Liberte Xbox Review 5/10 "A promising premise that has issues throughout" 🫡🗼 @LiberteGame #IndieGame #GameDev

A Lovecraftian action-adventure game with horror elements set in 17th century France, Liberte was subtly on my radar for a little while leading up to its release, and I was quite intrigued as it had been a while since I’d played a game in the action-adventure genre.

Unfortunately, Liberte has quite a few technical issues that bear down on a game that ends up feeling feels unrewarding and unfortunately – a missed opportunity.

The game begins in Paris, with your character awakening after a fall into an underground area. He has no memories but is pulled into action by an ethereal female voice, seemingly on his side. Within minutes, we ascertain that the protagonist - Rene - was on the side of the rebels, just as a monarch’s crowning was interrupted by a gigantic being seemingly from another world – and we find that there are multiple faction now vying for control in this crumbling city.

I was ready to get hips deep into Liberte, but the first inkling that something was wrong was in the introductory narrations, voice acting was fine – but the voice actors were delivering lines that clearly didn’t make sense and seemed cumbersome to deliver. I would have put this down to something that would be sorted in a patch a little later down the line, but Liberte was initially released last year on PC, and so it seems unlikely that this issue would be fixed this late in the day.

The character movements and animations, as well as the environments all feel a bit ‘PS3-ish’, and the fact that nothing stands out meant that I wasn’t even sure which pots or barrels I could smash to find cash inside, as some hold goodies whilst others are unbreakable, but they look the same on screen, making you feel oddly stupid as you randomly slash at things that are non-interactive in the environment. 

After the main prologue, the game tasks you with darting into the different areas of Paris to complete certain tasks and defeat key enemies. There is a deck-building element to this, as you pick up cards that can be used, or ‘burned’ to gain mana to utilise stronger cards from your ever-expanding deck, allowing you to set up your perfect playstyle in that run.

I liked having a saucy melee attack, whilst ramping up my armour as much as possible due to my gung-ho tactics, but you can also get traps or ranged armaments should you prefer a more refined mode of combat. This was nicely done at first, but as you effectively reset these cards and skills between runs, there is a really unsatisfying sense at the back of everything that Is compounded by the repetitive stages and runs that you embark on.

There are also problems with the visuals, Liberte is incredibly stuttery on the XSX, and I found it a little headache inducing as it jarred along on screen. Skirmishes often devolve into a rush of things on screen at once, and so there’s no sense of weight to the combat, just aimless swiping with your sword as you want for your abilities to charge, and the frenetic combat causes further issues to the framerate.

The audio is rousing and suitably epic, but it’s tied to a game that feels like it needed a few more months in development to tighten the issues that drag it down.

SUMMARY

There’s a decent game hidden in here, and the art in the character portraits, the setting, and narrative premise are all highlights, but the act of actually playing the game itself isn’t nearly as smooth and enjoyable as it should be, making this a hard one to recommend.

💧5/10💧

Melting