Disciples: Liberation

For main character of the game, Avyanna, the story begins with any other assassination. This time things go wrong however, and Avyanna is forced to make her escape. She opens a portal to make her escape and discovers an ancient city. Your goal is to build up this city, and to create a comfortable city for you and your friends. What this means for you as an individual is shaped by your own hand. How you handle quests will shape how people view you, and how the city turns out.

Many of the quests and dialogue have different approaches, with an indicator that helps you understand what sort of moral choice it is. Which one you choose will help you develop the city, and it will remember and respond to how you handled various quests.

Combat focused

Disciples: Liberation isn’t quite open world, but it is very close to it. The city is divided into 13 distinct districts, and there are lots of small personal dungeons and other locations to explore. Poking around the city a very short time is enough to discover that combat is the major focus of the game, and players can expect to spend most of their time in combat. Combat is turn-based, and very simple to understand. When you enter combat you’ll be placed on the field with several units. Each of these units have different abilities. Some of them can be placed to the back and don’t directly engage in combat, but do offer passive buffs that help the rest of the team.

Avyanna stands out among these units because she is the only unit with a spellbook. She can use this to give herself extra abilities. Units can be enhanced in their own way, with the help of a magic shard, and companion characters can get a weapon as well as the shard.

If you’ve ever played Heroes of Might and Magic, Disciples: Liberation gives off a very similar feel. The major difference is that while you play an invisible hero in Heroes of Might and Magic, you have a developed character to play in Disciples: Liberation.

Could get repetitive

The game isn’t out until the end of October, so practice runs are limited to available demos. One thing that becomes apparent very quickly when playing these demos is that combat gets boring quickly, and there’s a lot of combat. It could be that in the full version more units will be available, and with it more complex choices, but as it stands the limited selection makes the game a little dull.

80+ hours of gameplay

Adding to the concern of the repetition of combat is how long the game could possibly be. It looks as if the game is meant to have many hours of gameplay, which is a great value for players—if the combat doesn’t make those 80 hours a complete drag.

Pros:

• Well-developed storyline
• Almost open world

Cons:

• Potentially repetitive