The French Revolution is an ideal period of history to set a video game. Warring factions, apocalyptic-like societal collapse, buckets of gore, surely everything a good video game story needs. Sadly, Liberté entirely fails to capitalise on the juicy era in which it is set. Indeed, it succeeds accidentally in only one aspect, just like the French Revolution, Liberté is an absolute mess.
Ostensibly a top-down isometric hack n’ slash action RPG, Liberté is best described as an experience to be avoided. Visually the game is lumbered with the blocky, charmless visuals of a bad PS2 game. Despite the rudimentary graphics however, Liberté made my PS5 sweat like a member of the aristocracy paying a visit to Madame Guillotine. Frequent painful frame drops, several second freezes, and ominous black loading screens plague the far too long run time. Characters regularly drop in and out of existence, as if they are teleporting, only they shouldn’t be. At points, Liberté isn’t far off being unplayable.
Combat is basic and tedious, with no sense of impact from attacks. Player character Rene goes up against the same obviously cloned French Soldiers again and again. A dash and a combo or two are your lot, but frankly, so easy is the game that these skills are likely all you’ll need to storm through each tiny mostly linear level. Like a peasant rampaging through the Bastille, the game offers no resistance. Oh, other than by crashing and wiping out all your progress of course.
Liberté has one good idea, and even that it bungles. Rene is awarded abilities by acquiring cards from a deck. To activate the abilities, the player must elect to destroy a number of the cards in order to equip a favoured power-up. It could be a neat risk and reward mechanic, requiring the player to carefully consider the combat situation they are facing and respond accordingly. Problem is, your initial combo is so effective you don’t even need to use your abilities. Worse still, these powers, despite sounding cool – wielding a guitar as a weapon, lobbing a multitude of axes – visually they are limp and indistinct, offering no thrill in their use at all.
The story is nonsensical, the dialogue resolutely boresome, the characters flat and vapid, and the whole experience feels like little has changed since the game was in early access two years ago.
