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Could use a bit of work; has some potential

BACKGROUND


Live Free or Die (originally known as Fires of Freedom) is a project that’s been in development hell for almost two decades. A short demo was released for the October 2019 Release The Dead event (though actual development seems to have started sometime in late September).

A lot of classic cyberpunk games came out in the early 2000’s (A Blurred Line and Iron Gaia being the most well known) so my curiosity was piqued.

PREMISE


Unlike other games of its era, the world of LFoD isn’t really inspired by Final Fantasy VII. Instead, most of the backstory seems to have been taken from Shadowrun. There’s a Treaty of Denver, California is a free state (that got invaded by the Japanese), Mexico called, they want Texas back, Los Angeles got flooded, and a right wing nation split off from the United States (though this one is in the northwest and it’s not a successor state to the Confederation).

It’s worth noting that there are no ten thousand year old great dragons running for president, elves, dwarves, orcs and trolls are nowhere to be seen, and magic never returned, so while I do think it errs a bit too much on the side of derivative, I wouldn’t really call it plagiarism either.

The main character is Hawkins, a former army medic who was recruited by a mercenary unit called the Mist Dragons. The demo revolves around her and the rest of her team trying to kidnap an expert on quantum computers on behalf of the Axis Corporation. Hadley and Sammy, two characters teased on the gamepage never show up.

PRESENTATION


The mapping is passable and there’s never a point where you can’t figure out where you’re supposed to go.

Everything is more or less graphically consistent except for the dropship which I think was ripped from the Metal Slug series. This would have been fine back in the RPGmaker 2000 era, but it definitely clashes when it’s slapped in RPGmaker MV. There’s a part where the Mist Dragon’s leader starts talking about how it was the coolest thing ever and I just started laughing.

Another issue is the ending. Most of it is just told through text on screen, except the text is very bright and in both maps its used, there are very bright sections. The game fades to grayscale to make it more readable, but what it really needs to do is tint itself darker instead.

GAMEPLAY


The combat system is fairly standard for the most part. Unlike in other games using firearms consumes ammunition. There’s no obvious way to check and see how much ammo each character has remaining. This isn’t really an issue since ammo is plentiful and as long as you explore the environment thoroughly you won’t run out. You also never need to reload.

Healing items are a bit harder to find. This is somewhat of a problem because most encounters feature groups of the same enemy (who naturally have identical agility scores) and the game doesn’t stagger their ATB bars. So if when one bad guy attacks, they all do. There were a few times where I had a character at full health die immediately after everyone all decided to gang up on them.

That being said, Guildenstern's defence is high enough to render him basically immortal and has a special ability that can revive everyone, so it isn’t really a game breaker. There’s a part where Hawkins needs to use a laser targeter so the Mist Dragon’s dropship can blow up the Spider Tank from Ghost in the Shell, and the game will auto-revive her once she’s prompted to do that. The enemy mech insta-killed her again before she could act so I had to spend another turn reviving her, but the thought was appreciated.

Some of the item and skill descriptions were too long and got cut off. I think one of the items in the vending machine could have restored MP, though I wasn’t sure which and just decided not to buy them.

NARRATIVE


The game starts off with you playing as Hawkins, she's a rookie mercenary who's starting at a new company. Her boss seems to know her entire military history (but not her name - you have to tell him that.) He then tells you to take a quiz and go do a combat tutorial.

I chose the quiz first, because there’s a lot of history on the gamepage and I thought I might earn some exp or money by answering questions right. It seemed like a fun set up for a mini-game.

As it turns out, there is no mini-game. The quiz is two questions that are both non-interactive. The first question is odd. You’re asked where you are, and Hawkins gives an “as you know” speech about how she was blindfolded in Sidney and flown across the ocean, then put into an APC without windows before finally just saying “Hong Kong,” and explaining that it was actually a pretty obvious question. I have no idea why the Mist Dragons went to all this effort just to set up this basic question, but whatever.

Then there’s some exposition about LA that isn’t really important. Then he tells you that there’s no more time, but also that he also left a bunch of textbooks scattered around his office for you, and you can read them if you want.

Then there’s some more exposition in the combat tutorial. Then you talk to Rosencratz and he explains what a ‘Redshirt’ is.

I should probably stress that exposition in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. While there are exceptions I usually do like knowing what’s happening in a game.

That being said, compare this conversation in LFoD:

That the Mist Dragon's dropship? Nice.

She's a beaut, alright. One of a kind. Hawkins, this here's the Fell Purpose.

The Fell started life as a Navy CH-47 Sea Knight, an old tandem rotor transport/lift chopper. Ace Boeing removed the rotors and overhauled the engines from twin turboshafts to quad impulse rockets and converted the propulsion system to Vectored Thrust. So, effectively she's an AB-201 Thunderhead VTOL, albeit one with a unique airframe.

Nice. What's it armed with?

She not it. And right now her primary armament is a GAU-9/A 30mm Gatling gun mounted in the turret under the nose. In the rear she's got a pair of Bofors 40mm L/70 cannon, independently tracking. Plus she's got the usual suite of active defenses: flares/chaff/smokescreen.

Niiice.

Old girl's our deadly little home away from home.



With a similar moment in Neuromancer:

"You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs."

"Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.

"Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics.

"Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just be going..."

"I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind."

"You got zip to do with me and my kind buddy. You're rich enough to hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here, is all. I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else." He crossed to the window and looked down.

"That's where I live now."



The former just has Tseng standing there telling you about how cool his dropship is. It doesn’t reveal anything about his character, other than he’s weirdly attached to his company’s vehicles.

In the latter, even taken out of context you can see that Case is reluctant to get involved, Armitage is a veteran soldier and hacker and his experiences in Russia changed him. William Gibson is building up tension and suspense.

LFoD gives you datapads with excerpts from The Man Who Was Thursday (because Deus Ex did), but if there’s one thing from that game I would have wanted to see here, it’s character moments like Gunther and Anna at the vending machine.

I realize I’ve been pretty negative, so I’ll backtrack a bit and say that nothing is terrible per se. All of the characters are consistent, there aren’t any obvious plot holes, spelling, punctuation and grammar are all fine, but there is a lot of wasted potential.

Without getting into spoilers, I will say that things do improve once you get to LA. There’s still a lot of unnecessary jargon, but the pacing is good and the dialogue works better now that the characters have something to do.

CLOSING THOUGHTS


I’m not really sure what to think of Live Free or Die. The demo left me feeling underwhelmed, but I do think that with a bit more editing (and maybe a new sprite for the dropship) the game has potential.

I get the impression this demo was just a small part of what’s supposed to be a much larger game, so I’m going to leave this review unrated. Once the full game is finished, I’ll probably revisit it.

Posts

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Thanks for the feedback. Esp. on the writing.

I think I've been vocal that that's what I care the most about.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the demo more full throatedly.

Just so you know, you're making a bit much of the Shadowrun similarities. (Interesting fact, I do believe that the guy who made Iron Gaia went on to work for Shadowrun, was reminded of that when I saw the two mentioned in the space of a paragraph).

In general, the most obvious way to tell the difference between plagiarism and homage is that homage seeks to draw attention to the derivative works that inspired it as a shout out to them. The downside is that sometimes people see homage in elements of the storytelling where none was intended.

Besides the Treaty of Denver and Japan-Occupied-CalFree, nothing in the backstory is inspired by Shadowrun, it's just my (very pessimistic and somewhat idiosyncratic) extrapolation of where this country/continent is going. The fact that magic was a thing and that Indigenous Peoples figured it out first makes the geopolitics of the continental United States look radically different in Shadowrun than it does in Live Free Or Die.

Most importantly, in Shadowrun "America" is no longer a thing and not relevant. The UCAS and the CAS exist but the war for their relevance compared to the global megacorps is lost and over. Shadowrun is about surviving, thriving, and profiting in the cracks between the megas in a fully post-America world. Live Free Or Die is about a last ditch effort to save America and engages with sticky topics like nationalism and American Exceptionalism and the patriotism of dissent. It's a...sizeable difference in my opinion. I'm trying to mix the techno-noir cynicism of classic cyberpunk with political dissent and an in-depth critical dissection of the idea of "MAGA". Shadowrun was about mixing the techno-noir cynicism of classic cyberpunk with elves and dragons.

The American Federation (probably renamed the Christian American Federation in subsequent builds) isn't an expy for the CAS from Shadowrun. It's closer to being an expy of the NSF (as I see you pointed out) but honestly that is not there because it was in a computer game released by Eidos in 1999, it is there because I have been watching the NSF become a real thing for a decade now and it's terrifying. Looking at that kind of news out of the Northwest I've been like... "oh hey, wow, this is just like the NSF from Deus Ex....except that they are definitely not going to wind up being the good guys in the end".

Likewise, Mexico being a dangerously aggressive narcostate is pure extrapolation from observations I've made of Mexico.

The only thing you ascribed to being taken from Shadowrun that I thought was outright silly was the massive coastal flooding reshaping cities like LA and NY. It only makes sense to characterize that as being "from Shadowrun" if you're a climate denier or something. Like, the superstorms are coming, as is the sea level rise, at this point it's just science, not fiction.

Initially, G.K. Chesteron's The Man Who Was Thursday was indeed in there just because it's in Deus Ex. But then I got the copy of it that I'd ordered from Amazon and started actually reading it and now it's in there because it has very fascinating things to say about anarchy and law enforcement. Albeit from the perspective of a very antiquated time period.

The writing is nowhere near as taut or efficient as Gibson, you're right, but that's a hard bar to meet: I firmly believe he's the greatest prose stylist of his generation (our generation?).

In reality these characters would just use the jargon w/o explaining what any of it means. The dialogue would be much brisker but the player would potentially be even more confused. The dialogue between Hawkins and Tseng might look more like this:

Hawkins: That our ride?
Tseng: Yep.
Hawkins: VTOL?
Tseng: Yeah, converted. From an old Chinook twin-rotor.
Hawkins: Armaments?
Tseng: 30mm gatling up front, independently tracking 40mm cannon in back, plus smoke, chaff, and ECCM, usual package.
Hawkins: It's a badass ship.
Tseng: You call a ship "she", not "it" Hawkins. This one, she's named the Fell Purpose.

Gets across the same points in less words (this is a hovercraft, it was a helicopter, Tseng is sentimental about it, it has a 30mm gatling gun in the front and two 40mm cannon in the back, the latter of which are what are used for the
air strike at the end of the demo
) but is less informative to anyone that knows nothing about military hardware ("VTOL? ECCM?"), and less entertaining to anyone who knows lots about military hardware, like myself.

That said, I cringed when I saw just now that I had Hawkins say "nice" three times in the dialogue about the dropship. It was the kind of thing I was specifically trying to avoid. Hawkins is at once a mostly-silent-cypher-protagonist and a meta-commentary on the mostly-silent-cypher-protagonist which is a tough line to walk.

In the game, there are basically two dialogues I felt self-conscious about when I released it, and that was the dialogue about the dropship, and the shaggy dog story where Hawkins reasons out that she's in Hong Kong. Future builds if I can motivate myself to release any will have the talk with Tseng radically altered or removed, and might even start with the infiltration on the Lotus Gardens run.

I'm not going to apologize for most people in the year 2076 not knowing what Star Trek is and not getting Star Trek memes. To me that's just logical (and while we're tallying references, "historical documents" is a Galaxy Quest reference).

A lot of the writing I'm proudest of comes later in the demo, towards the end of the Lotus Gardens run and then the final expository narrative dump (which you're not the first person to point out is hard to read: that at least is an easy fix).

Anyway, Tseng and the Mist Dragons (who are totally based on Shadowrun characters I made in high school lol) are not in fact the main characters and are probably, if I can manage to complete this game (unfortunately, I am in very dire straits financially so I moved on to a project that I can hopefully sell--my artistic vision for LFOD involves a specific soundtrack of copyrighted music that would make selling it problematic), going to wind up being the bad guys (although hopefully it's clear from the demo that this isn't the kind of story that's going to have simple open-and-shut good guys and bad guys).

I am not sure that I have an entirely coherent and logical reason for having you do the "tutorial" part of the game as the bad guys except that it struck me as interesting and experimental. I often experiment with things I haven't seen experimented with in other games, usually having to do with perspective and empathy. The idea was--is--that later on when the Mist Dragons are trying to kill Hadley and company, the player's gonna feel some things.

Sorry to run on so long. Thanks again for your feedback. I appreciate you leaving this unstarred considering this was indeed a demo that I rushed out perhaps before it was as fully baked as I'd have liked.

- Crow

P.S. If you or anyone else would like to draw me a new dropship sprite for free, I'm not saying no. :D
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