Freedom Wars

Freedom Wars should get an award for the most thoroughly squandered premise. The game's dystopian future is easily one of the most poorly sketched ones I've seen. The idea of being born already serving a sentence is interesting, as is being penalized for every tiny infraction, yet after a while you start realizing that 90% of the game will be spent in the same drab, dry cellblocks with nothing much of interest to do outside of performing the occasional mission, prodding unhelpful npcs or grinding for hours to somehow manage to luck into the right materials for the overly convoluted crafting system. Having 3 separate menus for tasks that should have been condensed into one is hardly helpful at all.

That said, despite the disapointing world-building, the meat of the gameplay is still somewhat decent. You face either ground troops or enormous abductors and you'll be forced to switch up your tacticts quite a bit to achieve your goals unscathed. Teamwork is crucial as well, especially in the later game, when enemies become deadly ninjas who can snipe you from outisde the screen. At that point in the game, you'll also need some properly upgraded gear to avoid either being destroyed or having 45 minutes long battles against bullet sponge abductors.

So it's a mixed bag, a flawed end product whose fairly obvious shortcomings could certainly be fixed in a possible sequel.