Freedom Wars Remastered Review

thesixthaxis.com:

The sci-fi future of Freedom Wars Remastered makes George Orwell’s 1984 look like a holiday brochure. Forget worrying about the government tracking you, or whether what you read is the truth, in Freedom Wars you’re born with a 1,000,000 year prison sentence. One. Million. Years. From birth. This dystopian vision of the future is so ruthless, you have to earn the right to lie down. What happens if you forget? That’s a crime, and you’ll find another batch of years being added to your sentence.

This brutality paves the way for Sinners like you to work in indentured servitude to your Panopticon – a prison city – earning your right to essential things like lying down, or frivolities like running for more than five seconds. Each contribution to the greater good knocks a few years off your sentence, hopefully moving things in the right direction. Unless, of course, you callously go for a little run. Then it’s going back up again.

Freedom Wars was originally a PS Vita exclusive, and it’s remained one of the most talked about and sought-after titles in the handheld’s catalogue. Arriving here in Remastered form, there are minimal quality of life changes, but the key thing is that the game is here to experience across a raft of modern platforms. That’s well worth celebrating, but it’s a shame that the team at Dimps didn’t take the chance to bring us a more modern interpretation of the game’s iconic gameplay to go alongside it.

Freedom Wars belongs to the Monster Hunter branch of the action-RPG genre’s family tree, its combat centring on taking down huge foes called Abductors with a team of other players – either real-life allies or AI controlled. You follow that up by collecting various parts and components from that fallen foe, and using them to upgrade and improve your weaponry, or turning them in to your Panopticon in a bid to bring that sentence further down.

In 2024, Freedom Wars Remastered is showing its age and its portable origins. While the technical improvements bring