Join the revolution and fight the system in this hand-drawn comic book adventure shooter. Welcome to a brave new world. Undeniable truth and personal freedoms are dying. The revolution is near. Rise up in the bloodstained struggle for a land of the free. Forget everything you know about comics and immerse yourself in a dark, rain-soaked city. Use your wits, hack the system, sneak, and solve puzzles. Dispense picturesque headshots for great justice! Let the stunning hand-drawn art and action unite on the pages of this noir cyberpunk story. At least that’s what Liberated promises the player. Let’s dive in!
Liberated:
Liberated was one of the most anticipated Indies of the 2020 showcase (at least, according to its own publisher). What we got was an action-adventure game that unfolds across the pages of a comic book. I enjoy the occasional comic but prefer manga over the standard graphic novel. Mainly because American comics are issued in, well, issues. For us, in Europe, that means importing a lot of comics to complete a storyline, while Manga is published in books with a multitude of chapters. Luckily there is something like the Nintendo Switch, which makes graphic novels accessible in a game-setting. And Liberated is a special case. I do most of the Visual Novels for Gaming Boulevard, so I was curious about what this title would be like. Liberated blended the art of hand-drawn graphic novels with interactivity and side-scrolling action to create a revolutionary, seamless blend of game and comic, which reminded me of XIII in away.
So, how does this work, you might wonder? Liberated starts off as a regular comic book, with a very dystopian feel to it. The world has fallen into a state of ‘big brother’s watching you’, which reminded me of 1984 by George Orwell and A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Everyone is monitored, followed, and regulated. There are algorithms in place which track your behavior and can calculate if you ‘will mess up’. Due to the current outbreak of violence against police officers and racism, games like Liberated become closer to reality than we would like. Due to my own historical background, I have a high interest in anything that’s totalitarian, so the story of Liberated was right up my alley. A combination of high-tech North Korea and Russia, combined with nowadays America in which you, the son of the minister, are a pariah. Hack, run, and shoot your way through the comic, which is part reading, part action.
Comic-Book Gaming
Let me explain a little bit more. Each comic is made out of panels (duh), which either give some information and story progression as a normal comic would. But there are also panels that give you, the player, the option to carve your own path. These scenes felt like a noir-setting of Mark of the Ninja, in which you progress through facilities and outdoor areas, hiding in plain sight, killing and hacking your way through security. With Mark of the Ninja, however, you had the option to take a few different approaches, something I missed in Liberated. Most of the time I ended up running and shooting my way through the waves of cops, security guards, and drones that were in my way. Yes, I tried not Rambo-ing through the levels, but on certain area’s there were too many enemies to sneak-and-kill your way through. Which ended up with me dead and having to restart. It made the game felt a little bit on the repetitive side since most action scenes were composed of infiltration, hacking, shooting, and looting your way through the facilities and other government.
Since I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, I’ll discover the story on your own. I had some annoyances during my playthrough and read some players who had the same problems I faced. Liberated is not made for playing on a tv. This is a handheld experience and that’s mainly because of the text bubbles used to explain the narrative. Yes, you can enlarge them to make them easier to read, but still – not big enough. When I switched to handheld mode I was faced with another problem, the controls, and mainly the gun controls, were not optimized for handheld playing. This resulted in my Rambo-playing style and made my playthrough less enjoyable than I first anticipated.
Conclusion:
To conclude, Liberated is a nice addition to the Nintendo Switch library. It scratches that dystopian itch I feel sometimes and is not fully solved by playing games like BioShock and Borderlands. I prefer my dystopian games dark and noir-heavy. The comic-book-setting is well-chosen and works, although the game feels unpolished on some levels. I would have preferred a more streamlined experience on either docked or handheld mode, but it failed to deliver on both in the way it was described. However, this is a personal note and does not change anything about the depth and narrative power of Liberated – which also explains my score.
