If you want to look at one of the worst games of recent years, then here it is - LiBER from the Russian studio Friv2Online, capable of killing faith in domestic game development. We tell in the review what is wrong with the "Uncharted killer".

LiBER is an ambitious project that promises to outshine the Tomb Raider and Uncharted games. According to the assurances of the developers, you have to solve puzzles, find artifacts, fight with swords and firearms, enjoy stealth and parkour missions, and even sail on a boat! And you know - the authors do not deceive: all this is really in the game. But it is executed so weakly that it does not stand up to criticism.

There are two characters in the main role here: history student Alex, who found a mysterious book in the library and moved in time from 2020 to a good thousand years ago, and cowboy Nick from the era of the Wild West, who suffered the same fate. Once somewhere in the viking village, the heroes must unite, overcome obstacles and find a way to return home.

The plot of LiBER is generally quite good. At the very least, he explains the reasons for all the misadventures of the protagonists in a fairly accessible way, and even retains some kind of intrigue to motivate the player to move towards the finale.

At the same time, the dialogue is terribly written, the facial animation in the cut-scenes is frightening (the cameraman also likes to give close-ups, bringing the camera closer to the already not very pleasant faces of the characters), and the narration is torn - locations and events can change without any reasons, and some episodes look frankly superfluous. The gameplay is inappropriately interrupted by cut scenes, and sometimes after the video, control is transferred to the gamer for just a couple of seconds, so that he takes a few steps to start the next video.

In addition to this, the authors "entertain" the player with pseudo-scientific facts on the loading screens - incorrect and frankly harmful. I quote: "Moving at the speed of light, time stops" - a deuce in physics to the one who invented it. And in the Russian language, too, given the disgusting quality of the localization of the game.

Problems with the presentation of the story can be forgiven - after all, we come to adventure games for adventure, not exciting storytelling. However, in terms of gameplay, LiBER failed, and in absolutely all of its mechanics.

Take, for example, stealth: there are episodes where you need to sneak past patrols, hiding in tall grass, and distract opponents with throwing stones. Interesting? No: the AI ​​either does not notice the character next to it, or sees it at a great distance, and you can hide from the pursuers who notice the heroes by simply running to the trigger that will launch the plot script: the Vikings, armed to the teeth, were just chasing Alex, and now the next moment he is miraculously saved, and the enemies instantly forget about his existence.

In one of the missions, I needed to follow a certain bard in order to find out the necessary information from him. It looked comical: my victim walked whistling, and then, as if in a children's cartoon, began to look around suspiciously, putting her palm to her eyes with a visor, while the protagonist was hiding behind barrels and other utensils. The episode was long, and the only checkpoint was at the beginning, so I had to go through it again and again, as it took me a long time to get used to the bard's behavior.

When it comes to combat, LiBER has nothing more to offer than hand-to-hand combat consisting of alternating hits and blocks and gunfire where enemies don't even try to act tactically and hide behind obstacles. Primitive combat causes boredom, and crooked ragdoll physics, forcing defeated opponents to freeze in unnatural poses, is frankly funny.

The developers also promise us unsurpassed parkour, and you probably guess that in this aspect the game has nothing to show. The acrobatics is spoiled by an inconvenient camera and controls, which is exacerbated by crooked collisions: the character model either hangs in the air, not touching the object that he grabbed, or, on the contrary, partially passes through it.

It makes no sense to talk about the quality of the graphics after all of the above - everything can be seen in the screenshots. It is only worth noting that despite the compactness of locations and the low level of execution of models and environments, LiBER manages to load the PC very heavily. While some developers are doing amazing optimizations when working with Unreal Engine 4, creating huge, highly detailed worlds, Friv2Online Studio can only produce a mediocre picture.

And it seems that I would like to make allowances for the fact that this is the first major project of the studio, that it is necessary to support domestic game developers, and to find at least something worth praising LiBER for. But there is nothing to praise for - except to note the low cost: it seems that the developers themselves understand that no one will buy their craft for more than the equivalent of a couple of glasses of coffee.