As numerous PS Vita games have found themselves on other platforms over the years, Freedom Wars was still the last kid waiting to be picked. Well, a decade after its initial release, the game is finally being freed from its handheld prison with a remaster making its way to console and PC next year, and I for one am very stoked about this news.
It's sort of a sci-fi post-apocalyptic Monster Hunter in a way. Except, instead of being a well-respected creature slayer you're a puny prisoner slapped with a one million year prison sentence. You spend most of your game time undertaking large-scale operations and defeating huge mechanical weapons called Abductors to shave your time served… until you accidentally take more than five steps inside your prison cell and the years pile back on again.
Operations can be played solo or multiplayer, and if the remaster ends up being anything like the original, co-op will become essential as you rack up hours and the difficulty starts scaling. There's even an element of competitiveness, with leaderboards ranking cities around the world on their performance. It's a bunch of really neat concepts that come together under one roof, even if I do recall the game getting a bit same-y after a while.
According to a press release, the Freedom Wars remaster will boast "4K resolution, upgraded textures, 60fps performance on PlayStation and PC, an overhauled weapon crafting system, added difficulty settings and other game play upgrades" while largely remaining pretty faithful to the original Vita release. I do hope that the difficulty settings make the whole thing a little easier to grind solo, though I'm still jazzed to take down Abductors with my pals.
It's one of those games I've been desperately wishing would get a re-release since the original game's online servers closed in 2021, so I'm really happy to see it finally leaving PS Vita exclusivity. I've gushed about it to a fair few pals over the years who never had a chance to play thanks to its platform, so now I have the perfect excuse to drag everyone into serving a lengthy prison sentence with me.
Thankfully, I don't even have to wait that long for it, either—Freedom Wars Remastered should be launching on Steam and PlayStation 5 on January 9, 2025. The Steam page is already up too, and you can bet it's on my wishlist.
