Short Thought: Attack on Titan: Wings of Freedom Demo

At the recent MCM London Comic Con, Koei Tecmo had a demo for the newest Attack on Titan spinoff, the video game that released in Japan back in February. It’s set to come to Europe and America on 26th August as Attack on Titan: Wings of Freedom, but until then, here are my thoughts after the demo.

The demo saw us play the military final exam, and proved to be a good tutorial for getting used to the controls. The manoeuvre gear was simple to use and the animations were very similar to the anime, and the combat system was pretty intuitive. They even included a mechanic for the wearing down of blades and gas, the same as in the main story.

I played it on the PS4, which is not my preferred platform, and I did not have a good time with it. The vast portion of the demo is set in a forest with wooden titans that you have to “kill”, and this isn’t especially easy. For starters, the camera wasn’t intuitive. Like, at all. To attack a titan, you have to lock onto it, and this lock on affects a specific body part, like the neck or the ankles. The here-up-to-now camera movement on the right analogue stick changes to make Eren focus on a different part of the titan, and the only way to affect the camera is a set behind button which the demo didn’t tell me about. I had to look at the controls sheet to find out about halfway through struggling with the controls.

Wooden titans make for easy targets

Attack on Titan: Wings of Freedom did not play very well on the PS4, which is interesting since it also came out on PS3 and Vita. It had massive pop-in with foliage, and looked like an early PS3 game, but the frame rate would randomly drop to sub 30. I would have given it a pass (and was until doing a little research for this) because it doesn’t come out for months so has plenty of time to improve performance, but it came out in Japan months ago and still plays this badly.

All I can hope for is that what they showed at MCM is an odd unfinished version, because the Japanese press seem to have given the game positive reviews. As for if the English voice actors from the anime are in the game, I couldn’t possibly tell you since I watch it subbed.

Overall, I’m hopeful that this could be a good game, but I’m probably going to be buying it on PS4 since this is a Koei Tecmo game and they port to PC with the same skill that I have for ballet.