Review: Liberated is a “Both Sides” Tale in a Period of Resistance
Playing Liberated amidst the protests and riots stemming from the recent police murder of George Floyd was profoundly unsettling. As I was playing this cyberpunk noir game on my Switch, I sat in front of my laptop, which displayed social media images of public demonstrations and the resulting police brutality. Meanwhile, in Liberated, I was playing as a cop, indiscriminately shooting members of a resistance organization.
This side-scrolling twin-stick shooter from Polish game companies, Atomic Wolf and Walkabout Games, tackles a number of social and political issues relevant to our everyday lives through a distinct comic book visual style. Government surveillance and the growth of social media are amongst the hot button topics depicted in Liberated, but what the story emphasizes is perspective.
And therein lies the major flaw of the story, as the framing forms an equivalence between the resistance and the police, between the people and authority. As we reach a flashpoint with systemic violence and public unrest, such a framing could be dangerous.
Liberated is very overtly inspired by the graphic novels Sin City and V for Vendetta, the former by its aesthetic and the latter more so by its themes. The story takes place in the year 2024, sometime after a school bombing. This is what incites the dominating and constant surveillance of society through a social credit system known as CCS and an algorithm called Themis. The game switches between the two opposing factions: the anti-government organization known as “Liberated,” and the police force.
The story is told over four chapters, or “issues,” of a comic series. Both cutscenes and gameplay are presented within the panels of these comics, with the scenes of dialogue and story taking on a very Frank Miller-esque style. Characters include a hacker named Barry, who becomes the newest member of a Liberated cell, a police captain named Frank who was instrumental to the rise of Themis, a former colleague of Frank named Harry who is now with Liberated, and a couple of other Liberated members as player characters in the final issue.
None of these characters particularly stands out—conceptually they all fill in a very familiar archetype (i.e. the hacker, the mole, the cop days away from retirement) from other similar media, and none of their dialogue has any color or personality. There are no distinct voices amongst the cast, and a bulk of the cutscenes are the characters shouting platitudes at each other. There is no nuance in the way any of these characters interact, and every one of them might as well be standing on a soapbox during their monologues. Even with how overt all of these interactions and ideologies are, the story still seems afraid to endorse either side, pulling the game into “really make you think, huh?” territory.
The foundation of Liberated begins to crumble further into the gameplay segments. There are stealth elements, hacking minigames, and the occasional puzzle to solve. The environments explored in the game are fairly well-realized, and the attention to detail in lighting and sound design is noticeable. However, the act of playing the game itself left a lot more to be desired. At its core, the game is a sidescroller, with dual-stick controls used for shooting, but the way the game handles these mechanics never made much sense to me.
Players will use the right stick to aim their firearm, the right trigger to shoot, and the right bumper to reload. While the player’s perspective is from the side, the fact that the characters theoretically can just look straight ahead always took me out, and as a result, a lot of the characters’ behavior made little sense to me. Enemies will either be totally oblivious to the player’s presence or will be extremely well-prepared several screens ahead for you.
A lot of the time, it didn’t seem like my bullets were registering if I tried shooting an enemy I knew was ahead but was slightly off-screen. Sometimes you’ll enter a room with guns already pointed at you, again, even though your character can see ahead within the world of the game, making it an issue of reaction time for the player. But with how unfair these situations can be (i.e. dropping down to be surrounded by two trigger-happy enemies on both sides) it can sometimes seem like trial-and-error and luck over reflexes and skill.
And then you get into the “stealth” sections of the game; the left bumper is to go into a sneaking mode, moving quietly to not alert enemies who apparently have extremely sensitive super-hearing to footsteps (yet they can’t hear gunshots from a screen or two away). It isn’t quite helpful when trailing enemies who are going at regular walk speed, so instead, you might want to hit a button to hide behind a wall and simply wait for them to pass by to either sneak behind or silently dispatch them.
The problem is that the stealth mechanics feel completely impractical except in rare cases indicated by the story. I played most of the game walking to the right with my gun pointed in front, shooting any enemy that approaches in the head. And holstering your weapon and re-drawing it will refill the clip, making reloading actually useless. Even with these stealth and shooting mechanics laid out at the beginning, Liberated doesn’t expand or go further with any of them.
Puzzles in this game felt inept and involved very little thought processing. It comes across as an attempt to replicate a Playdead game, with movable objects to climb, levers to pull, and elevators to ride. Perhaps it is just the particular way I approach game spaces, but a lot of these puzzles barely registered as so. Levels do not give players the time and space to sort out all of these puzzle elements; instead, everything is laid out in a way that the nature of the puzzle isn’t even evident until you’re in the middle of it, or even until it’s solved. It’s all a matter of feeling around the scenery until you inadvertently run into the solution with no challenge.
But even if the shooting in this game felt “right” mechanically, it still would not feel right emotionally.
Liberated wants you to believe that this is not a story about “good vs. evil,” but rather one about people. However, the way the story goes about this feels extraordinarily naive and lacking. The characters spout off about how each other’s sides are bad, with the Liberated telling the cops that they are responsible for this dystopic surveillance state and the police captain Frank swearing vengeance at the Liberated for all of the dead officers.
But once the second and third chapters of the game put you in the shoes of Frank mercilessly mowing down resistance members, his characterization is compromised; couple that with an actual torture scene and the likely scenario that the government was responsible for the school bombing, and the premise of the game falls apart. Yet still, Liberated caps everything off with an aura of ambiguity surrounding all parties involved, and leaves everything to public opinion. In their attempt to make the dynamics of such a civilization complex and textured, Liberated has somehow made it even more distilled and simplistic.
What results isn’t ambiguity, but instead what feels like pure cynicism, and the events at the end of Liberated treads into nihilism.
I know that video games will not save us, and I wasn’t expecting Liberated to have the solutions to all of our modern-day problems. I know that we as individuals have to be insightful enough to understand right from wrong and that art and media cannot be depended on to prescribe these thoughts to us. But in this time of turmoil, taking themes of police brutality, authoritarianism, and revolution and mixing it into a narrative that asks if both sides are going “too far” is a rubbery equivocation that we as players simply do not need.
I had come out of PAX East 2020 with some skepticism about Liberated, having already noticed the platitude-heavy monologues. A friend and peer of mine, however, did mention that the developers’ Polish backgrounds could inform the direction in which the story takes. After completing the final game, I am left pining for a game with these themes that is closer to history.
Having a sense of place and culture can very much help in characterizing and defining a game, its characters, and their motivations. More recently, we have indie games including A Summer’s End taking place in 1986 Hong Kong and The Flower Collectors set in 1977 Barcelona capturing a moment in time. While it is absolutely not in my place to tell Atomic Wolf and Walkabout what type of game to make and what aspects of Polish history to draw from, I do personally believe that basing such a story from real and personal and historical perspectives may have led to something stronger than a mere pastiche of dystopic graphic novels.
The reason why Liberated feels wrong to play on this exact day is that, at least in the States, we are in a moment ourselves that is unfolding before our eyes. Whether it is on the frontlines at a protest or on our social media feeds, we are watching black Americans murdered by cops, innocents, journalists, and local politicians pepper-sprayed and shot by rubber bullets, a President who is blatantly inciting violence, and his opportunistic followers who are stirring up conflict in bad faith. We are watching history in the making, and while Liberated is looking towards the future, it is already left behind.
This game was reviewed on a Nintendo Switch with a code provided by the publisher.
