Liberté Review

Developed by Superstatic and published by Ultimate Games S.A., Liberté is a rogue-like take on the French Revolution but with a bit of a twist. This is where politics meets an interdimensional being with both using people as pawns to drive their ambitions and manipulate the future they want to achieve.

                You begin the game as Rene, a French fighter who seems to be fighting for the rebels but his memory has been lost. He is guided by Lady Bliss who seems to be this interdimensional being that is helping Rene progress his story and fate whilst using him to benefit her own gain. There are 4 factions at play and you have to assist all of them to progress the story.

                The 4 factions are the rebels who fighting against the crown for their part in the French Revolution. Then you have the crown who are fighting for the new coronated King Phillip. Then you have the Church fighting for the religion of France and lastly, the tribe who follow nature and are against those who fight to aid the corruption that is plaguing France.

                The music seems very limited as the normal background track as haunted as it is with a slow guitar play with the occasional clip-clopping of horses and dripping just seems to loop. That is until an enemy approaches and then the speed of the music ramps up as an alert to an upcoming battle. The sound effects are decent enough with the sword swinging and clinking as well as the blast of old pistols. Some dialogue is vocalised but it does seem like someone’s poor attempt at English with a bad French accent at times.

                The gameplay is quite complex to understand at first but if you think of it as a roguelike game then it starts to become clear. You have your standard attacks and evasive rolls but your skills and talents come in the form of cards from a deck that you have to build. Every time you level up from beating enemies you gain a few cards. These are random and they cannot immediately be used as there is a mana cost to equipping them. Mana works differently in this game as it’s more of a storage to learn other skills. Each card has a cost that it needs to be able to play or that same cost is what you gain back in mana if you burn/discard the card. So, you usually have to discard to gain mana before you can use another to gain a skill or talent. These skills are quite varied but they are vital to staying alive in your playthrough as the enemies get tougher.

                As you progress you earn blueprints to craft better cards to add to your deck to make you more powerful on your next playthrough. But having the blueprints is not enough as you have to have the right materials to create the card too. These can only be earned by defeating enemies and completing missions. Each time you start a playthrough you can choose a quest from the map which puts on the side of one of the factions against the other. Enhancing your reputation with each faction allows you to unlock other bonuses and characters connected to the faction to help vary the gameplay. You can also buy cards at certain checkpoints with silver coins you get from enemy drops or from breaking pots and furniture around the map. Although that could do with making more sense as some pots and furniture are breakable whereas the rest of them aren’t even though they look the same.

                Sadly, although the combat is quite robust and requires good dexterity to hit the enemy and evade their attacks the variation of enemies is quite low and whilst traversing the same areas of the map it can feel very repetitive quite quickly which is a shame as I enjoy the combat mechanics and the deck building elements. It’s also very easy to get lost in the plot as it’s only after you get killed do things make a little more sense. When you die you are reborn out of goo which Lady Bliss controls so are doing her bidding in her way even though you get the idea she is not on the good side. But if you progress enough through the game, you hear conversations that the spread of the bliss is a bad thing and you even have encounters where you have the choice of helping spread the bliss or to fight the bliss. At this point, I didn’t know what side I was on and it seemed like spreading the bliss was a bad thing so I don’t know if that means you play as the bad guy.

Regardless I have played the game for a while now, and like those that have played Hades before it can get super repetitive dying and starting all over. However, unlike Hades, you don’t feel like the run is all that different on the next play-through and starts to feel a bit samey. It could have done with some more variation of the maps and enemies. I thought I was doing super well on a couple of run-throughs as I ran out of the 40 cards in my deck so when I levelled up, I was not getting any cards any more. But the enemies just kept cycling the same ones as did the map it just kept making the game harder but using curses. These curses just made you weaker or the enemies stronger and so it was just harder to stay alive.

Conclusion

Liberté in theory is where Hades meets the French Revolution. However, this is not as fast and varied as Hades and it is only very loosely based on the French Revolution. Although deckbuilding and using cards as skills in combat is not a new idea, the way it has been delivered is still different and fresh. The combat separated from the bizarre plot is enjoyable but it just needed more variation to keep it interesting.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S (via a Game Pass Ultimate subscription). All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version.
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Good
  • Combat is fast and challenging
  • The variety of cards for combat is interesting
Bad
  • The repetitive playthrough of the map gets old
  • The story is quite hard to follow
  • Some of the level designs is clunky
6.9
Okay
Written by
Gaming, or, games in general, are in my blood. Just shy of an addiction but still an obsession. From opening my mind on the Commodore 64 I have kept up with the generations of gaming, currently residing on the Xbox One. Gamertag: Grahamreaper

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