Disciples: Liberation Review – IGN
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Disciples: Liberation, a tactical RPG adventure, is a fun outing in a fantasy world that puts you in the shoes of a classic RPG protagonist with special powers, a motley team of companions and a bone to choose from with destiny. scaling the stakes beyond what you would ever expect them to come. In fact, it outperforms its weight class in the quality of its combat and content, but is disappointed with a disorganized clutter of additional systems and some very prominent bugs.
Combining a turn-based tactics game with a proper role-playing game, Disciples: Liberation has you wandering through isometric environments as you play through an 80-hour role-playing story; I did more than a few side missions and optional fights, which finished in 92 hours played. . It is not an open world, but it is not linear either; each chapter is divided into a few regions that can be covered in any order. Within those regions, you fight a lot of turn-based battles, and it’s nice that they’re fun and (aside from being a little slow at times) designed quite openly because there are so many.
It’s a suitably long cosmic story for Nevandaar, a fantasy world that is dark and terrible, but still allows for goodness and redemption. Your character, a sewer-born mercenary named Avyanna, has many dialogue options: gentle denoted by halos, aggressive denoted by horns, and sarcastic denoted by Avyanna’s own twilight wings symbol. The side quests have enough diversity and enough compelling characters that I wasn’t always able to easily decide who to line up with.
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There’s a lot of branching dialogue, most of it pretty good, but some of it is really cheesy and accompanied by equally cheesy voice acting. Honestly that’s a good thing, because Disciples: Liberation knows what tone you’re looking for and sticks with it. Nevandaar is a comfort food environment; This is a generic, familiar, and feel-good fantasy, well done.
When preparing for a fight, you will control Avyanna, some of her named companions, and a set of generic units that you have recruited on your travels or produced at home in the ancient magical city of Yllian. There is plenty of variety in the units, from armored infantry to bone golems, possessed berserkers, and wild elf snipers. There are over 50 units, in total, and the units level up as you go, so nothing really becomes irrelevant. (Unfortunately, although your companions are a diverse and strange bunch, on the battlefield they are only skins from basic units with higher stats.)
In addition to its use in the front line, each unit can also be placed in one of the three spaces in the rear line, where it brings unique power from afar by buffing your units or weakening your enemies. Pro Tip: Winter Dryads give your entire army permanent regeneration, which I find invaluable.
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The combat maps are ideally sized, giving you plenty of room to maneuver and a pinch of terrain to play with. They avoid both the trap of feeling like a tight chessboard and the classic genre mistake of attempting environmental realism at the cost of being tactically interesting. No style of play feels penalized, nor does any style feel fundamentally dominated. Both ranged and melee focused options have their high points, and while mobility is strong, units gain bonuses and healing if they choose not to use an action point. Those little bonuses for not acting are a brilliant design, allowing defensive strategies to flourish in a genre normally obsessed with aggressive movement. Enemy AI tries its best and focuses fire quite well, but is very bad at knowing when to time its special abilities and really terrible at sticking around to take advantage of those bonuses.
I liked to build my armies from combos of undead (who have staying power), demons (who hit hard), and elves (to eliminate stragglers). The human units of the Empire are all obnoxious annoying by the gods and I couldn’t bear their screaming after a while, so most of the time I didn’t use them. One of my favorite army comps occurred mid-game, when my undead Death Knights inflicted the freeze effect on enemies and Elven snipers, who automatically criticized frozen enemies, eliminated them. Meanwhile, Avyanna, whom he had turned into a teleporter battle mage, would wreak havoc with control spells on the enemy’s bottom line.
Spells are a particular joy, with an extensive magic spellbook to collect that ranges from situational enhancements and fireballs to strange utility spells like walls or clouds of mist. It really nails the feel of that classic fantasy magic user with a spell for every situation, even if you’re playing as one of Avyanna’s melee builds.
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Other systems, however, seem designed almost at random. The resources to build your base and upgrade your troops are poorly balanced, with some critics and others almost useless – I had a reserve of over 200,000 wood and iron at the end of the campaign, but I constantly wanted more gold. They also accumulate in real time while the game is running, but can only be collected at your base, so if you really wanted unlimited resources, you could leave Disciples: Liberation running and visit them every hour or so. There are other things that generally feel irrelevant and only come up as frustration, such as lingering damage between unrelated matches or arbitrary limitation on the number of buildings you can place in your settlement.