
Freedom Wars Remastered Review
Grab your Thorn and throw away your Vita, because FREEDOM WARS Remastered brings one of the better action-RPG games from the handheld to modern systems. Admittedly, I only played a couple of hours of the original, but I hoped that the remastered improvements focused enough on quality of life to make it more appealing to me.
The story of the game is that you’ve got amnesia, which is against the law, resetting your prison sentence to one million years, which it was at from the moment you were born and became a drain on resources. And it turns out that lots of things are against the law, such as laying down, pacing in your cell, or talking to a member of the opposite sex. So, as a Sinner, you’re sent out on missions to do things such as rescue productive members of society who have been kidnapped, to shave time off of your sentence, and earn the right to run for up to 10 seconds.
In case you don’t know, the remaster improves the graphics, both with better textures and an improved framerate, and there are more cosmetic options for you and your Accessory (android companion). The controls have been adjusted since controllers have two extra shoulder buttons and a lack of touch-sensitive surfaces, most noticeable with the Thorn (your fancy grappling hook) being more fluid to utilise. Menus and the inventory system have also been revamped to make it all easier to use. The multiplayer aspects have also been upgraded, but as I never toyed with those in the original, I can’t really comment on how much.
Missions in Freedom Wars Remastered see you taking on machines, other Sinners, or autonomous drones. The first few see you rescuing citizens, but others will have you gathering resources, fighting bosses, or sneaking around the place trying not to get caught. While each one is given a difficulty rating, they’re not always accurate… It’s extra frustrating because the briefing lets you see what types of enemies you’ll encounter, except I don’t think I ever saw it say anything that wasn’t “enemy type unknown”. It’s not like I need that for every mission, but it doesn't even work on the first missions where you’d generally want to show off everything.
You can usually choose who is part of your team for a mission, so it’s in your best interest to speak to people around the Panopticon (that’s your home base, where your cell is) to get them on your side. Your team members are useful in fighting off enemies or ganging up to pull down a larger one with your Thorns so that you can attack it without fear of reprisal for a few seconds. You can also issue orders to your Accessory, for instance, if you want them to extract a Citizen to the starting area while you chase down an enemy.
Speaking of the Accessory, it talks with text-to-speech, which is actually really frustrating. All of the androids do, as well as the AI running the Panopticon, so I hope you like hearing mispronounced words constantly! Not even words made up for the game like “Utopedia”, I mean normal, everyday English words like “constant” and “information”. I don’t recall if this was in the original version, but given the fact my Vita’s headphone socket is broken, I may have not played it with sound turned up very high.
Another thing that has frustrated me is the fact that there are no checkpoints or autosaves. If you do a bunch of stuff and then start and fail a mission, you return to your last manual save. I was honestly shocked when it happened, as I just figured I’d get to restart the mission or something, not lose 15 minutes of gameplay that I’d have to rush through again so that I could save and reattempt the mission.
One of my favourite bits of gameplay is when you use your Thorn to jump up onto an Abductor, then you can directly attack body parts in an effort to sever them. It takes several attempts, with the Abductor usually doing a move to throw you off and hurt you, but seeing an arm fly off is always satisfying.
You can collect parts that come off of Abductors, as well as other things scattered around levels, and you have the option to keep them, or give them to the Panopticon in exchange for time taken off of your sentence. The reason you might want to keep them is because other Sinners might want to trade for them, and you can craft weapons and items using them, so it’s always a balancing act of keeping some and giving others. Of course, you can always give the ones you keep at a later time.
Freedom Wars Remastered is a good remaster of a really fun game, though it has its issues. Expect to sink dozens of hours into this, and even more if you ever want to get your sentence reduced to zero — or do it again, if you played the original.
FREEDOM WARS Remastered (Reviewed on PlayStation 5)
This game is great, with minimal or no negatives.
It has its issues, but it’s nice to finally get this off of the Vita.
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