When I first received Liberte, I was not impressed. The key had arrived when the game was in the last month of Early Access and there were so many rough edges with it. The experience of Liberte felt hollow. However, there was some part of the story that stuck with me. So instead of writing up a preview report of the game, I decided to bide my time and wait until the game was fully released. That time has now passed and I can safely say that Liberte is a good game!

Taking place in a strange alternative Revolutionary France, you play a character who remains just as strange as the changes to the timeline. When starting the game, the protagonist that you control finds himself being called by a giant being who seems extraterrestrial in nature. This being asks you to take her heart which seemingly destroys her body but allows her to communicate to you without others eavesdropping.

You quickly realize that you are someone that other characters recognize, but questions plague you. How did you come to be this person? Who should you side with? What does the alien want? Who are you really?

While these questions are eventually answered, I believe that they are best left for you to find as you help to shape this new France. What I can tell you is that the voice acting is brilliant. When I played the early access version of the game there was no voice acting, which hindered my experience. With lines being added in with the full release of the game, the story becomes even more intriguing and the motivations behind the various characters that you meet become clearer.

The studio did a superb job of finding voice actors that could make these characters come alive beyond their drawings. This is a rare feat considering that there is very little body language that we are given through the drawings of the characters.

Liberte is a top-down Roguelite with deck-building elements. While the deck-building portion of the game initially threw me off, it grew on me over time as I learned the controls. However, I didn’t notice too much of a difference in my gameplay experience based on what cards I picked other than how quickly I dispatched my enemies.

This makes me question why the developers decided to use a deck-building system rather than the typical skill tree. Regardless, it was a nice change from the normal way of gaining levels for your character and having permanent abilities. This also allowed for more experimentation of play styles throughout various parts of the game whenever I felt that the combat was getting stale.

In Liberte, you run across four distinct factions. Each faction is vying for control of the overall situation going down in France in an attempt to shape the future of the revolution to fit its goals. These factions consist of The Rebels, The Crown, The Tribe, and The Church. The Rebels and The Crown are the natural opponents of each other and will often ask you to fight the other.

The Tribe and The Church go at each other, but both operate more in the gray of events rather than black and white like the other two factions. Whichever faction you choose will change various aspects of the game and how your playthrough turns out. Each faction also comes with a rewards system that gives you access to certain items and characters that you can use to give yourself more unique ways of dispatching your enemies. 

Overall, I think that Liberte is a decent game, but really becomes special through its story and characters. The voice acting also goes a long way to bringing more life to the story to the point where I primarily kept playing for the story rather than the gameplay. That is not to say that the gameplay was bad as I quite enjoyed mowing through the various enemies, but there wasn’t that much of a challenge. If you would like to check out more deck-building games with intriguing stories, I would suggest that you check out Edward Harding’s review of Mahokenshi right here.

A PC Review Copy of Liberte was provided by Anshar Publishing for this review.

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Liberte

19.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Great Story
• Awesome Voice Cast

Cons

• Combat That Became Stale
• Relatively Meaningless Deck Building Mechanic