Chains of Freedom Review - Middle-of-the-Road Tactics
It is no secret that I love a good turn-based tactics game. I grew up on the genre and recent hits like XCOM, Mutant: Year Zero and the criminally underrated Hard West 2 have all consumed hours and hours of my life as I master the tight tactical gameplay on offer. So when I heard that Chains of Freedom sighted some of these very games as their inspiration, I just had to check it out. While aiming for the best in the genre is admirable, getting there is something else entirely.
The sad news is, Chains of Freedom is aggressively average in almost every way. Some elements are better than others, some are worse, but as a whole, this is one of the most forgettable experiences I have come across in the genre. This makes it hard to describe, and hard to write about. You see when you write reviews, a great game gives you plenty to praise, a bad game gives you rage to fuel your words, but an average game becomes a blank spot on the page where you search to find things to say. There is nothing here that is broken, nothing that deserves my poison pen, but at the same time, there is nothing that brightens my mind and forces me to sing its praises through my words.
I will try though, for you my dear reader. Chains of Freedom is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a fascist/religious regime has risen to power after a strange substance began mutating and destroying the population. This regime is nothing short of a cult, with those that live outside of it simply target practice for the seasoned soldiers that support it. I took control of a group of these soldiers that are hunting a rebel cell in the backcountry, sending them on their way to fight mutants and other humans alike. The story twists and turns through some predictable sci/fi tropes and never gets in the way of things, but some poor voice acting and boring writing meant I was forgetting story beats almost as soon as they happened.
On the gameplay front things are split up into three different gameplay loops. The combat, exploration and stealth. The combat is the strongest of these three, with some nice turn-based battles resulting. In Chains of Freedom, I often found myself short of ammo so scrounging the battlefield mid-battle becomes an important tactic. This adds a wrinkle to the standard turn-based fare we are used to in the genre. The range of abilities also felt appropriate and different weapons all had their uses. It is clear to me that the team behind the game really put their skill into this part because it easily feels the most fleshed-out component.
Stealth on the whole is pretty bad. Fiddly to use, hard to see enemies lines of vision and frustratingly difficult to recognise when a soldier is out of sight, this part of the game caused me grief like no other. It is, poorly implemented and by the end of the game, I pretty much gave up even trying to use it, just setting my soldiers up in cover and starting combat instead. On the exploration side of things, players simply need to get their group of soldiers through the ruined countryside, mines, caves and various other locations all in a state of disrepair. There are some light puzzle-solving elements and scrounging for more supplies is a must, but it does little more than give players a chance to heal their soldiers inbetween battles.
Upgrading soldiers is an interesting exercise and something that feels unique. Players can utilise the very substance that ended the world to boost their soldiers. Each piece of this substance offers a different improvement, be it improving accuracy, a new ability or some extra armour. Each soldier starts with only two slots for pieces of this substance but that can be upgraded to five as the game progresses, really allowing a custom approach to upgrades. I did enjoy mixing and matching abilities, creating different classes like a sniper, healer and tank in the process. It does rely on luck though so you never really know which abilities you will find out in the world.
On the tech side of things, the game runs perfectly well. No hiccups, no tech issues and no crashes, so props to the team for putting out a rock-solid product. I know it is a sad comment on the state of things these days, praising a game for simply working, but here we are. Graphically the game looks nice without ever wowing me in any area. Some of the enemy designs are fun and the levels themselves have a nice amount of detail, but the soldiers, both the player’s and the enemy’s are a bit bland. Sound design is serviceable, apart from the voice acting, which as I said previously is woeful and the music does its job in the background.
So Chains of Freedom isn’t a bad game, it really isn’t. But that doesn’t mean it is a good one either. Everything is just too average, too bland, too safe. There is no personality, no innovation, no excitement. It is the type of game you finish and then immediately forget, the time spent playing just disappears from your memory. The biggest crime of any piece of entertainment is being forgettable, and Chains of Freedom sure hit that mark. There may be something here if you are a die-hard fan of the genre, but even then I would only be grabbing it on a deep sale, there are just too many better options on the market to say otherwise.
Chains of Freedom was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
