Chains of Freedom review: More isn’t always better

Games don’t often get audible sighs of exasperation from me for being difficult. Challenge is a fine thing and turn-based tactics games are a perfect environment for them. But not every type of challenge is equal. 

Chains of Freedom appears to subscribe to two main ways of increasing the difficulty: The first one is to throw you into engagement after engagement, every one containing more enemies than the last. That makes sense. A major part of the game is the resource management across your playthrough. Ammunition is finite. Resources to craft it are finite. Making you expend vital shots in essentially meaningless battles are part of the formula. But it’s a delicate line to walk and all too often for my taste does Chains of Freedom veer onto the wrong side of this border. Things get far too repetitive. 

Your group of desperadoes fights the same body horror creatures or fascist military units in every battle and there are no variations to the mission objectives for most of the game. It’s always the same thing: Eliminate all waves of enemies. And there sure are a lot of these. Unique foes are so rare, I can count their appearances in the entire campaign on one hand.

While I don’t particularly enjoy the resource conservation game, it’d be fine if the encounters designed to make me make those hard decisions were at least interesting, but they are not. Somewhere in the middle of the game, Chains of Freedom starts to drag itself out. It doesn’t help that you can’t save during the long battles. You can’t even tab out while the myriad of enemies take their turn, because the game pauses as soon as it’s not in focus. So once you’ve started a combat encounter, you’re stuck in there, no matter how uninteresting it is. That saps away motivation and I’ve had multiple instances where I finished a single battle and then saw the next one coming and went “Nope, not today” and did something else, because the game tired me out.

What’s really perfidious is that the resource management aspect ruins most of the battles that have the potential to be a little more interesting. Sometimes, encounters involve third parties, transforming them into more complex shootouts. But remember, you don’t want to waste your stuff. So what do you do? You go and camp in a corner while the other two parties kill each other, watching them take their turns – not always a pleasure, given some of the AI’s more questionable decisions – and biding your time until you can mop up the survivors for a cheap victory. Satisfying in a cunning sort of way, yes, but it should never be the optimal strategy in a game not to play the game.

The second way the game ups the difficulty from time to time is to take away team members, killing them off or turning them against you in plot twists that you can see coming from miles away — the writing and story are robust, but nothing you haven’t seen before. That just feels cheap. As you make your way around the game, you can find various types of biocrystals. All characters have the ability to equip these, benefiting from the stat bonuses, passive bonuses, and active skills the artifacts grant. These are all freely swappable outside of combat and the system actually feels great to use. It’s giving you a lot of freedom to specialize and build your characters or prepare for tough engagements you couldn’t solve in the first attempt. It’s one of the game’s strongest aspects.

Naturally, this means that you begin to design your team a certain way and play around that. Take one variable out of the equation, though, and suddenly your team feels clunky and weak. Now, I can see the argument for doing that: It forces you to rethink your approach, change up your style. But it feels a little hypocritical of the developers to force that burden of mixing it up on the player, while they sit back and throw the same enemies at you throughout the game.

I don’t want to portray these aspects as net negatives, because I’m certain there are players out there who will delve into these types of challenges with relish — it’s just not exactly for me.

Aside from the obvious XCOM-like turn-based combat, the game clearly derives inspiration from the likes of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden and Miasma Chronicles for its exploration, levels, and difficulty.

Speaking of its level design, it’s got great and not-so-great points. In terms of providing terrain for combat encounters, it’s fairly consistently good and challenging — and the maps have to be robust, because they’re often the only thing differentiating combat encounters from each other. You’ll find high grounds, cover, and explosive barrels of various kinds to help you out, while the areas provide some interesting firing lanes and choke points. But they can also work against you, such as a deep rift in the ground protecting enemies from melee attacks, forcing you to deploy your long-ranged weapons on that side and adapt your tactics.

The areas are less great for the exploration bit, because they loop around pretty much the same way every time. You’ll come upon a locked building, go further, do some combats, find a key, get a convenient shortcut back to that locked area, open it up, do some more combats, and advance onwards. Every. Single. Time. There is no minimap either, so you better remember what’s where if you don’t want to circle around several times before finding the exit.

Again, it all serves its purpose. I just don’t enjoy that purpose as much as the developers or, perhaps, you.

And that’s a bit of a shame, because the combat itself is really good. They developers seem to have made the conscious decision to only give a single character the Overwatch ability, which I think is a very good one — it can bog combat down a lot when available all the time. Make it a once-every-couple-turns thing on a single character, though, and suddenly it’s interesting again. Every character on your team will have one such unique ability. There is a guy with a grappling hook for mobility, there is a guy who can mind control body horrors, there’s a woman who can taunt foes, and so on. It’s just enough to spice things up and enable you to build archetypes of characters without dictating anything.

Together with the excellent biocrystal system, the solid variety of weapon types, and the terrain interactions (you can do cool stuff like extinguishing flames with smoke grenades) combat is generally fun — it just gets a bit repetitive and tiring due to the aforementioned factors.

Nordcurrent’s Chains of Freedom isn’t an outstanding turn-based tactics game for me, but some of its core systems are genuinely good and – depending on your personal tastes – it might be one you will greatly enjoy.