Liberté Review

I leapt at the chance to review the PS5 port of Liberté because it was a local co-op game, which is pretty much all my son and I play together. I also caught the words “roguelike deck-builder”. Wait, isn’t that basically a two-player Slay The Spire? This game was unfortunate to be downloaded with such misplaced expectations. It is not attempting to be anything of the sort, and is instead an isometric fighting game, with your moves selected from a deck of cards that you pick up, craft, use or burn along the way. With my hopes initially deflated, they picked up again as I completed the tutorial and worked out how the deck-building side of things worked.

You gain new cards along the way, and they cost mana to play, but in this case play does not mean every time you use it. You have various slots which can only accept certain types of card: melee, ranged, support, consumable, etc, so with only one ranged slot, you cannot play two ranged cards. You get more slots available as you progress (and, being a roguelike, you continue to progress over time, no matter how much you die, in the form of blueprints and crafting). The mana cost is what you have to spend to put that card in your slot. You can only gain mana by burning cards and getting their cost to spend on others. So that can lead to some tough choices when you have only cards that you want to keep. It’s a pretty fun system, and implemented well.

I also like the cooldown system with the cards once deployed. When you fight and you use a card, it has a cooldown, but it is not time related. Rather, you have to connect with a certain number of basic attacks in order to decrease the cooldown to 0 and you can use the good skill again. It’s a proactive system that stops you hiding around the corner from a difficult battle until you’re ready to go. There’s also plenty of cards helping the cooldown from other card slots etc (eg a bayonet stab is a melee card, but if you successfully use that it will take two points off your ranged card cooldown, so you will be able to fire again that much more quickly).

A third win was the setting. This is set in an altered version of the French Revolution, flavoured with Lovecraftian horror, which sounded brilliant. Within that world, you must choose between different factions to support: The Rebels, The Crown, The Church and The Tribe. I looked forward to playing one off against the other, or finding characters to save or bring down, and change the course of the story.

As I played the game, however, my renewed enthusiasm began to fade a little. It didn’t matter what faction I progressed. They all needed levelling up to get stuff, and it didn’t matter what I had done before, I just progressed whichever faction I had chosen for that run, and then changed or stuck next time. There was no real depth or interest or choices to be made.

What is more, the actual isometric look and feel is very old, and the combat felt clunky and repetitive. It looks like a subpar Hades, which managed to triumph over the standard look by offering a far better combat experience. I felt like I was battling my controller more than I should have been, but that may be due to my admittedly awful combat abilities.

The combat is interspersed with what looks like exploration around the lovely setting they had thought of, but there seemed so very little to do. A press of the controller stick shows you which way you need to go, and you might as well do it, because if you go anywhere else, there is nothing but empty space or dead ends. So you follow the path, going along streets, through groups of people, all with nothing to do. Until there’s another fight. I just don’t understand all the space that has been added to the game, when it seems to offer nothing.

The local multiplayer might still save it, right? I hoped so, but it just seemed to double down on the clunkiness of combat, and we looked so alike that we kept mistaking ourselves for the other. It was actually harder and less rewarding than playing it single-player. The extra player doesn’t even get to do certain things the main character can do, such as press the button to find out where they should go next, so they are waiting around until the main player decides to progress. After struggling through a number of sessions to glean any enjoyment from the game, my son refused to go back to it.

In the end, progress was so slow going, and the game so unrewarding that it was a struggle to get through enough Liberté to reasonably review it, but I've taken the hit so you don't have to. There are some good ideas in this game, and fans of the genre may well enjoy it far more than I did, but the repetition and unfulfilling gameplay is unlikely to make you stick around.