Developer: Okay Studios
Publisher: WhisperGames
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Liberator TD – Review
Everything about Liberator TD seems iffy. At first glance, it’s a simple tower defense game, the kind we’ve seen dozens of times before, most recently with No Creeps Were Harmed TD. However, when looking up info about the game, we found that despite its simplicity, it took over seven years of development. The studio behind it, Okay Studios went radio silent for six years out of those seven, returning only to make a brief announcement post on Facebook. In the month since its release, nobody has played Liberator TD according to Steam Charts, and we’re seemingly the first ones to actually bother reviewing it. Is this because of the current geopolitical climate, given that Liberator TD was developed by a Russian studio and released by a Chinese publisher? Or is it just a terrible game?
Story
It’s a good thing that Liberator TD is based on a simple and familiar concept, given that no effort is put into setting the scene or giving any backstory. The game opens with a soldier, presumably our main character, rambling vaguely about a strange dream, before getting stuck in the action. Bug-like aliens are here, and it’s up to you to defend Earth. It’s basically Starship Troopers without the political satire.
Graphics
The resemblance to Starship Troopers is especially apparent in the game’s key artwork, and is entirely deliberate. The game’s Steam description refers to “90s films” and even directly quotes the famous line “The only good bug is a dead bug”. Things look decidedly less impressive in-game, where the top-down perspective, simplistic visuals, and keyframe animations make Liberator TD look like a browser game made in Flash.
Sound
Accompanying the on-screen bug infestation is an electronic rock soundtrack. We’re not sure whether this was specifically composed for Liberator TD, but we doubt it. It sounds generic enough and doesn’t fit with the game’s atmosphere, so we wouldn’t be surprised if it was taken from a license-free music library. There is no voice acting, and the sound effects aren’t particularly impressive either.
Gameplay
We’ve played plenty of tower defense games before, so we feel fairly confident in saying that we’re familiar with the genre. Liberator TD does add top-down shooting action to the formula, but again, that isn’t something we haven’t seen before elsewhere. So believe us when we say that Liberator TD is utterly unplayable and broken. The issue lies solely with the game’s controls. We tried our hand at intergalactic pest control with both a controller and a mouse and keyboard combo, and neither worked. Liberator TD doesn’t support controllers in the first place, but given how frustrating the keyboard controls were, we decided to give our controller a try anyway. And to our surprise, we were able to move our character left and right, but nothing else. Back to the keyboard then. The game uses a regular WASD configuration, and any other button inputs, such as those for placing buildings or firing charged-up missiles can be remapped. Not that this matters, as the input buttons simply don’t respond the way they should. Our screen prompted us to hit the ‘E’-button to fire a missile, but when we did, this only registered about 10% of the time.
Initially, we thought we were doing something wrong. Maybe we were supposed to wait until the missiles were charged before we pressed the button. After a few minutes of playing, we realized that the button prompt only popped up when the missile launchers were ready to fire. Moving your character around with directional keys felt sluggish, and aiming with the mouse was too slow for comfort and turned out to be inaccurate. After about half an hour of struggling with the first level, we started to have an inkling of why nobody else had bothered playing Liberator TD since it launched.
Based on the developer’s description of what Liberator TD has to offer, there isn’t anything later on in the game that is worth torturing yourself over. There are eight different turret types but you can only use four of them at once, with some being more effective against different kinds of enemies, for example. It’s all bog-standard tower defense stuff that we wouldn’t bat an eye on if the game had worked properly. In fact, chances are we’d have just rated it as an average and unremarkable game overall in that case. According to Okay Studios, the campaign should take around 10 hours to complete, but we imagine that only applies if you’d be able to get the controls working in the first place. We can’t imagine anyone deliberately forcing themselves to play through 10 hours of this when there are so many superior tower defense options out there.
Conclusion
We try to stay away from political statements on this website, so we’re not letting the fact that Liberator TD is from a Russian studio influence our opinion of the game. The same logic applies to Ukrainian developer Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes games, for example. We do suspect that Liberator TD being a Russian game is the reason other websites are avoiding it. However, we do have another reason to tell you to steer clear from this one, and that is that it’s just bad. The story and visuals are derivative and we’d probably call the gameplay uninspired if we would’ve been able to get the busted controls to work. Liberator TD is, to put it simply, a stinker.
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