Attack on Titan: Wings Of Freedom Review

Over the years I have played multitudes of movie/TV show to videogame ports and rare is it that I come across a gem in the massive pile that has accumulated. Attack on Titan has a few spots that make it a slightly dirty gem. Wings of Freedom starts just like the anime does, explaining how the human race has been pushed to living inside massive walls. Fair warning: the game and this review may contain spoilers if you haven’t read the manga or watched the anime. 

The game starts out with a bunch of cutscenes showing how the colossal titan broke through the wall and allowed other titans to breach the outer wall and then proceeds to show the main protagonist Eren Jaeger enrolling in the Titan Slaying Academy. After completing a mission in which you have to kill a bunch of dummy targets with the same vulnerable spot as a titan, the back of their neck, you then proceed to a variety of cutscenes. Following the cutscenes your adventure begins.

The game feels very similar to the old Spider-Man games in which you use omni-directional gear to navigate through various buildings. This was actually one of my favourite parts of the game because I had to learn which part of my swing was going to give me the most momentum and speed in order to maintain a good amount of fuel while covering vast distances quickly. While there are fellow titan slayers all over the map that will resupply you with fuel, they can be out of the way so learning to utilize fuel efficiently is pretty important.

As you progress through the story you will reach the biggest downfall of this game: repetition. The game will have you proceed through the main story and you even have the option to do side missions, but the objective never really changes and it makes the gameplay grow stale no matter how big of a fan you are. The main objective of the missions is to kill titans by severing the skin at the back of the neck with your specialized blades and since that is the only way to kill them, there are very few methods you can mix in. As the game progresses, you deal with tougher titans, but they aren’t any more intelligent, nor do they use different attacks instead it just takes more damage to kill them. Upon beating the game, you can continue adding collectibles to your home base, but there is little else to do for all but the most dedicated fans.

The game boasts what initially feels like an in-depth crafting system, however because of how easy the combat is to master, there really isn’t much of a reason to scavenge for materials to craft items because the starter equipment is good enough. To top off the repetition is the plethora of Survey missions which don’t actually have you do anything unique, other than slay hordes of titans.

On a more positive note the variety of characters you get to try definitely makes the combat feel fresh for a little while. Playing as Captain Levi or Mikasa gives a sense of ultimate power as your movement speed and damage is absolutely insane. You will find navigating the maps as these characters quite easy as your fuel consumption is lower because you are able to gain far more distance with their base movement speeds. Another unique character you get to play as is the titan-smashing Eren in his titan form. You get to use flip abilities and throw punches that have a devastating effect. Unfortunately even these elements of the game will grow stale when all you do is slaughter titans.

The game does feel very rewarding when you land kill shots on a titan’s neck, but there’s just such little reason to try and go for a titan’s legs or arms as it is simple enough to hook into its back and slice the neck with little to no problems. Therein lies my final grievance with Wings of Freedom: the easiness of the game. Even setting the game to its highest difficulty didn’t prove to be much of a challenge. Where I was expecting to die repeatedly I found that I would die once or twice and that was about it. Generally, with a game like this I would expect the highest difficulty to actually challenge me and I was disappointed to say the least.

To move on to a more positive note, I did find that the art style for the game had a very familiar feel to the show while also being unique in its own way. For a low budget game, it has what I can say are some great graphics that even on the highest settings did not seem to cause framerate issues with my PC. On top of that, this is a ported game so not having the general problems associated with framerates on ports is a very big plus - as there is nothing worse than being limited in FPS because it came from a console.

While on the topic of ports, I did find the keyboard controls were definitely lacking, but the controls while using an Xbox controller were very satisfying and polished. You don’t exactly get to aim where your gear’s hooks land in buildings and trees but you still get a feeling of control when it comes to aiming your character’s trajectory. This is far more than I could have hoped for when looking back at other games that have tried to use movement systems like this.

Overall, Attack on Titan takes a lot from the anime and delivers it in a nice little package that has one major drawback of being repetitive. For fans of the show this won’t be much of a problem as you are most likely just playing the game to slaughter titans while you wait for season two of the anime. The game itself is very polished and has some fun mechanics. Unfortunately, once you have completed the story most people will be hard-pressed to continue on through the bonus missions just to gain a few collectibles. The game very accurately depicted the anime and nailed the speed and ferocity of slaying titans, although I do find the price point to be just a little bit too high for what the game actually gives you in content.