Freedom Wars Makes You Work Off a Million-Year Sentence

Each character can equip 2 weapons and a
variety of useful items to use in combat. Each player also has a vine of thorns
on their left arm that can be used to pull them up to vantage points a la Bionic Commando style, pull and
cripple enemies, or for special attacks.

Heading to the demo, I went to a booth with
three other players where a guide waited for us with 3 PS Vitas and a Vita TV
hooked up to a monitor. Each player selected a PS Vita and joined the host game
the guide had waiting for us with the Vita TV.

I entered the game with the other players and
was met by an instructor who told me to go to one of the multiple beams of
light coming from the floor to start my mission. As per my habit with any
adventure/RPG, I tried talking to the instructor a second time to see if they
had anything else to say and was told that private chatter would not be
tolerated before getting slapped with an extra hundred years onto my million
year sentence. These guys weren’t kidding around.

Before starting the mission I got to select
my weapon loadout. Our default weapon selection consisted of a basic sword and
a choice between an basic automatic rifle, a mini-gun that had high rate of
fire and a penalty to mobility, and a rocket launcher that could single-fire
rockets for large chunks of damage. I figured the demo would be set to the
easiest possible setting, so I chose the mini-gun, since it was likely that a
movement penalty wouldn’t be a problem at that difficulty.

The demo went fairly smoothly, with the 4
of us taking out 4 Abductors and saving the objective 3 civilians in about 6
minutes. It was a little short, but I got a pretty good feel for the game.

Maybe it was the nature of the quest that
wasn’t so much about defeating monsters but about rescuing people and carrying
them to extraction points, but the vibe I got from Freedom Wars made the game feel felt less like a game like Monster Hunter or God Eater and closer to something like a capture-the-flag match in Call of Duty. I can see the game’s multi-player being a lot of fun
depending on how they mix up the gameplay and customization options.

Gameplay-wise, Freedom Wars still feels rough around the edges and in need of
refinement. The control response was a little clunky and I did encounter one
glitch during combat where one of the other players latched onto an enemy Abductor’s
leg and the leg started spazzing out.

Also, whenever an Abductor was defeated or
heavily damaged, we would be treated to a wide angle view of the creature going
down, which looked nice but interrupted the combat and took a moment to readjust when the
camera went back to my character. It’s only momentary, but in an action game
where split-second judgment is key, such distractions could prove fatal.

Overall, Freedom Wars looks like it has potential but needs work. I am curious
as to the single-player mode and if it stands on its own at all, but we never
really got a chance to check that out. The game is being developed in part by Shift,
which worked on the God Eater series,
so if they follow the same user feedback refinement model, hopefully they’ll be
able to work out all the kinks by the time the game is completed.

Freedom
Wars is scheduled for release in Japan in 2014. No
word on an international release.

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