If you are someone that never got caught up in the launch ordeal, the backlash, or is willing to look past it, then I can tell you, there is a decent game here with a good story and interesting side characters. It's a very above average game and that's just fine.

• To put it simply, it's a comic book style revenge story dealing with some pretty dark themes. It leads into dealing with the criminal underworld and discovering huge invasions of privacy, which is pretty relevant today.
  
• I like Aiden Pearce as a character, he is someone that is recovering from tragedy due to his own actions but has the power to take vengeance. He is very reminiscent to Altair, or Connor from the Assassins Creed series. Stoic, serious and he is always straight to the point, with paranoia, trust and control issues all in tow.
  
• Supporting characters are pretty unique and interesting. I just don't think they got enough screen time and all of them could of benefit from either having there own side missions or just in general being more involved in the story.

• Free running feels like a very basic version of the Assassins Creed system with your ability to mantle over waist height objects and climb up small walls. It does a good job of keeping a flow in chase sequences but I feel it lacks verticality.
  
• Stealth was usually my go to and the game gives you options on ways to utilise it. Track targets using cameras and then make plans to use hacking skills to take them out, sneak around, distract them with lures and non-lethally take them down with your expandable baton or just kill them with a suppressed pistol.
  
• Open combat works like your standard 3rd person action game with it's cover system, just with the added ability of being able to hack objects around you to cause explosions, blackouts or jam reinforcement coms. The guns feel okay to use with a decent variety available, with a slow-mo "focus" ability.
  
• Obviously "hacking" is a big part of the game-play and the world itself. It does a good job of making everything feel like it's connected and integrating it into how you want to play. Using it to interact with other characters, utilising it in stealth, combat and also while driving, but most objects can only be used in one way making it feel very static.
  
• Driving in this game to me is the worst aspect. Cars, motorbikes, boats and trucks just feel bad with poor handling and feeling like they are made of plastic. As your primary way to get around and the amount of vehicles on offer it's a wonder why it feels like it was worked on the least.
  
• The game hosts somewhat of a reputation system but unfortunately it's not real well implemented and it's easy to forget it's even there. Generally it just takes a hit if you kill innocent people or goes in a positive direction when you save NPC's from an ongoing crime.
  
• All of your abilities can be affected by skill points earnt through leveling, which you'll gain by just playing the game. Some skills are locked behind doing side content or story missions and points can be used to unlock new hacks, crafting items or passive skills.
  
• There is a crafting system, where you can make one-time use hacks, lures and grenades with materials found in world but you can also just find/buy those items as well.

Questing/side content

• The city is filled with named NPC's which fill up the background and make the city feel a bit more alive. They can also provide some form of game-play purpose like being able to steal money from but majority of them are there for a bit of a laugh by reading the information that pops up in their profile.
  
• The classic Ubisoft open world where it just fills the map up with a bunch collectables, points of interest and basic short form side content all of which can be revealed on the map via hacking random npc's or unlocking the local CTOS tower.
  
• I'm disappointed in the side missions in the game and I do wish they had more focus on individual characters rather then what we got with the investigations and trail following tasks. They offered interest at first only for them to kind of fizzle out and become forgettable.
  
• There is a multiplayer element to this game that I didn't get to experience outside of a tutorial.

Difficulty

• It's pretty standard when it comes to difficulty and you'll find nothing that makes it stand out.

Length

• The story will take you around 10 hours with 41 missions but if you want to go for that 100% which I'm not sure you will have much luck with considering multiplayer adds towards it, it could easily take 60-80.

Visuals

• By no means bad and is probably what you expect. The city during the night hits the feeling on the head perfectly, it suits the tone, atmosphere and feels amazing just walking the streets at night in the rain. Which is in contrast to Chicago during the day where it just feels, fine.
  
• The character models do well enough to portray the emotion in the characters with detail and I love the design of the main cast. NPC's lack a bit of fidelity across the board and can be often copy and pasted,

Audio

• The OST in this game is absolutely solid, bringing pumping percussion beats or the more atmospheric synth as a backdrop. It just needed to be used more often with a bit more variety.
  
• You have the in-game radio as well, that play's while in a vehicle or you can load it up anywhere via your phone. You unlock more songs by hacking random NPC's which is a neat idea. There is a few notable songs but for the most part it just didn't interest me and I'd much rather listen to the OST or the ambience.
  
• Voice acting does well to convey emotion and in general adds to the performance of the characters. I especially like Aiden. You can tell Aiden tries to come across serious and monotone as possible a lot of the time to give the illusion he is always in control and has no weaknesses, only for it to break when his emotions get the better of him.

Performance and Bugs.

• There is one thing that's hard not to mention and will absolutely steal your focus, Aiden's coat. It just kind of goes off it's head. There is a mod that you can download to fix this issue and I heavily recommend it.
  
• It runs great on modern hardware as far as I can tell. Roughly 200fps consistently.
  
• No game-breaking bugs. Mainly just clipping issues and rendering distance.

My system at the time
Operating System: Windows 11
Processor: 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900K 3.20 GHz
RAM: 64.0 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super.
Resolution: 3440x1440
Installed on an M.2 SSD

It originally came out at the same time with ACIII but for the PSVita, and yeah, you can tell. Aveline is our first main-line female protagonist, up until Syndicate and she had the potential to be such a good character but feels completely held back by the game itself. I found Liberation to be completely boring and for the most part, uninteresting and I wish that wasn't the case. Even if you are a fan of the series, this one is easily skippable and close to, if not at the bottom of the ranking.

• Takes place around the same time as ACIII but in New Orleans, Louisiana.
  
• You play as Aveline de Grandpré, a woman of French and African heritage in which her mother was a slave and left Aveline at a young age for unknown reasons. Aveline then being raised in a wealthy home with her father and stepmother.
  
• Aveline pursued the idea of freeing slaves and led to her meeting Agaté, who became a mentor and brought her into the Brotherhood.
  
• No real modern day story, you are just a random person playing a game made by Abstergo, which they have modified to put the Templar's in a better light. There is however a really cool idea of having a "hacker" interacting with you in certain areas and getting you to assassinate a random npc which will then show you parts of cut scenes that have been altered by Abstergo. It just hasn't been executed as well as it could have been.
  
• The story overall feels really hard to stay engaged with, it's bland and most of the characters are uninteresting. Connor does make an appearance, which is cool, but It's purely fan-service. They barely interact and he doesn't seem like ACIII Connor.

• Liberation uses the exact same engine and gameplay as ACIII with a few new additions. The biggest being the three "persona" outfits. The assassin outfit, which allows you to do everything you would normally expect from these games, the slave persona, where you are restricted in weapons but you still have full movement and can blend in with slaves. Then there is the Lady persona, which limits your sprint speed and makes you unable to use weapons, but allows you to charm guards and makes it harder for them to detect you. Each Persona has it's own notoriety bar, which can make it handy to swap in and out but unless I was forced to, I always used the standard assassin getup. The idea of using different outfits that let you doing certain things and allowing you to blend in with certain areas or groups is something that's been dabbled in occasionally and a full flushed out system around it would be interesting to see for social stealth in future titles.
  
• You can buy new "outfits" but they are all just recolours of you current clothing sadly. You can at least change your head piece which I like.
  
• They reuse the exact same animations from III that Connor uses and It's weird to see at times on Aveline, considering how powerful Connor felt. They did introduce a chain-kill system, that I never used, and a whip. Which the whip is basically only used for a few parkour sections, and to pull enemies closer in combat. cool idea though.
  
• Stealth is the same as ACIII which isn't the best thing, but there is still a few decent stealth-based missions.
  
• Missions structure is heavily dated, with the typical slow moving tailing missions, or parkour to a certain spot within a certain amount of times.
  
• There is also a HQ with the ability to send ships to buy or sell goods. I forgot about it about 2 hours into the game.

Visuals

• Has the same look and feel as ACIII does, just on a smaller scale with a smaller map. Most of your time is spent in New Orleans, which is a fitting setting for an AC game, being a more condensed city environment. You do also spend some time in the bayou, which could be a really cool area if it didn't look like they took a city-building sim game spray tool and just go over an area with it.
  
• A lot of the areas in the game lack any real detail or decor, which is to be expected with it originally being a Vita title.

Audio

• The Soundtrack kind of just sits in the middle for me, It's not loud and epic, but not boring either. It provides that necessary ambience for the game.
  
• It overall sounds the same as III in terms of quality, aside from lacklustre voice acting, which pops up often.

Performance and Bugs.

• The game itself ran fine, aside from having to use the Ubisoft launcher. But I definitely have not experienced a lot of the issues other people have said.
  
• Plenty of in game bugs though, at one point a cut scene refused to play and I had to restart from checkpoint. I've had boats get stuck in the ground, and NPC's just morph into a nearby structure.

My system at the time
Operating System: Windows 11
Processor: 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900K 3.20 GHz
RAM: 64.0 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Installed on an M.2 SSD