Image: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Freedom Wars Remastered is a competent action game with unfortunate UI problems.
Game developer Dimps, most recently known for working on games like Soul Calibur 6 and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, launched a game called Freedom Wars on the PlayStation Vita all the way back in 2014. Given that the PlayStation Vita inches closer to utter obscurity by the day, you’d be forgiven for not hearing about it sooner.
However, underestimate Freedom Wars at your own peril: the game ended up being one of the most successful first-party PS Vita games in Japan, turning it into an extremely successful exclusive for Sony and Dimps. This is likely why the game is making a comeback this year, with Bandai Namco Entertainment launching Freedom Wars Remastered for an all-new audience on current and last-gen consoles.
While Freedom Wars’ kinetic gameplay and multiplayer support makes it a fun time capsule of sorts, its nostalgia factor is hampered by several returning faults – namely, a bevy of annoying in-game menus, clunky movement, and poor pacing.
What’s Freedom Wars again?
It sucks to be alive in the world of Freedom Wars Remastered. Set in a dystopian future where society has collapsed and Japan has separated into warring city-states called Panopticons, players start off the game with a 1,000,000 year life sentence in prison. In a world struggling with overpopulation, existence itself has become an unforgivable crime. Well, nearly unforgivable.
The all-seeing government is not without mercy. The mostly-imprisoned populace has been given a way out: simply risk your life to fight giant monsters known as the Abductors to reduce your life sentence a few years at a time. In doing so, you’ll also gain access to quality-of-life privileges like new clothes, new accessories, and oh yes, the right to sit down.
This is a pretty grim setting for an action-RPG, to say the least - but its worldbuilding is nonetheless intriguing. Learning about the perilous life our protagonist leads does a lot of heavy lifting for the story's opening hours, which otherwise consists of repetitive rescue missions and tutorials. The plot only begins to thicken when you’re tasked with rescuing a woman of mysterious origins, allowing Freedom Wars to widen its scope and raise the stakes of its story.
Unfortunately, it’s the manner in which this story unfolds – consisting of generic dialogue and unremarkable side characters – that comes across as wasted potential. Dimps attempts to build on this world with a narrative full of twists and turns, but they come across shallow and half-baked without the provision of characters interesting enough for players to latch onto. The game also drags its feet for its first few hours, forcing players to endure repetitive rescue missions so that they can learn the ropes, before finally allowing them to engage with the meat of its story.
This game also puts players through a veritable onslaught of menus before something gets done, even if it’s as simple as embarking on a new mission. Pages and pages of poorly-designed UI must be sifted through before the player can equip cosmetics, purchase entitlements, make donations, and check on their progress – not to mention the trifling dialogue choices that must be made on top of that. It almost starts to feel like a point-and-click game in between combat encounters.
Freedom Wars is all about grappling to places
Freedom Wars Remastered’s core gameplay loop revolves around taking on missions where players have to defeat hordes of enemies while also ticking off different objectives. For every mission you complete, you’ll gain resources that can be donated to reduce the protagonist’s life sentence. Think of it as a smaller and more contained version of Monster Hunter, with less focus on looting enemies for specific crafting materials.
A wide spread of weaponry is available for players to hoist into battle, but only two can be used at a time. Assault rifles, giant swords, and more can be unlocked in due time, along with various Augmentations that allow for useful buffs like increased resource drops or extra damage on specific enemy body parts.
Freedom Wars Remastered’s combat has aged about as well as one can expect, considering that it was built for a handheld back in 2014. Personally, I found that most of its fun factor can be attributed to the game's grappling hook-like Thorn device, which allows players to pull themselves towards distant objects and enemies. This is especially important for fighting Abductors, whose weak points hover well above ground level. There are plenty of Thorns to choose from as well, each giving the player different abilities to bring into battle.
Swapping between thorns, long-range guns and melee weapons to take down larger Abductors is a lot of fun, but the cycle of battling the same monsters across multiple campaign missions can get repetitive very quickly. Regardless, the satisfaction of severing an enemy limb and popping an Abductor pod open to rescue a survivor never wears off, even after many hours of having done it over and over again.
What slows things down is the game’s clunky and dated movement. This game follows in the footsteps of Death Stranding, in that it makes the simple act of running from one place to the other feel as obtuse as possible. Players are often tasked with carrying survivors to safety, where stumbling into strategically-placed obstacles will cause the player to drop them and fall. By the time you’ve picked them back up again, enemies will likely have caught up to you - an annoyance only worsened by the fact that you cannot turn while carrying a survivor.
Freedom Wars Remastered clearly hasn’t done enough to salvage its 2014-era gameplay for modern times, given how difficult it can sometimes be to latch onto the correct enemy weak points, run in the right direction, swivel the camera around, and aim down sights. You’re fighting the game’s controls just as often as you’re fighting its enemies, which is a sore spot this remaster would have done well to address.
Verdict
Freedom Wars Remastered plays like a handheld game released in 2014, for better or worse. Its visuals and gameplay have been polished up to somewhat meet modern-day standards, but its abundance of in-game menus, poor story pacing, and generic characters weigh things down. If you’re looking for a decent sci-fi adventure however, this game does present a unique view of dystopian Earth that's worthy of praise, considering the many games that have tried and failed to create something new in the same genre.
If nothing else, this game proves that Freedom Wars might have the makings of a great franchise, as imperfect as it is on its own.
