Liberte Review (PS5) – Taking Liberties

I really pondered to myself how I’d start this review of Liberte. Normally, I’d have some opening spiel about the French Revolution or some GCSE level musing about the difficulty of video game development compared to reviewing. However, after being made to suffer the bare minimum I could muster for the game, I’m not going to bother. You know how at the end of the French Revolution the resistance are completely battered, broken and ultimately doomed? Yeah, that’s a fitting description of where Liberte is on PlayStation.

Within literal seconds of starting the game, I knew I’d made a mistake. Obviously, you try to hold on to a sliver of hope that you’ll be wrong. You know, like desperate Parisians battling an authoritative king in the 1700s. The outcome however, was fully as my initial impression warned me. It doesn’t help when the porting process has been so low effort you can’t even use the D-Pad in the menus. First impressions matter, and well, Liberte never recovers from the horror show of its starting position. Like a sprinter in the hurdles smashing face first into the ground before they even get to the obstacle part.

Give Me Liberte! Actually, Please Don’t

We’re going to start with the most glaring aspect of Liberte itself: the performance, porting and bugs. I wouldn’t typically start here, but given it’s all you’ll be met with when you play the game, it seems right in this case. Despite being an action roguelike deckbuilder, you’ll be hard pressed to notice any of that above the horrendous glitches and visual ugliness.

In combat? Good luck finding where the framerate has gone. Moving across a level as you normally would? Watch in awe as the shadows pop in-and-out of existence. Group of NPCs? Witness them layer 4, 5, 6, 7, maybe even 8 of them on top of each other. Enemy artificial intelligence? Non-existent, either they’re one-hit killing you or just flat out not moving at all. Did I mention the game just spawns them onto the map right in front of you for no apparent reason?

Then there’s the glaring porting issues. Deckbuilding is pretty tough in Liberte. Not because of challenge or difficulty mind, but because X supposedly adds and removes cards from your deck. Only it doesn’t – it only adds them. Want to chop-and-change your deck? Cool, make new ones or get lost. Then when you make a new deck, it won’t register or save you selecting it, and the game will give you the default one anyway. Fantastique.

Quite simply, Liberte is a technical mess and that’s being kind. I can’t fathom what’s happened in the process of bringing it to console, but this resistance movement should probably have been rethought prior to it firing a cannon right into its own face.

Cannon Fodder

So, aside from the fact that Liberte runs about as well as my asthmatic lungs in winter, is there a good game lurking somewhere underneath it? If there is, I simply couldn’t uncover it. Story wise, there’s a somewhat interesting premise… maybe. You awake as Rene, an amnesiac resistance fighter who’s seemingly died and been revived right in the middle of the revolution. There’s a sultry evil goddess whispering in your ear and calling you “petal”, it’s rather odd, but as a mystery, it’s okay.

All of which is then utterly wrecked like a ship in a storm without a lighthouse when you realise that there is effectively, no real narrative. You start a run, you’ll spawn at a dock, get a random bit of dialogue between two figures… and that’s your lot. None of it is is remotely entertaining, it’s poorly voiced, and it can’t escape the bugs either. Even if you die and respawn as a different character (there’s 4), it’ll still show Rene as being the one speaking, even if I’m playing as Ana… talking to Ana.

While there are four factions you can “interact” with, it literally boils down to pick a level and you’ll be siding with that faction. You may think that’ll create a dynamic loyalty system that creates interesting philosophical dilemmas of who you side with. You’d be as wrong as Marie Antoinnette when she sees cake. Each faction is reduced to a progress bar, and after the tutorial/prologue I skipped virtually all the dialogue. While the setting is an intrinsically fascinating one, Liberte’s approach to it is as well executed taking a Bayonette to the toe.

Fruits De Mer(de)

Okay so, story and performance are a tidal wave of peasant revolt, what about the actual hack-and-slash, roguelike gameplay? Unfortunately, about as good as a Napolean campaign in the Russian winter. Liberte has a fairly basic combat sandbox. Each character has a basic attack, melee, ranged and a couple of other specials that go on cooldowns determined by attack hits rather than time.

You can dodge infinitely with no stamina or cooldown, so to compensate, enemies are ridiculously spongey and usually down you in one or two hits. While inherently there’s a modicum of fun to be had with hacking away at one of the four factions of enemies, it’s all quite loose and imprecise. Bosses in particular are just tedious, unfairly balanced wars of attrition, often ending with a cheap hit that wipes out five minutes of agonising back-and-forth combat.

I didn’t find it particularly conducive to being enjoyable when the framerate hit single digits and my specials wouldn’t actually trigger. Or even more entertainingly, when a stronger boss launched a one-hit kill move with no telegraphing. Liberte’s glitches are even more galling for the fact they can ruin your run and set you back progress, extending out the tedium and frustration for what’s already a rather irritating experience.

Sleight of Bland

To its credit, as a roguelike Liberte does strike a lot of the right notes. There are bliss curses that make levels more difficult with modifiers, world level tiers to increase the challenge, and plenty of cards with which to customise your playstyle. In most roguelikes you can choose your path through levels with more informed decision-making, but the basic building blocks are here.

Deckbuilding is depressingly stifled thanks to the inability to remap the add/remove button on the menu, but the actual variety of cards is great. Gathering resources during runs allows you to craft new variants and maxmising the synergy with a balance of abilities, traits and talents works to a decent degree. However, it’s more unique feature of burning cards to gather Mana, which is then used to play cards, again restricts the potential freedom of a deck.

Each time you level up in a run in Liberte, you gain 2-4 cards. Playing them requires Mana, so you have to burn in order to use. What that effectively does, is make you pick one of each type of ability and then throw all the rest of your cards into talents or traits, which are more stacklable bonuses. Bringing other abilities is a waste, because you can only have one of each anyway, so why bring a worse one knowing you won’t use it? Even burning it won’t produce much Mana to make it worth taking.

Deprivation of Liberte

I could go on and on about all the problems Liberte suffers that destroy much of the potential experience. Invisible walls aren’t even covered in any assets, just big empty voids where map ends. There are loading screens all over the place. AoE attacks aren’t effectively communicated to the player. So on and so forth, until I’m inevitably put the guillotine for all my belly nagging.

Throw in the fact that Liberte is a poorly optimised and relatively ugly specimen visually, it turns out more of a burnt, decrepit pasty than a smooth and buttery croissant. Lighting and shadows barely function, attack animations are so floaty they could be mistaken for being on the moon, and the environments are so painfully generic they become a chore just to dash through.

Perhaps most of this has been unfortunate circumstance of poor optimisation and porting to a new console. If that’s the case, then I really do hope some patches can drastically upscale the current version of the game. In its present state, Liberte is too broken and despondent for me to be able to recommend it, even for those who appreciate the time period or are hankering for a roguelike deck-builder.

Liberte is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Developer: Superstatic
Publisher: Anshar Publishing

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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