If you haven’t heard of Freedom Wars, you might not be alone, but this Vita exclusive from JAPAN Studio in collaboration with Shift and Dimps is an impressive effort. The premise of Freedom Wars and many of its gameplay mechanics are interesting and well crafted, but the experience is dampened significantly by repetition and a general sense of grind that set in sometime around that fourth or fifth hour of play. The game doesn’t stop being good after that point, I just found I had to either space my sessions out further or play in shorter amounts — I may never see the end of that million year sentence…
A million year sentence? Indeed! The dystopian setting is one of its most appealing qualities. The opening moments of the game put you and several fellow Sinners in the heat of battle against an Abductor, a massive, cyber mech of a thing that has a penchant for capturing Citizens. Your character is knocked down by a large blast, and when you come to, you find yourself in prison. Your crime? You have amnesia, and thus you have wasted much of society’s time and resources. The amnesia angle provides for a clever segway into character creation, in which you choose from a plethora of options starting with gender, name, and then from a multitude of body types, sizes, voices, facial features, and so on. No matter how cool your character looks, the officials of the Panopticon in which you reside could care less — you owe them a million years of prison time, but you can work it off by engaging in warfare with the other forty-nine Panopticons.
These fifty Panopticons, or ‘cons as they’re oft referred to in-game, are fifty cities across the world. As part of character creation, you also select a city to pledge your allegiance too. I chose to take my talents to Reykjavík as opposed to Miami, although choices included Los Angeles, Oslo, Seoul, and many others. This selection can be altered later and you can play both Vs and Co-op play with folks from other Panopticons, too. But for the sake of the story, it’s an all out war between them as so many thousands of years in the future, the Earth’s resources are extremely tight. So much in fact that they’re rationed to each ‘con. But, the demand exceeds the supply, so fighting between the ‘cons occurs. Those that do the fighting are the Sinners, those members of society that have done something deemed wrong, or more specifically, against the idea of the Greater Good. These Sinners are slapped with insane sentences which they’re only able to work off by going to battle. Meanwhile, Citizens are the productive members of a ‘con, who also need rescuing from the Abductors at a very regular rate.
Help comes in the form of an android that stays close to you night and day (and really, you’re not going very far in your cell or on the prison grounds). Known as an Accessory, these characters can also be heavily customized to suit your desires and needs. They’ll go into battle with you and do pretty well for themselves. They take orders by pressing Select or tapping the front screen. These orders include following you (default), carrying a citizen, and more as you unlock them. They also are very verbose in combat, letting you know if your fellow Sinners, whether playing online or off, are in need of assistance or if enemy reinforcements are coming, or if an Abductor is low on health, etc. I never found them overly chatty, but note that they can get slightly behind in their dialogue, at least in multiplayer, such that they’ll say an Abductor is at like 30% health when really it’s just been downed to 0%. A 30% change like that in an Abductor is not an instant thing either as they have a high HP. In fact, facing Abductors is part of the grind I was referring to earlier because they generally take too darn long to takedown, even with other live players and their Accessories in the mix.
The Accessory is by your side for other tasks, too. They’re ready to inform you of new punishments as well as making note of your successes. New punishments are fairly routine, and it’s not hard to tack on ten, twenty, or even fifty more years to your incredible sentence. Run for five continous seconds? You just bought yourself another twenty unless you have purchased the Entitlement to do so (which you can do early on). Entitlements are detailed and gave me a chuckle on more than one occasion. Like to sleep laying down? Hope you bought the Entitlement for that. Same goes for talking with other Sinners, too. It might sound grueling, but these additional punishments are as much about a brief bit of comic relief as anything.
It’s easy enough to add to your enormous sentence, but what about working it off? Well, that’s actually much harder than I had hoped. Engaging in the story based missions or hopping online are the best ways to earn years off of your sentence, but each reduction is still just a drop in the bucket. I would have preferred to have seen at least double the amount of “points” in this regard. Also, any resources you collect during a mission can be donated to your Panopticon — these don’t add up to much, but it’s essential to turn at least some of them in. In fact, Resources (including weapons, medkits, Abductor parts, etc) that are marked in red must be given up at the end of the mission lest you receive yet further years on your sentence (as your CODE level increases, you can keep these items). Resources can also be used at factories that you micro-manage to help produce new items, including weapons, and boosts for weapons. There is a ton of customization here, the weapons alone are split into six categories. I thought the developers did a good job of introducing these mechanics at a steady pace across several hours of play. In fact, you can’t even go online for the first three hours or so, and other mechanics aren’t introduced until after that, which helps keep thescope of things reasonable.
Speaking of mechanics, one of the coolest aspects of Freedom Wars is the Thorn. This is a permanently attached device you wear that’s kind of like the old grappling hook from CTF days in Quake (yes, that was a long time ago!). There are three types of Thorns, only one of which you get to start with. Thorns are used to introduce a vertical plane to the action — simply aim at a wall or structure above you, and if you’re close enough (the length of the Thorn gets upgraded later on) press R to extend it and you’ll subsequnetially be zipped over to it. That way you can hang onto a wall and then either leap straight up from it or back-flip your way off of it. It’s intuitive and great for maneuvering around for a better view of the battlefield or to find hidden Resources. The Thorn has several other uses too, including immobilizing an Abductor for a short period, attaching to them so you can try to pull them down (works best with multiple team members doing this at the same time and targeting certain spots on the Abductor), and defensive abilities too like healing other team members.
Healing is a vital (pun intended) part of the experience, and I’m happy to say that my Accessory is doing a pretty good job of reviving me if I get downed in combat. It’s nice to know that in online multiplayer, if for some reason the people you are playing with aren’t interested in helping, your Accessory at least will. Fortunately, in the couple dozen or so co-op missions I played, the community is proving committed to working together — which is good because success is highly unlikely without some help.
On that note, Freedom Wars has actually become more of a multiplayer game for me than a single player. It’s great that the two modes are both well represented, and switching back and forth is pretty seamless. Better still is that missions you complete online with others are able to be skipped when you reach them in the single player mode. As online players are proving to be more skilled and helpful than the AI in single player, I’m finding myself playing more and more of the game online in co-op, even if the missions are out of order from how the offline mode presents them. This way of playing has done little if anything to takeaway from the actual story, which to be honest has its moments and interesting characters, but it isn’t as interesting six to eight hours in as it was during the first one or two.
Freedom Wars has plenty of action RPG depth and breadth to it, and it works well offline or online, co-op or versus. Overall the ideas and execution of those ideas trumps the negative aspects, but the negatives are considerable nonetheless, especially for the longevity of the experience itself. Players might want to consider firing up their PlayStation TV (this game if fully compatible) and treating this game as a much longer-than-typical portable title, too.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
