It’s easy for these sorts of games to get dull after a while, but Freedom Planet succeeds for the most part in keeping gameplay fresh throughout. Others feature Indiana Jones huge boulder escape parts. Some level sections require the player to solve a puzzle to open a door further back in the level. Finally, the game tries hard to mix things up with new level mechanics in each part of each stage. Moreover, unlike an old Sonic game, which capped the player’s time in each level at 10 minutes, Freedom Planet imposes no time limit at all, letting you explore and find new ways to get through a level. However, even the pacing and difficulty aren’t really an issue, because Freedom Planet gives Lilac and friends unlimited continues and mid-level checkpoints to start from. I’m gushing over the game at this point, so let me tune it down just slightly: along with the old-school stylings of the art and the gameplay, Freedom Planet also features plenty of old-school cheap difficulty, and some of the levels are long and drag a bit. And the voices aren’t even bad! Try to beat that.įreedom Planet’s trio chilling out between stages. Despite the Sonic-looking-ness of Freedom Planet, the sprite and level art are all great, and it’s obvious that a lot of work went into putting the game together. It’s colorful and fast, the level designs are varied and interesting, and Lilac, Carol, and Milla play quite differently, requiring a different approach to the same levels for each character. You can’t, can you?) However, the game still manages to maintain a light and fun atmosphere. It’s a lot more grim than a game from the time would have been (just imagine Dr. Freedom Planet tells the story of Lilac, a dragon (yeah, she’s a dragon, somehow), her tomboyish cat friend Carol, and their new annoyingly hyperactive dog friend Milla as they help a mysterious stranger defeat an evil alien overlord who has instituted a coup in their country by killing the king and mind-controlling his son, the prince. The mix the developer used here ensures that this game feels not like a Sonic pastiche, but like its own game, which is important as hell (at the very least, it lets him claim a way broader copyright on his work without getting mixed up with SEGA’s lawyers.)īut this isn’t an article on copyrightability in video games, so let’s move on. The player can make use of lots of different moves unique to each of the game’s three characters to take down enemies and bosses. Freedom Planet also takes influence from other 16-bit series like Gunstar Heroes, Rocket Knight Adventures, and Mega Man X. So big deal, you might be thinking: Freedom Planet is a fangame starring a modified Sonic sprite. And the main character (Lilac, above) kind of looks like a redesigned and recolored Sonic character. ![]() ![]() Hell, the game even has half-pipes and loops that look like they were taken straight out of an old Sonic game. Moreover, the characters play a bit like Sonic, Tails and Knuckles as far as speed and special moves go. The level art and the sprites and character designs are really reminiscent of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Luckily, Freedom Planet has both.įirst things first: Freedom Planet obviously looks like a Sonic game. Not that mere nostalgia is enough for a game to be good (see Retro City Rampage, which seems to try to survive on its nostalgic appeal alone and fails.) A game, even a pretty basic platformer like this one, has to have fun gameplay and some aspects that set it apart from other, similar games. So I’m pretty happy about Freedom Planet, an early 90s-style action platformer released in 2014. Which is just fine, but the video games of my childhood are more in the 16-bit SNES/Genesis category. Still, most of these games have seemed to focus on the 8-bit era of the Famicom/NES/Master System. The love of indie game designers for retro-stylings is pretty understandable – it means way less in production values, and playing on the players’ love for the games of their childhoods is always a good bet.
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