Throne and Liberty Review (PS5) | Push Square

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Throne and Liberty is a fantasy MMORPG that debuted in Korea last December. Since its global launch the free-to-play game has dominated Steam's concurrent players and top-sellers charts. While it's certainly popular, a long list of technical issues and uninspired mechanics cast doubts over its longevity.

You take up arms as the Star-Born, a person imbued with the power of a star fragment. The Arkeneum, an evil force, has invaded and ransacked your homeland, and it's up to you and the other Star-Born to join the Resistance and save your world.

The cinematics are gorgeous, and the narrator who offers expository voice-over is charmingly British, lending an air of literary authenticity to the high-fantasy setting, but the story is fairly run-of-the-mill. Your village was destroyed when you were a child, and now you're all grown up you can finally fight the invaders and turn the tide of the war.

The narrative is split into 10 chapters, most tasking you with exploring different areas and meeting new characters; some pop up later, and there's a fair bit of backtracking involved so you get to explore the world of Solisium and its varied biomes thoroughly.

But the characters that do return aren't that interesting, and the locations you circle back to remain unchanged, so the world feels static despite your quest progression. Add to that a lack of any interesting ways to interact with the environment or story beyond the very occasional puzzle, and the entire thing becomes a bore. Every objective is displayed with a quest marker, so you're quite literally just checking items off a to-do list with very little thought needed.

But people rarely play MMOs for the story. For a free-to-play game, Throne and Liberty is surprisingly grind-light. Many of the story chapters, co-op dungeons, and wider-MMO features like raids are gated behind achieving a certain character or power level, but you gain plenty of experience just from doing the main and side missions. A lot of these need to