Throne & Liberty Review (PlayStation 5)

My first few hours of Throne & Liberty provided an experience I’d soon rather forget.

It felt like everything I was dreading from a new free-to-play MMORPG was presented front and center. From being inundated with currencies and item exchanges to irritating tiny red dots informing me of new information across 20 different menus and options screens, it was such an assault on organization it was physically painful.

If I wasn’t playing to review the game, I would have stopped after four to five hours. However, after suffering through those initial hours, I couldn’t help but be impressed by what I saw in Throne & Liberty.

Throne & Liberty Review

First and foremost, Throne & Liberty looks incredible for a free-to-play game. The characters and animations are surprisingly detailed, but even those pale in comparison to the environments.

Rolling open fields, barren deserts, complicated underground caverns – Every area of Throne & Liberty is beautifully crafted, with each corner of the world begging for players to stop and take in the sights. It was the attention to detail in the world-building that put me off balance.

This wasn’t what I thought it would be; this wasn’t simply another cookie-cutter MMO clone looking to cash in on a few months of success and then ride out on a dwindling player base.

Throne & Liberty is a real attempt at making something new, something exciting. I worked with MMOs for a very long time – it’s a genre I have a lot of love for – but I’m also very pessimistic all the same.

I initially approached the game as I would any MMORPG. Plowing through the side quests, skipping and ignoring the endlessly pointless dialogue, I’ll listen through some of the more interesting cutscenes. However, for the most part, I’m not stopping to smell the roses.

Throne & Liberty’s story, while nothing groundbreaking, is surprisingly good, and it’s not just the main story either.

Whether I was slaying demons, digging into a dangerous conspiracy, or chasing massive underground sandworms like Kevin Bacon, the quality of quest design in Throne & Liberty worked flawlessly in hand with a well-structured and impressively engaging narrative.

I legitimately cared about the side content. Admittedly, not all of it, this is still an MMO, but I was constantly impressed by the depth of the stories and characters in content players could otherwise completely ignore.

There are times when the game falls at the feet of its ambition, turning otherwise intriguing quest design into a frustrating slog. Attempting perfectly timed platforming sequences in an environment not designed for perfectly timed platforming sequences is not fun, but these are few and far between.

Thankfully, other areas of innovation don’t struggle to the same degree. Exploring what feels like the most open-world MMO I’ve played in years, Thone & Liberty is thrilling and rewarding from start to finish.

Soaring through the skies, running along the planes, and swimming to distant islands, Throne & Liberty’s in-game morphing system gives players complete freedom to explore nearly anything they can see with mounts for land, sea, and air.

It’s not quite to the level of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but it’s the only MMORPG I’ve played where I felt like an explorer. I wasn’t just walking through carefully disguised corridors of progression, I was actively engaged in just exploring for the sake of exploring, an art almost lost to modern game design.

Throughout Throne & Liberty I was constantly saying to myself: this feels similar, just better, and that’s never more true than in the combat. Yes, it’s a traditional tab-target style MMO combat system, but the inclusion of active defensive abilities makes it a real game changer.

Opting for a two-handed weapon and sword & board as secondary, I was built to tank, and it’s the most fun I’ve had tanking since The Lord of the Rings Online.

Players are constantly tested in difficult battles. Dodging familiar red areas of death on the floor as enemies launch powerful abilities, but the opportunity to engage defensively with other abilities, makes every fight feel infinitely more fun than regular MMORPG combat.

Carefully parrying or dodging enemy abilities provides additional effects, such as a quick burst of healing or a cooldown reduction on abilities. It’s minor on paper, but in practice, this system delivers a more immersive and impactful combat experience – two words I rarely associate with MMO combat design.

The skill to time and perfect the defensive abilities makes such a huge difference. Doing it properly, I could easily fight off seven to eight enemies at a time.

Doing it wrong? I’d be dead in 30 seconds.

The progression systems boast much of the same, that niggling feeling of familiarity with just the right dose of “Oh, cool.” Using old or crafted gear as a resource for newer, more powerful gear, keeps even the early-stage dungeons relevant and worthwhile.

Farming different books for active and passive skill leveling, completing contracts for Weapon Experience points, further customizing skills and abilities with additional effects and bonuses…it never ends.

I’m already at maximum level, and I feel I’ve barely touched the surface of building the ultimate tank… once that’s done? I can simply change weapons and start building pretty much any combination of typical MMORPG class archetypes I can imagine. All the while benefiting from the resources, materials, and farming capabilities of having a max-level character.

If I were to pick a singular area of development that MMORPG’s have been struggling with, especially on console, it’s the social elements. Sadly, Throne & Liberty makes minimal effort in addressing this.

Voice communication is off by default, and no system that I could find exists to make communication any easier. Trying to explain even a basic tank and spank boss battle with a singular mechanic is nigh on impossible using an on-screen keyboard.

I spent several hours on the brink of a boss battle arena, constantly filtering through party members as they abandoned the mission after several wipes.

Just to be clear, these were not complicated boss battles for even the most casual of MMO players, but the console audience isn’t there yet. More effort is needed with communication tools for this kind of content to truly flourish.

Despite its communication shortcomings, most areas of PvP and social questing in Throne & Liberty can be entertaining with minimal communication. Watching as dozens of players descend on a field of wolves to see who can claim the most pelts was incredible. Floods of spells, explosions, and swinging swords… Throne & Liberty’s large-scale cooperative and competitive quests represent some of the very best content it has to offer.

Sadly, communication isn’t the only issue plaguing consoles. The controls are clumsy and frustrating; there are instances where navigation buttons randomly stop working. In addition, some screens allow for d-pad navigation use, while others force stick navigation. The play-by-play controls in combat work fine but navigating one of the game’s many intricate menus feels like playing Jenga with a blindfold.

And good luck trying to navigate targeting in large-scale PvP.

That said, plenty of fantastic co-op content is available, even if you don’t want to dabble in PvP. The Guild system of Throne & Liberty is one of the most rewarding I’ve experienced.

Guild Contracts reward regular, directed cooperative play with minor rewards for killing regular creatures. Working together to achieve Milestones unlocks new content, such as dungeons and boss battles, for the entire guild. Players can donate supplies to purchase guild upgrades. It’s a great system and one I very much look forward to exploring as more content is available.

One final area that was impressive was the day, night, and weather cycles, each intricately connected to various aspects of gameplay. Exploring certain regions, such as the Lycan-infested Gray Claw Forest, sees more wolves spawn at night.

While gathering specific resource nodes promises greater yield if it rains. These are all things we’ve seen before, but it works brilliantly to help direct content and avenues of progression depending on the world around the player.

It would be irresponsible to not mention the technical woes surrounding the release, although I’m very confident these will be addressed in the coming days. Throne & Liberty launched a premium early access version that turned out to be a glorified beta testing window, with the game regularly offline for six hours or more a day.

That was frustrating enough, but the full free-to-play release was a complete mess. Missing currencies, a broken auction house, players unable to log in for days at a time, and the cherry on top? My character was missing for several days.

If you’re looking to dive into Throne & Liberty in the immediate future, expect a bit of a bumpy ride.

Throne & Liberty is one of the most impressive and refreshing MMORPG’s in years. While it’s easy to initially dismiss it as “just another one of those MMOs,” those that dig deeper may come to realize Throne & Liberty is the perfect MMO to bring them back into the fray. If you have the choice, play it on PC.