A couple of years ago, I reviewed a 505 published title called Hybrid. Developed by 5th Cell of Scribblenauts fame, it was a sci-fi third person online cover based shooter that used “gravity manipulation” as one of its main draws. And although it was only 3v3 and didn’t have a ton of maps, I was still really pleased with the $15 effort in a broad sense. So I had hopes that 505 has an eye for good stuff to bring to the LIVE Arcade. Quickly, though, it became evident to me this wouldn’t continue the positive streak.
Liberator is an online shooter, meaning there’s no “campaign” portion. From what I can gather, two factions have some sort of beef with one another, and settle their differences exchanging gun fire. The (perceived) evil Dark Water, Inc. and the militia army style “Minutemen” do battle for, well, some reason or another. What that is isn’t made abundantly clear. When you select LIVE from the main menu, you can host a lobby, search for a game by your preferred parameters, or just find a “quick match.” The pre-game setup features a pretty cool mechanic that lets you vote between two different maps and two different match types. The choices range from basic team based stuff like TDM and Domination, to FFA selections such as straight Deathmatch. One of the interesting team ones is Capture the Briefcase, which follows CFT classic rules, but has teams stealing and attempting to capture a (you guessed it) briefcase. When in control of the case, you don’t lose or gain any abilities. The only difference is that your whereabouts are made obvious with the case’s icon attached to your character. FFA has my favorite play type overall. Named Rekondite, this borrows conventions from Halo’s Juggernaut mode. Essentially, one person becomes the Rekondite at the start of the match. This person has cloaking ability and increased speed, but can only use a knife. Killing the predator grants the privilege of becoming the ‘dite. The most kills as the hunter wins. Not a bad idea, on paper.
The map selection is pretty basic. Simple names like Subway, Prison, and Streets don’t leave much to the imagination. You can count on them to be designed as the titles suggest. Although, I don’t think the actual “layouts” are horrendous. Sure, they’re nothing special. But the elevation changes and objects in the level don’t strike me as odd or out of place. Subway, for instance, is dark and damp with a seedy motif of stalled trains and cramped utility hallways. By comparison, The Village is a brightly lit, sprawling landscape with plenty of room to move about and get into skirmishes.
When the game starts, you can outfit your character’s loadout with a plethora of primary weapon choices. Many of the familiar classes are offered, and the features depend on the gun you chose. For instance, the Assault Rifles include old favs like the AK-47, FAMAS, and Aug. The AK and FAMAS both have iron sights, but the Aug comes with an ACOG scope of sorts. Trouble is you can’t customize. So if you really like the way the AK handles and decide to roll with it, you’re stuck with irons. Same goes for the SMG-centric Recon group, highlighted by the AKS-74U. Shotgunner features shottys, naturally, and goes from the drum loaded Striker all the way to the two barreled Sawed Off. Expect LMGs in the Heavy Gunner class, such as the M60. Of all the categories, it’s the Snipers that have the most outlandish monikers. Two of note are AWSML115A1 and M110SASS. A quick search showed evidence that the M110 is an actual gun. No such luck with the AWS. Rekoil even affords the opportunity to be a full time tuber, with the Rocketeer’s RPG7. Secondaries are limited to pistols, “Melee” equals knife, and they even throw in a frag grenade for good measure.
There’s no good/nice way to put it, so here it goes: the gameplay in Liberator is awful. Even a semblance of accuracy is M.I.A. You never know if you’re going to land bullets or not. It honestly feels like you just need to aim in the general area of a target, and the mechanics may or may not allow you to land shots. While going through the play test, at times it seemed as though certain guns were more accurate than others in a given class, then other times I wasn’t so sure. I found some amount of reliability with the AK, but perhaps that’s the one I stuck with most often, and the (pardon the pun) recoil wasn’t as bad opposed to another ARs or SMGs. Not much variation in terms of range between classes exists. Shotguns deal more damage per round than other things, and the hit distance for, say, the Striker against the P90 didn’t feel like the drastic difference it should have. And good luck using anything past an iron sight. The “red dot” scopes on the ARs are terrible to use because the dot itself isn’t proportional to other objects. It takes up so much of the screen, that an enemy at distance is completely encompassed by the reticle. This might have a lot to do with the accuracy problem. It’s honestly hard to tell. And getting a Headshot is a flip of the coin in most instances. I remember one time in particular I was aiming squarely at a guy’s back (if not tilted just slightly down), at point blank and it registered the final round as a skull hit. That’s really bad.
Another poor aspect isn’t in the coding, necessarily, but is still a huge design flaw. In team games, friendly fire is turned ON. For “core” playlists like we have here, that’s a stupid decision in this day and age of online console gaming in the first place. The point that I’m most hung up on is the way team killing is handled. Which is to say it’s not penalized at all. At the end of the game, each player is given a score for accomplishing tasks like kills and captures and such. Killing a teammate counts against this number. Do it enough, and the friendly fragger will show up with a negative score. But the “score” is arbitrary. There are no “items” to unlock with accumulated points. You don’t get in-round bonuses for consecutive kills. Nothing of the sort. Okay, fine, it’ll hurt them in the leaderboard standings. Strike me as conteptuous if you must, but that is a lame, lame punishment for would-be online trolls. And to make matters even worse, if a teammate gets “lucky” and tags your dome, they get awarded with the “Headshot” screen notification and announcer shoutout. I mean, c’mon!
One definite positive I can give this game is the netcode. As wobbly and unstable as everything else is, one would assume server connection issues and lag-o-plenty follows suit. Actually, most games I played were stable and didn’t mysteriously lose host communication. And outside of games played at The Village, there wasn’t much in the way of lag, either. In all sincerity, I’m impressed considering the otherwise gloomy ecosystem. Quickly, though, presentation puts us right back into the negatives. Even for an Arcade game, the look is very basic and “block-y.” It’s hard to explain exactly what’s wrong. I hate using comparisons to games of past generations (which is usually an off-handed put down, of which is way overused by everyday gamers and industry journalists alike), but in this case I think it’s applicable. The “trails” of rounds consist of white lines, or something. Character models are super stock and are hard to differentiate between Dark Water and Minutemen without an extended peek. The backdrops and objects that make up the maps are an eye sore and look uninspired. To put it bluntly, Rekoil is ugly. Worse still are some of the sound effects. When bullets are sprayed from an AR or SMG, the final round is accompanied by a drop off of the gun fire audio. It’s as if the sound abruptly stops for no good reason. The announcer is turned up way too loud in the audio mix, which becomes annoying after a while. And the explosions from RPGs and frags are just kind of there. Admittedly, there aren’t a ton of collision detection issues (outside of the noted hit marker problem) or frame drops. So one could say the graphical package is, at the very least, consistent.