Disciples: Liberation Review - Page 2
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I'll be the first to admit that the game managed to surprise me with some of its twists, like that time you're hired to help a farmer who's being robbed by the rebels and taxed by the church. If you decide to do the guy a solid and kill all his enemies, he ends up dead because, for all their racketeering, the church was also providing him with protection. And many hours of gameplay later, you'll meet the guy's cow who'll ask you to kill him and feed him to her (since this is a modern game that tries to be funny, I'm afraid humorous cannibals are a must). But if he's already dead, he turns into a zombie and the cow refuses to eat him. And this is just one minor quest chain in one of the areas.
All of this decision-making isn't just for show. The game's four races each have a reputation meter. If you raise it, the units belonging to those races become stronger when fighting under your banner, you get access to new skills, and the ability to construct new buildings back in Yllian, a city of angels that acts as your home base.
Most of the game's quests will allow you to increase or decrease your reputation with the races, and more often than not, pleasing one race makes at least one other mad at you. During your first playthrough, you'll probably be able to max out relations with one of the races, and that's it. However, after you beat the game, you'll unlock what's essentially a New Game+ mode that sends you back in time and tasks you with maxing out relations with everyone with the help of some new dialogue options. Doing so is supposed to unlock some secret boss fight and ending.
Speaking of dialogues, the game has that thing where the options you get to click express the general idea of what your character is about to say, but at least it has the decency to clearly mark the attitude of each line. You get friendly replies, angry replies, inspiring replies, romantic replies. So many romantic replies.
You know how RPGs tend to have romances and some people love them while others can't stand them? Well, Liberation is on a completely different level in this department. Sure, you can have a romance with one of your companions (you get two for each of the game's races, plus your starting childhood friend). But pretty much everywhere you go, you get opportunities for casual hookups that the game delights in describing to you.
But the funny thing is, as much as I usually want to have nothing to do with RPG romances, here that stuff tips over into the "so bad it's good" territory, where I couldn't wait to see what weird sexual encounter the game will throw at me next.
Do You Guys Not Have Phones?
Apart from being more promiscuous than Hugh Hefner in his prime, Avyanna has a character sheet with four primary attributes - Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence. These increase her damage, health, critical chance, resistances. The usual. Unfortunately, the attributes are borderline cosmetic, as you can't manually increase them. They just go up on their own as you gain levels.
You can also raise your stats by equipping armor, but doing so will put you face to face with the game's itemization system. And that's very much a gazing into the abyss type situation.
