Liberation Captive 2 Amiga 1993-94 Byte Engineers Tony Crowther

Liberation: Captive II Amiga

Byte Engineers released Liberation Captive 2 for the Amiga in 1993-94. Sequel to Tony Crowther's Captive of 1990, the Blade Runner-inspired Liberation Captive 2 was designed and programmed by Tony Crowther, aka Ratt. Liberation Captive 2 is a cRPG.

Liberation CD32 was released in December of 1993 on CD-ROM whereas the hard disk drive-installable five-diskette A500/1200 version was released in February of 1994. 

The cyberpunk-themed Liberation Captive 2 is set on a dying Earth controlled by mega-corporations in the 29th century. Bio-Corp initiate a cover-up operation when their law-enforcement droids malfunction and start killing humans and framing others for the murders.

In undertaking the role of Trill (the protagonist of the original Captive) the object of Liberation is to investigate Bio-Corp and liberate the captives by remotely controlling the actions of four droids from a laptop, all the while avoiding Securi-Corp forces that are hunting Trill down. If Securi-Corp capture the droids they trace Trill's location from one of the droid's decoding chips that contains a control signal.

The player commands the droids to explore a city that is rendered in real-time, light-sourced texture-mapped 3D. The city is three levels in height (tri-tiered) and contains nine sectors and many buildings and NPCs. The three tiers are street-level, underworld and rooftops. There are 4,000 missions on offer. With the exception of its physical layout the city and the missions are randomly generated from game to game.

The main screen consists of a feedback window, video display units and a central drawspace that represents the first-person viewpoint of the four droids. The droids can look left and right, look up and down, turn to the left and to the right as well as move fowards, backwards and strafe left and right. In addition, the droids ride in taxis, climb up and down ladders and staircases, and interact with objects and actors in the game-world, such as terminals and NPCs.

Naturally, droids can also fire their weapons of which there are 50 different kinds. Firing weapons and using devices drains droid batteries, which can be recharged at power-points and by absorbing electrical discharges. Droids can also rest in order to self-repair their armor.

Each droid can be fitted with 2x devices for a total of 8x devices, the readouts for which are displayed on VDUs.

Liberation Captive 2's user interface features drag and drop, scrollable feedback window and switchable modes of operation, such as the Stat-screen, the Backpack (inventory) and the Repair-screen, which allows droid components to be repaired, replaced and upgraded. The inventory also shifts around items, auto-arranging them.

Liberation Captive 2 supports kb/m. Left-click, right-click and click-hold are employed.

The active drawspace is a pidding 192x100. Yep, smaller than the drawspace of Dungeon Master of 1987. It doesn't matter than Liberation is realtime 3D and Dungeon Master is 2D flip-screen -- the effect is the same yet DM's drawspace is bigger, DM plays better and faster and DM is inarguably a better game.

Liberation Captive 2 was distributed on 5x 3.5" 880kB diskettes and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Liberation Hard Disk Installer. The install size is 3.5 megs (85 files). If the Wall Map Creator is installed, the install size becomes 15 megs (152 files). The Wall Map creator adds 67 wall graphics to the game (71 in total).

Liberation requires 1.5 megs of RAM and supports 030 and 040 acceleration.

• Liberation Captive 2 manual: 36 pages.
• Liberation Captive 2 copy protection: text input manual reference.

In my opinion Liberation Captive 2 should have maintained the original Captive's 2D flip-screen nature. The original Captive ran on 7 MHz 512K RAM Amiga 500s. Now imagine an AGA A1200 sequel that takes advantage of trapdoor RAM and an 020 CPU clocked at 14 MHz.

Liberation of 1993-94 is nowhere near as good as the original Captive of 1990. Liberation is technically impressive in some ways, but it is not a great game like its predecessor, which is one of the greatest games. Liberation gameplay is boring, slow and dull whereas Captive gameplay is extremely fast and hardcore.

Also, the CD32 console that Liberation was developed for was a mistake. I can't stand consoles, even Amiga ones. And I can't stand it when people make console-first games just because of the CD-ROM fad.

CD32 CD-ROM capacity is 640 megs yet Liberation only consists of 160 megs of data files 140 megs of which are given over to poorly acted digitized speech. The core of the game is only 3 megs or 15 megs with the 67 extra texture-maps.

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