Throne and Liberty Review (PS5)

Throne and Liberty is a fantasy MMORPG that debuted in Korea last December. Since its global launch the free-to-play game has dominated Steam's concurrent players and top-sellers charts. While it's certainly popular, a long list of technical issues and uninspired mechanics cast doubts over its longevity.

You take up arms as the Star-Born, a person imbued with the power of a star fragment. The Arkeneum, an evil force, has invaded and ransacked your homeland, and it's up to you and the other Star-Born to join the Resistance and save your world.

The cinematics are gorgeous, and the narrator who offers expository voice-over is charmingly British, lending an air of literary authenticity to the high-fantasy setting, but the story is fairly run-of-the-mill. Your village was destroyed when you were a child, and now you're all grown up you can finally fight the invaders and turn the tide of the war.

The narrative is split into 10 chapters, most tasking you with exploring different areas and meeting new characters; some pop up later, and there's a fair bit of backtracking involved so you get to explore the world of Solisium and its varied biomes thoroughly.

But the characters that do return aren't that interesting, and the locations you circle back to remain unchanged, so the world feels static despite your quest progression. Add to that a lack of any interesting ways to interact with the environment or story beyond the very occasional puzzle, and the entire thing becomes a bore. Every objective is displayed with a quest marker, so you're quite literally just checking items off a to-do list with very little thought needed.

But people rarely play MMOs for the story. For a free-to-play game, Throne and Liberty is surprisingly grind-light. Many of the story chapters, co-op dungeons, and wider-MMO features like raids are gated behind achieving a certain character or power level, but you gain plenty of experience just from doing the main and side missions. A lot of these need to be played with a party or guild, as most of the end-game and higher-level dungeons have their difficulty scaled to assume you'll be playing alongside some people, so if you want to go it all alone, this isn't the game for you.

Luckily, improving your equipment is relatively painless and doesn't feel overly pay-to-win. Sure, there are more types of experience-giving items than anyone could possibly remember, but you get so many by completing quests and radiant contracts that it never feels like you need to farm for them to keep your equipment in good shape. You can buy and sell valuable loot in the auction house, and you can use real money to buy in-game currency, but it's not needed unless you want to excel at the top levels of the game's competitive multiplayer.

What is frustrating is that much of the game's activities are gated behind timed events. While these do add a sense of shared community to the world, it's undeniably irritating when the quest that would give you enough XP to level up and unlock a new feature is tied to an event that isn't happening for another hour. This isn't an issue in the earlier chapters, but as the game progresses and invites you to engage with its MMO mechanics, these kinds of side missions become more common and are hard to avoid if you do want to level up without simply farming monsters.

It's unfortunate, because when you have an hour to kill, the game's standard combat is fairly mindless. Hostile mobs populate the overworld but they only pose a threat in large numbers. Basic attacks are automatic; simply press R1 and you'll attack. You can trigger 12 hotbar abilities that are very controller-friendly by holding R1 or R2 and then pressing either a face or directional button. You can also parry or dodge based on the timing of your L1 presses. It's simple, but a great way to translate an MMO to console.

What's also simple is combining different classes and switching up your weapons. There are seven weapon types: daggers, crossbow, longbow, wand and tome, sword and shield, greatsword, and staff. You can equip any two weapons to create a hybrid or specialised class, and can mix and match their abilities however you want. There are only four stats to level up: strength, dexterity, wisdom, and perception. Each increases your damage output, so you never have to worry about falling behind the pack no matter what you choose to spec into.

You even get three loadouts that you can swap between instantly. These can all have different stat distributions, weapons, equipment, and skills, meaning you can go from a melee DPS to a long-range healer or a mixed support depending on the needs of the situation and without having to return to a base or manually change all your gear. It's a remarkably simple and useful system that makes it easy to try out multiple playstyles during your time with the game.

Unfortunately, the rest of the menus, and there are a lot, are a nightmare to navigate. When you open up the main menu, go into a sub menu and then back out, you're booted out of the menus entirely, so you have to open the main one again and re-navigate to where you want to go. It makes levelling up your equipment, character, and skills take longer than it should. The game also switches between mostly making you click between menus to infrequently changing to a cursor, which is confusing.

Now add to this a host of technical issues, and what can be a pretty and passable if unremarkable beginner MMO becomes a liability. There are frame rate drops in crowded areas like towns and raids, frequent server issues (both before and since launch), subtitles out of sync or not matching with audio, characters and the entire game going mute, game freezes, becoming trapped on environmental objects, occasional long load times, and one instance of the game simply crashing during a raid when there were lots of players on screen.

And despite several attempts, it was impossible to join a party to take on one of the co-op dungeons — they're intended to be played as a team, so going solo isn't an option unless you're absurdly overleveled.