo of a small automatic weapon and a big chaingun. This time I prioritised melee weapons, and unfortunately there’s just no getting around how much you have to lay into the abductors just to take one down. Once you start getting multiple thrown at you at once, you can guarantee your next few minutes will be spent hypnotically chipping away at one so that it’s safe to move on to the next. Guns are weak but give a range advantage, while melee weapons let you pull off combos and charged attacks. The problem here is that you don’t have invulnerability at all throughout the long charge, long animation, or the long recovery period. Pulling this off successfully without getting hit at all is an unreliable gamble, which had me instead spamming a midair spin attack on account of being the best one I found at balancing damage and attack length.
The other big problem with combat is the allied AI. The player has two sets of order commands, one for their personal accessory and one for the other six allies. Although this seems like a good way in theory of getting the AI to do certain things for you (such as opting to cover the AI while they transport a civilian rather than them covering you), my experience with changing up active commands seemed to do more harm than good. The default commands are good all-rounders, while more specialised commands can be iffy. I don’t even know where to begin trying to understand how “Cover Me” made my allies want to completely ignore me while downed. Suffice to say, that sortie did not go well. The biggest plus side to the commands system (since this actually works) is assigning your accessory to say custom phrases with the text-to-speech when an order is engaged. Just be wary that the English dub TTS struggles with even simple words that accessories say as part of the game’s narrative.
After combat, any resources of a level that the player has the right to retain can either be kept or donated. Weapons kept can be used in future sorties or as upgrade parts, as with materials. Donating items to the panopticon slowly chips away at reducing your sentence, as well as earning entitlement points. These are used to claim rights, such as upgrades for the thorn (grappling hook) and ally equipment levels, unlocking cosmetics, and making your life easier inside the panopticon. Notably, this is how you make yourself able to sprint freely around an area without being penalised for consecutive seconds spent sprinting and being too far away from your accessory.
The character creation suite is quite reminiscent of Code Vein’s, sans accessory placement controls. The player unlocks an adequate amount of outfits, most of which with a few variations. Outfit part colours can be customised, along with the addition of one accessory item in a fixed position and two decal slots. Growing up on WWE Smackdown Vs Raw has absolutely spoiled me for freedom in character creation suites, but while Freedom Wars’ is hardly robust, it does the job well until you’ve seen enough NPCs wearing those same few outfits with little customisation.
New to the remaster is Deadly Sinner mode, a pseudo difficulty toggle in which panopticon contributions have less sentence reduction and infractions are harsher on your sentence, but in turn you gain an extra eye symbol next to your sentence and access to a handful of exclusive cosmetics. Its effect is largely felt outside of combat, though in battle is where its artificial difficulty is simply a waste of your time. The game will randomly decide to cut your mission time, or throw in enemy reinforcement waves, or both.
The problem with the reduced mission timer is that, in most of my cases, this trigger took away about 21 minutes from a 45 minute time limit. This wasn’t always an issue, though sometimes it leaves you with not enough time to deal with spongy abductors that spawn on alternating sides of the map. A higher difficulty option would’ve been nice, but completely random time limit cuts or even more enemy spam for almost no extra reward is not the way to implement it.
The game supports online co-operative and versus play modes. Perhaps it was just unlucky timing, but I could only get into one co-op lobby and never found any versus lobbies. Nonetheless, co-op supports up to four online players plus accessories to carry out missions just like playing offline. Versus, based on the offline practice missions, seems to be either deathmatches with limited shared team lives, or racing to escort the target amount of civilians to safety. Co-op is where the multiplayer really shines, and probably also where the game as a whole shines if you can get 1–3 more friends to sortie up. The PC port also seems to suffer from crashing issues, though I didn’t encounter anything like that first-hand in my 25 hours of play.
Final Thoughts
I went into Freedom Wars again under the very real notion that this game I once enjoyed years ago may not hold up so well, even though I did remember it being quite dry and lacking in much variety. I’m happy to say that I did enjoy it exactly the same way this time around (aside from the Deadly Sinner mode antics), but there’s unfortunately just no getting around that it’s incredibly repetitive.
This was more forgivable on release as a portable-only game, the kind you’d dip in and out of and give you something to do on commutes and such. Out of that element, it’s harder to justify the repetitive nature of taking on the same few sponge enemies several times each mission. It hurts a little to rate the game so harshly when I do still enjoy it many years on, but there are times where one has to recognise that some media they enjoy greatly is full of flaws and a hard sell to others. For me, this is one of those times.