Chains of Freedom Review | TheSixthAxis
Chains of Freedom is a turn-based strategy game, similar to XCOM, but set in a post-apocalyptic Eastern European country instead of an alien invasion. As with every other apocalypse, the land is messed up, full of unhinged lunatics, and there’s mutants about. It’s a good thing that you’ve got a squad of tactically minded folks to fight through these enemies with.
The story of Chains of Freedom isn’t going to blow your mind and the characters aren’t exactly novel, but it’s enough to keep you going to the next combat at least. A mysterious disease called EDEN is spreading through the land and those it doesn’t just kill become deformed, crystalline monsters who, naturally, make up a good chunk of the enemies you’ll be facing. Again, it’s not particularly unique, but I found some moments to be enjoyable enough even if I ended up treating the story as a thread to connect the combat encounters.
The biggest issue with the story is that it will take characters from your party without warning, suddenly replacing them with other characters who have different abilities. These new characters are perfectly functional, of course, but you’ve just spent hours with the others and equipped them with essential tools. When they’re taken away it means the time you spent preparing them was wasted, and if anyone can be gone at any given moment, it becomes very easy to not care at all about any of them. I only truly cared about a character when they had unique abilities, but even then sometimes they’re taken away from you, leaving you without that ability. Whilst this does force you to switch up your tactics, not being able to rely on having your carefully assembled squad of characters is a pain.
Thankfully the actual combat is pretty great. If you’ve played XCOM, you know what to expect here. Each character has action points that are spent on moving, attacking, and using abilities or consumables. A few abilities can make certain characters feel really quite powerful, such as a grappling hook which I was using to reposition a sniper, but could also be used to quickly get into or out of combat for a little melee punishment, or to flank around hunkered down enemies. Another character could sacrifice a third of her health to gain 20AP, which has saved her life many times, not to mention ended quite a few enemies’ lives. Since there are no limitations on how many times you can attack per turn, she could attack four times with that ability, making her very powerful.
The other side of this is that the game does feel a little bit easy, with the only real challenges being bosses, and even they’re not that tough. There are a few enemies that I would consider annoying, but not really challenging, such as one that teleports away when damaged, leaving behind a lesser enemy, which wasn’t really difficult to handle, but made the combat longer and more laborious. Some combat encounters will also bring in a few waves of reinforcements, often just appearing right next to your characters upon arrival, which is rather annoying in a game about tactics. Despite these issues, the combat can be very satisfying and was the real reason I wanted to keep playing.
Characters are customisable, though mostly by equipping weapons, tool, and consumables that you find whilst exploring the environment and looting defeated enemies. Favouring sniper characters to keep enemies at a distance, I found a crossbow that causes bleed and burning on enemies that I was partial to, but there’s plenty of variety through shotguns, flamethrowers, as well as various types of grenades, like cryogenic grenades. They provide a lot of effective options, so long as you don’t mind combing every area for loot. The walk speed is needlessly slow and there’s little of interest in the environments other than the loot, so exploration can feel a bit dull. Crafting materials will allow you to craft many of the aforementioned things, as well as ammunition for all your guns, which I had to do a lot as I was constantly running out.
The most interesting things you find through exploring are biocrystals. These are a weaponized form of the EDEN virus that will give a character a bonus. Some are incredibly useful, whilst others are basically useless, but at least there’s a lot of options if you find them. Characters can be upgraded to be able to equip more biocrystals, but only at certain shrines that can only grant a limited amount of biocrystal slots. This is how your character progresses and since it seems like you can miss some of these shrines – there’s been a few moments where I realised I hadn’t seen one for a while and got suspicious – it also seems to be possible to just miss some character progression. Also, as mentioned, you can give these upgrades to characters only for them to suddenly be removed from your party and replaced with someone else, wasting all your time and investment.
The graphics in Chains of Freedom are good, but not that impressive. It does the job well enough. Being post-apocalyptic, the environments are all drab, broken down buildings and such like that aren’t particularly interesting to look at in addition to the game not being pretty on a technical level, so the only draw for exploration is the loot you can find. The game sounds good enough as well, with some punchy gun sounds, though the voice acting oscillates between “serviceable” and “a bit off”.
