Chains of Freedom

A budget tactics game that knows what it isn't

Chains of Freedom sends a small squad into a fictional, dystopian Eastern European state to unravel a conspiracy amid mutated threats and political collapse, wrapped in turn-based tactical combat clearly indebted to the XCOM lineage. It's worth stating up front what several of its own reviewers say plainly: this is not, and was never marketed as, an XCOM-scale production. There's no base to manage, no world map, no tech or talent tree layer — the campaign runs as a single continuous thread, each area unlocking the next in sequence. "This game is not XCOM, nor by budget, nor by price. Also, it was never advertised as such," one reviewer states directly, pushing back on comparisons that judge the game against a budget it was never built to match.

Judged on its own terms, the reception is genuinely mixed rather than uniformly negative, and the story is where it earns the most consistent praise. Multiple detailed reviews single out the narrative and setting — a genuinely distinctive dystopian conspiracy rather than a generic alien-invasion retread — as strong enough to carry a player through mechanical frustration. "The story is entertaining, the tactical combat can be quite tricky, but I enjoyed every minute of it," one reviewer writes after completing a 35-hour standard-difficulty playthrough, explicitly noting they nearly skipped the game because of the negative reviews about turn limits before deciding to try it anyway.

Turns run out before luck evens out

The single dominant, most specific complaint in the negative review sample concerns strict per-mission turn limits, and the language reviewers use to describe the problem is unusually consistent. "Having a very small maximal turn count when you easily can have bad luck and miss 4 times in a row and that is sufficient to lose the battle because of the turn limit. Most stupid game decision in game history," one review states. Another frames the mechanical tension precisely: "It's simply and roughly designed to determine the player as looser while you miss a shoot and require one more turn to win." The core objection isn't difficulty itself — several of these same reviewers explicitly identify as experienced tactics-genre veterans who enjoy hard games — it's that a strict turn cap combined with real miss-chance percentages means a genuinely well-planned turn can still fail through bad luck alone, with no turns left to recover, which reads to many players as unfair rather than challenging.

It's worth noting reviewers themselves report the developers acknowledged this feedback, and at least one reviewer specifically waited to see whether a patch would address the turn-limit complaints before purchasing — evidence this is a live, developer-aware issue rather than a permanently baked-in design flaw, even if it was clearly a significant problem for a meaningful share of the launch audience.

A demo that promised something the release didn't deliver

A separate, more concrete complaint concerns expectations set before purchase. Multiple reviewers report that the pre-release demo allowed saving mid-mission, a meaningful comfort feature for a genre where a single long, difficult engagement can run well over an hour — and that the full release removed this entirely, restricting saves to mission completion only. "The demo will allow you to save the game as you wish... once you buy and continue THERE IS NO WAY TO SAVE until the mission is completed. A difficult game made impossible to play due to the demo misrepresentation," one reviewer writes, explicitly requesting a refund on those grounds. This is a specific, checkable claim about a change in behaviour between two builds rather than a subjective balance complaint, and it compounds the turn-limit frustration directly: a hard mission that can be lost to bad luck near its end is considerably more punishing when there's no way to preserve progress partway through it.

Investments the story can erase without warning

A third recurring and unusually specific complaint concerns the interaction between the game's permanent upgrade system and its narrative. Reviewers report investing rare, non-refundable resources into upgrading specific squad members — extra equipment slots, permanent stat buffs — only for the story to kill off or reveal as a traitor the exact character they'd invested in, with no compensation offered. "I upgraded my tank with extremely rare materials and gave him extra crystal slots which are permanent non refundable 1 time buffs.. and the devs kill off the character in the story without refunding anything. This must be one of the dumbest decisions I've ever seen," one reviewer writes, and a second reviewer independently reports the same pattern happening to them multiple times over the course of the campaign, escalating from frustration to abandoning the game entirely. This is a genuinely unusual design collision — a scarce-resource progression system and a narrative built around character loss, pointed directly at each other without any apparent mitigation — and it's corroborated by more than one independent account rather than resting on a single player's bad luck.

Where this leaves it

Chains of Freedom is a competently built, story-forward tactics game that earns real credit for a genuinely distinctive setting and a combat system multiple reviewers say holds up well once its rough edges are understood — and it deserves to be judged against its actual budget and ambitions rather than a genre benchmark it never claimed to match. But the turn-limit design, a demo that reportedly oversold its save flexibility, and a scarce-resource system that can be erased by the story's own plot beats are real, specific, independently corroborated problems that go beyond ordinary difficulty tuning. Worth considering for tactics fans specifically drawn to its setting and willing to accept genuine, occasionally unfair friction, but check for confirmation that the turn-limit issues have been addressed in a recent patch before committing at full price.