- 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 30/12/2024 00:01

Liberté (PS5) – Review

It has already been over a year since we took a closer look at Liberté on Steam, and we concluded that this roguelike deckbuilder had all the right elements to be a hit. Sadly, some minor bugs and a slow story progression stood in the way of it reaching a higher score. Now, we are taking a look at the PS5 port of Liberté, which is handled by Ultimate Games. We know the publisher mainly from ports of PC games, and not all of them have been a success so far. That being said, we were curious to see if Liberté for PlayStation 5 was a successful port or if it needed just a bit more love. Story The story starts with our protagonist, René, waking up surrounded by rubble and suffering from memory loss. When he inspects his surroundings, he suddenly hears a voice. The voice instructs René to find her, take the heart from her otherworldly carcass, and get to safety. Here we discover that the story is set in France around the French Revolution or rather an alternative version of it. In our journey, we meet other characters and find out that the voice that guides us is Lady Bliss. From here on out a journey begins where you must uncover what is truly going on, who you are, and who or what Lady Bliss is exactly. Overall, Liberté has a good story. There is a bit of dialogue at the beginning of a run that shows us the relationships between some characters. Those dialogues do make us understand where everyone stands in the revolution. The pace of the storytelling was fast enough to understand what was happening and not forget what we were doing. The overarching story progresses rather slowly, however. Graphics When it comes to the graphics, Liberté is a bit of a mixed bag. During dialogues, the images that are displayed look great, especially their painting-like qualities. The art on the skill cards is decent with some exceptions. When looking at the in-game graphics, however, it’s clear that this port took quite a few hits. The NPCs models look cheap, there’s quite a bit of clipping, and there is just a slew of general graphical bugs and glitches. We expected a lot more of this next-gen port, especially since the Steam version looked quite good. Sound The music of Liberté is decent. There were some moments when the music just stopped at a random moment, like in the middle of a fight. The amount of different tracks is limited, which makes tracks loop rather quickly. The SFX are done well with some exceptions. We noticed some immersion-breaking moments like a woman screaming at the beginning of the fight, while said NPC is not running around in panic and just walking around like nothing is happening. Gameplay  Liberté is a roguelike game with some deckbuilding elements. The decks you build are in fact your skillset for the run you’ll embark upon. When diving into the experience, we get a short tutorial, but for some reason, the actual button inputs aren’t explained. We assume the team that handled the port didn’t want to replace the original symbol to match those of a PlayStation controller. This was a trend for further tutorials in the game as well, which is a shame. Luckily, the controls are intuitive and responsive, so we didn’t actually experience any issues with the general gameplay loop. The combat in Liberté is straightforward. You dodge or attack, and cards can unlock some abilities temporarily. Only one active ability in a certain category can be active. This makes you choose what skill you want and sacrifice another as you have to sacrifice a card to get mana. This aspect does remind us of Flesh and Blood TCG. Each run will feel different as you may take a different combination of skills each time. The deckbuilding aspect was nicely handled. You will already have a full deck at the start, and this can only be changed when you die or go to the game’s hub. In each mission, you may find a blueprint, and those blueprints unlock some cards that can be crafted. The cards you get are random during a run. Making a deck at the beginning of a run and then getting your cards at random does make it feel like an actual card game. This in turn creates a certain luck aspect, and it ensures no two runs are the same. These aspects do remind us of other TCG like Magic: The Gathering or Cardfight!! Vanguard.    Conclusion We had some doubts about the PS5 port of Liberté, especially when we saw how the quality of the graphics took quite a few hits. All in all, you’re treated to the same gameplay experience as the 2023 Steam release, which still makes the overall gameplay loop quite enjoyable. We still enjoyed the deckbuilding components, and the combat in Liberté was as enjoyable as it was in the original version. Every run still felt unique, which created quite a bit of replay value. Sadly, the overall presentation felt lacking. The soundtrack felt limited, and the awkward transitions between songs broke immersion quite a few times. Sadly, the game’s graphics truly made this a subpar console port, especially since the PC version still looked quite good. We do hope the console version will receive a few patches down the line, to at least reach the same quality level as the PC version. If you have the option to play the game on PC, we’d recommend the Steam version, if not, you could still do much worse than what Liberté has to offer.