The PSP was many issues to many individuals, a pleasant little slice of {hardware} that ended up with a fairly stellar library of ports and new video games — however one factor you can by no means say about it was that it had a second analogue stick. That sole little management nub on its left needed to do a heck of quite a lot of heavy lifting, and Killzone: Liberation is and was an ideal instance of how builders labored round it.
In making a spin-off from its profitable first Killzone sport forward of dropping Killzone 2 on the PS3, Guerrilla labored with the PSP’s limitations to make Liberation, a top-down strategic shooter which you could now choose up emulated on the PS5 and PS4. Taking part in it in 2024 makes for a little bit of a nostalgia overdose.
If that sounds each good and unhealthy, that is precisely our intention: Liberation is a irritating combination of brilliant concepts and implementation that typically feels achingly annoying to play on a contemporary system, which should not be a shock. It drops gamers into the center of the continued battle between the dastardly Helghast and the Interplanetary Strategic Alliance. We reprise the position of Templar from the primary sport as he hunts down some Helghast bigwigs over the course of 4 acts, every comprising 5 missions.
Every of those levels runs to round 10 minutes lengthy, making for a fairly modest runtime, though the sport is padded out by single participant challenges that see you drop again into missions with particular targets within the hopes of unlocking upgrades in your character. There are issue choices to discover, too, though as we’ll cowl later they are not precisely welcoming.
You management Templar from a top-down perspective, shifting him together with your left analogue stick and aiming with the identical. You may free-shoot whereas shifting, however the true intention is so that you can take cowl by holding R1, then pop up whereas static to free-aim a laser sight at enemies. There’s some light lock-on right here, however it could be too beneficiant to explain it as feeling nice. Fairly, Templar’s accuracy is piecemeal, and it is all too simple to get caught in a long-range combat that takes 30 seconds to resolve as a result of virtually all of your bullets miss the goal. Throwing grenades, in the meantime, is an train in crossing your fingers.
As you progress, discovering briefcases of cash will make it easier to unlock new weapons over time, and so they’ll even be dotted round ranges. From machine pistols and shotguns to explosive crossbows, these are all good enjoyable to experiment with, even when a lot of them are pretty ineffective. Prioritising weapons that hit more durable is important for the reason that sport’s issue can get irritating at occasions; enemy troopers rinse your well being very quickly, whereas their very own sponginess is a degree of rivalry.
You will encounter a couple of completely different enemy varieties, from cover-hugging snipers to onrushing shotgunners and cell grenadiers. These will guarantee you need to react to the battlefield round you, though you needn’t count on any grand surprises. That mission-based construction implies that every stage within the sport boils all the way down to virtually an impediment course: you may have a base, stretch of swamp, or mountainous path to get by way of, with Helghast spilling out of closed doorways or dropships to cease you.
Certainly, ranges all too typically depend on the identical construction: push by way of a bit to a blocked path, backtrack to seek out some C4, then push by way of once more to detonate the blockage and proceed. Alongside the way in which, you may additionally discover provide caches that provide you with well being refills, new weapons, and explosives, however every has a finite inventory. At factors, you may be concentrating arduous on useful resource administration, with these provide containers changing into barely unlucky crutches in tougher moments, ones that you will trudge slowly backwards to seek out when needed.
You will additionally typically have a buddy together with you in missions, who could be ordered round by way of an honest command display, directing them at particular enemies or cowl factors, or just telling them to comply with you round (as is best more often than not). In these moments the sport feels somewhat extra bombastic, and fewer like a bizarre Metallic Gear Stable spin-off that deserted any pretence at stealth (though Liberation does have barely-used consciousness states for its troopers).
Within the second half of the sport, this cadence is interrupted by a few of the most painfully troublesome boss fights we have encountered in ages. A combat in opposition to a spider tank had us questioning our will to dwell because of shonky focusing on and Templar’s painfully sluggish motion velocity, and we will not think about we’ll be the one ones to leap all the way down to Straightforward mode merely to squeak by way of.
Liberation is a additionally good reminder of how hooked on muted palettes we had been again in 2006 – it is virtually unremittingly brown, dropping that color solely to shift to gray at occasions, and whereas its washed-out look felt gritty and practical on the PSP’s show, it is rather less good-looking blown up on a contemporary show. The extent of element was nice for the time, however you may now must do quite a lot of imagining to fill within the gaps in its grubby animations and low-poly fashions.
Nonetheless, the sport is easy and crisp in its new upressed presentation, and the addition of each fast Save/Load features and a rewind function are life savers. They utterly eradicate potential frustrations when Liberation throws you into conditions the place trial and error is likely to be the one manner out.
Conclusion
Should you owned Killzone: Liberation again within the day and wish to go down reminiscence lane, then $9.99/£7.99 is a low sufficient worth to demand a revisit. Nevertheless, you probably have no nostalgia for this handheld adaptation, there’s not a lot right here to attract you in, particularly given the sheer variety of extra completed trendy twin-stick or top-down shooters which might be obtainable on the PS Retailer as of late.