Sunday Musings - Looking Back At Final Liberation

As always, the idea behind a Sunday Musings is that Adam takes a concept and times an hour and a half to write it in. This week, we finally get liberated….

There is a certain joy held in the memory of games we played in our youth, and a horror to discover how bad or basic they are looking back.

This was a mixed bag of a journey to say the least.

Final Liberation is a turn based strategy PC game set in 40k, giving in some ways a cheaper option to those of us who were yet to have anything more than a paper round in order to get grabby hands on white metal goodness. At the time, it was a ton of fun to play. Now though, it feels like there's a straining at the seams to make something, anything out of it as a game in and of itself.

The campaign system however is loads of fun and exactly what you'd expect. Moving along the story (more on that later) unlocks more or larger machines and troops you command into the smashing of Orks. The Single Battle however is the most fun you can have in such a setting, picking the troops to a predetermined limit and smashing together the armies in a precursor to tabletop simulator. Only muddy. And with more sound effects.

What Troops! There is a huge selection to pick from on both sides. The Imperium start weak but have access to many long range artillery in droves to pepper the greenskins with from afar. Alongside such blastingly good choices come the tanks in flavors of Heavy and Super-Heavy. The Imperium doesn't get it all their own way though, as the Orks are cheaper, hit hard and can get much faster with the Bikes and Buggies. Then come the Titans!

Both the Titans and Gargents are game changers, once something of that size hits the battlefield, it becomes a waking engine of destruction, levelling everything in it's path. However, they are not invincible, as the even the smallest trooper unit can unleash a vast amount of shots against a Titan's lumbering, slow to charge Megalasers(tm)

The engine Final Liberation uses is a fairly by-the-numbers turn based one, with number crunching and dice rolls happening behind the screen. Units are capable of either firing twice or move slightly and fire once, or even move a lot and lose the ability to open fire. If two enemy units get close, they dive into hand to hand, which adds a certain further layer of tactically edged thinking, as a mob of Orks can take down even a Super-Heavy tank in hand to hand. Throughout trying to kill as many opponents as you can, you also have to keep an eye on securing the objectives needed to fully win a battle, which moves things around enough that a simple "stand back and fire" approach will not work.

The graphics of the game are muddy but well detailed. Animation is extremely limited but still fun to watch, as militant colours all wave tiny arms in melee combat. The environment looks flat, but also not a million miles away from something you'd see on an actual tabletop. This strange halfway point of being a game set in a fictional setting as well as a representation of the tabletop is an odd one.

Final Liberation however turns into something special when you begin the campaign, with you as the Imperial Commander on Volistad. As you move your various forces around the world in a turn based manner, you gather and retain resources which can be used to fill out the army with reinforcements or train up new units. The more you control, the more resources you gather which leads to tactical thinking about defending what you have or pushing forward to gather more. Very simple yet highly effective.

The overall highlight of the game is the FMV though, and whilst the green screen is a little cheap, the costumes a little shoddy and the script is a long way from movie quality, there is so much to love about them. Commissar Holt (as played by Larry Rew) is a joy to behold. He is the main drive of the FMV's, played as your second in command who uses verbose and grandiose language to the planetary crew, but quietly respectful to you as the Commander. The videos are somewhat grainy, but that adds to the charm and trust me when I say that the video of a Titan awakening gives me chills.

The game is all in all very dated, very short, quite basic and does little new to the genre for the time. It is however an excellent example of adapting tabletop gaming to a PC, with it's main strength being the brilliant FMVs. But, I have enjoyed every second of returning to it.

Every damn second.