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I never understood how people could play any action game on the Playstation Portable or the Playstation Vita. I had both machines, but playing with the PSP’s analog nub or the PS Vita’s mini analog stick cramped up my thumb after awhile. It was one of the reasons why I never played the original Freedom Wars when it came out and why I looked forward to trying out Freedom Wars Remastered when it was announced!
Why bother buying a game that would cause me discomfort right? It was pretty much the same for nearly all action games across Sony’s portables. I never played Portable Ops or Peace Walker or any of the portable Monster Hunter games. Shocking admission, I know!
Thankfully, Bandai Namco has seen it fit to remaster Freedom Wars and release it. Improved visuals, a better frame rate and best of all, regular controllers!
What is Freedom Wars Remastered?
Freedom Wars Remastered is a single and multiplayer third person action game. It’s developed by Dimps Corporation, with publishing done by Bandai Namco. It’s available right now on the PC, Playstation consoles and the Nintendo Switch.
Our copy was provided by the kind folks at Bandai Namco!
Freedom Wars is your standard post apocalyptic dystopic. Earth’s resources are all depleted, and the survivors fight themselves over the remaining scraps. Enclaves known as Panopticons house the survivors and like current nations, they make alliances and wage war against each other.
You’re a Sinner in a Panopticon, which is a like one of Judge Dredd’s Megacities. You can choose which from a selection of Japan’s prefectures (I chose Chiba) and from then on, you’ll be representing that Panopticon.
As a Sinner, you’re sentenced to 1,000,000 years in prison for being born and being a waste of resources (and also for losing your memories). You work off the years in your sentence by going out on assigned missions; fighting off rival Sinners, recovering kidnapped Citizens (people who actually contribute and have useful skills for their Panopticon) and do all sorts of other stuff.
I really dig how deep the developers went into the whole dystopian thing and your worthlessness to society. In the very beginning, you can’t even run or sleep on your bed without getting time added on to your sentence. You can’t even talk to other people, or other genders or even go out of your cell.
You need to earn that privilege by going up in CODE levels and then buying those privileges with the points you earn from missions and donating items. Big Brother is truly alive and well and you either bow down and play ball or get squashed by the machine.
Fun stuff.
Freedom Wars Remastered tries to blend the gameplay of Monster Hunter and Toukiden (remember that series?) with gunplay and the ability to grapple (with a whip-like item called a Thorn) onto almost anything in the game. Friends, the environments, even the enemies.
These mainly come in the form of huge towering…things. Some look like mechs, some look like aliens, but all of them are called Abductors. What do they abduct? Why, the useful Citizens of course!
Each Abductor has multiple parts you can destroy. You can lock on to them when you’re using a melee weapon and then use your Thorn to attach yourself to them. While attached, you can hack away until those parts are destroyed or you get thrown off.
It’s really cool to watch in action and I honestly feel the action is superior to its contemporaries like Monster Hunter or God Eater. Note I said contemporaries which means the portable versions of those titles, not modern versions like Monster Hunter World, which also allowed you to grapple onto enemies.
Other than the Thorns (which come in three varieties), you also have different melee and projectile weapons. Some are fast and light, some are great for doing massive damage (but slow) and some are pure fun (the Autocannons). All the weapons are situational, so there’s really no one type that trumps them all. I personally roll with a Heavy Weapon (the Aftershadow) and a Rocket Launcher. Same for my Accessory.
There’s something innately satisfying of attaching to a giant machine and then just hacking and hacking (or firing a rocket point blank at a part you really want to destroy) until you get thrown off, or whatever you’re hacking gets blown off. Then it’s a mad rush to dodge and collect the machine parts so that you can reuse them to upgrade your gear.
It’s a gameplay loop anybody who plays hunting games will be familiar with. What Freedom Wars Remastered expands on this is that it adds in enemy AI humans in some maps to fight you as you’re taking on the Abductors. It also lets you bring in up to 3 allies, who each have their own Accessory (AI Helper).
The whole Accessory thing is pretty cool. Basically, every Sinner gets their own Accessory to help them in battle. They also serve as guards, relaying transgressions to the wardens. In practice, you can customize them to your liking. You dictate what weapons they equip, how they look and even their voice lines. You can even give them orders, though I find that they do well enough even on the Default setting.
It’s a cool little feature in Freedom Wars Remastered (and in the original I suppose) but you can write lines and then have the in-game voice generator say it. Of course, the generator is crap and whatever you write makes it sound like a robot is talking…but since it is a robot that’s talking, it somehow fits in really well!
Since the Accessories are paired with a Sinner (and you can bring up to 3 AI Sinners with you), that means you could be having as many as 7 other AI helpers on your team for a map. It makes for some really cool and hectic battles…despite the cramped maps.
An unfortunate carryover from its portable platform days, the maps in the game are…small.
Really small.
Think of the first section in Monster Hunter World after the camp, and that’s pretty much it. There are a handful of different maps, but all of them share share the same playable area size. It makes some fights (the stages sometimes throw 2 Abductors at you at once) really tough. Apparently, the difficulty’s been adjusted for the remaster. If that’s the case, I shudder at how difficult these fights might have been on the PS Vita!
Thankfully, while you do get limited revives before it’s mission over, you can get KOed and return to the fight (without using a revive count) if your allies can jolt you back to life in time. So while a mission might say you can revive 5 times before failure, in practice it’s usually much more (at least thrice or quadruple that).
Unfortunately, the game tends to ramble on with its story.
There can be lengthy periods of nothing but just you moving around and talking to people to progress. It gets boring, especially at the beginning. When all you want to do is earn points to buy some privileges but the game forces you to sit through yet another conversation, you start to lose interest fast!
Even then, there mission offerings are rather paltry. You can repeat missions to farm drops, but the missions themselves are rather limited, with there being only a number of missions (including optional ones) per CODE level.
You can even sign up for online missions, including those that attack other Panopticons, via the in-game rankings.
Unfortunately, I was never able to find players to try these out with, and since Bandai Namco only gave us a single PC code, I wasn’t able to get my friends try either. Your mileage will vary of course, so don’t let this put you off.
Another thing worth noting is that the in-game animations are pretty janky. The movements look a bit stilted but it’s the lack of reactions from the Abductors that’s the issue here. Getting shot at with missiles (the game’s most powerful weapon class) doesn’t even faze them. They just keep on coming. Even Terminators flinch and stagger when they get shot!
This being a remaster, there’s barely any new content added (other than the DLCs all being included from the get-go) but the HD visuals and 60FPS do make up for it somewhat. The game really benefitted from the touchup, as it was originally a PS Vita game…and those don’t look too hot.
That doesn’t do anything for the small stages, but hey, at least those stages look better, yeah?
On the ROG Ally X, the game performed beautifully. 1080p, with everything maxed out. 60FPS, without any issues. It’s not surprising. Despite the Remastered moniker at the end, this is, at the end of the day, just a prettied up portable game.
The ASUS ROG Ally X is leagues ahead of the Playstation Vita and not being able to run this well is unthinkable. If you thinking on bringing Freedom Wars Remastered on the road, know that you’ll have no issues with it on the trusty ROG Ally X.
The Bottom Line
Freedom Wars Remastered might not be the first choice for most people when they hope for a remaster. Tough, because it’s the one that Bandai Namco decided we’re going to have.
Thankfully, that wasn’t a totally bad decision.
The game’s actually decent, and the remaster improves most aspects of the game. It doesn’t make the game great, but it at least takes it a tad above average. However, issues with gameplay (too much talking for one) still detract from the potential the game has.
So while you might have fun playing the game, it’s not as fun as it could have been.
Despite its flaws, if Dimps or Bandai Namco does make a sequel, I do think the series could be a real fun one.
TLDR:
Decent game with a lot of potential but its execution is lacking.
The Good:
- Fights against Abductors are fun.
- Buying back entitlements is satisfying.
- Awesome setting.
- Thorns are fun to use.
The Bad:
- Too much talking and exposition.
- Maps are too small.
- Fights can be unfair with multiple Abductors in play.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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