That results in a lot of failure, despite the fact that enemies do nothing more than walk back and forth in a given area. If a level requires you to be sneaky, you'll need to trudge along at a walk until you see a distant flashlight, then duck away to hide. Trying to be stealthy at all is a pain-you move so fast and your vision is so limited that you pretty much barrel straight into enemies before you see them, alerting them immediately. Liberated wants to evoke titles like Shadow Complex, but it plays like something half-remembered from a bygone era. Most of the game is gunplay, and it's never much fun. Most of the time, though, it's better to just aim your gun with the right analog stick and walk forward, taking out the cops and flying drones as soon as they enter your field of view. In the stealthier portions, you can duck behind walls and objects as your character passes them, and then ambush enemies as they pass by. From a practical standpoint, gameplay is mostly just walking from place to place, trying not to get spotted by cops as they patrol back and forth. In the first volume, you play a hacker hunted by the cops and then recruited by the Liberated to help with their missions, which include attacking data centers and hacking into the airwaves to tell the rest of society to wake up. All that's missing is the Guy Fawkes mask-although Liberated has its own slightly different take on that idea as well. It's almost exactly the story of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, but instead of one masked vigilante, you have several cells of them. Fighting back are the Liberated, an Anonymous-like faction of rebels who resist freedom-stripping technologies and insist the government is using fear of terrorism to grab absolute power. The story is set in a world in which surveillance technology and social media have become tools for controlling society in the name of safety. As you pass over panel after panel, you'll occasionally pause on one that becomes a playable side-scrolling level, where you're generally tasked with shooting a lot of enemies, or hiding from them and breaking their necks as they pass by.
The game is presented as though you're reading through four volumes of a graphic novel of the same name. To be fair, Liberated's story is mostly a comic book. It's unfortunate that the playable parts and the story that are meant to drive the game can't match up to its gorgeous, comics-inspired art style-paging through all those great-looking panels will make you wonder if Liberated wouldn't have made a pretty good comic, instead of a lackluster game. The same is true with its frustrating side-scroller gameplay, which is both overly simplistic and often frustrating. Liberated's story is pretty much a carbon copy of its more interesting inspirations. The tech dystopia is well-worn territory in movies, books, comics, and video games, and Liberated offers little that hasn't been done better elsewhere. That familiar premise has been utilized again and again in works ranging from 1984 to Westworld, and it's also the state of the world in Liberated, a cyberpunk-ish side-scrolling action game that's as much comic book as video game. Surveillance is out of control, technology is numbing the minds of the masses, and the government (or corporations, or some combination thereof) has become fascist and corrupt, stripping freedoms and assassinating dissidents in the name of security.