Freedom Planet

It actually makes me a little sad to think this game may go unnoticed among more widely known like Shovel Knight. Bringing up Shovel Knight here brings me to another point, about being inspired by a game versus being a clone of it. Shovel Knight is fantastic because it is inspired by Megaman and takes some of it's best elements, but doesn't let itself be constrained by the formula by being a clone. Likewise, it's graphics are inspired by 8-bit and 16-bit games, but it uses it to create a great looking game instead of trying to merely look "old school". Freedom Planet is the same way. It is inspired by Sonic, but is not a simple clone. The game remembers the amount of vertical space and exploration the old Sonic levels had, rather than trying to just be fast, and the three playable characters themselves play different from the Blue Blur. You don't jump on enemies, and you don't spin dash (though one character has a similar ability), but rather have actual attacks and special abilities, like the aforementioned dash, a shield that shoots a short beam when you drop it, and even a motorcycle! That, by the way, makes this the only platformer that I know of that lets you ride around on a motorcycle in the regular levels. Finally, I want to talk about the amount of detail and love and went into the graphics. The characters themselves are well detailed and have a ton of animation, including some done just for cut-scenes. How many sprite based games featured animations that you see exactly once, just to make sure the scene looks good? When Carol hangs from bars while riding her bike, you'll see her struggling to hold on from the extra weight. When you start running when the third, unlockable character, she'll drop down to all fours. Small details like these in the animations also bring out so much character. Don't let this one pass you by because it looks too cutesy or because your tired of retro games. It really is one of the best platformers I've played, period.

My initial reaction was: WOW! This is amazing! The graphics are incredible (bright, colourful, lots of multi-layered parallax scrolling), the music is beautiful, there's lots of character animation, and the controls are fluid and easy to use. It was great for about 15 minutes, until I thought: this level is dragging on... The first level took 25 minutes. The second level 30 minutes to complete. Then I played a level with an unlockable character that took 25 minutes again. The levels are long, inordinately long, as in why the hell would anyone make any level in any game this laboriously long? And labyrinthine. So much so, that I quickly abandoned the idea of exploration, because I'd follow a path filled with gems, only to end up meandering back to the start, and discovering I'd travelled backwards down a secret route. Do you remember Ecco the Dolphin on Mega Drive, which had painfully complex 2D mazes? Or Kid Chameleon, which had a kerjillion levels so you'd never see the end without cheating? Freedom Planet feels like the best bits of Sonic the Hedgehog, mixed with the worst bits of Ecco and Kid Chameleon. Every drop of positivity I had for it is gone. The thought of having to sit through a singular level of such length again makes me nauseous. I don't ever remember the Sonic games dragging on or outstaying their welcome as long as this. In most other platformers, each level probably has a tight 2-3 minute limit, maybe 5 minutes in some cases. Elegant and streamlined. Here it's 20-40 minutes of drudgery. It reeks of the kind of self-indulgence that amateur developers would have, not knowing when to stop creating. It needs about 50% of the content either cut, or repackaged into smaller chunks. Too long, too laborious, too labyrinthine, just too much. I'd rather just go play the original Sonic 2 for an hour, and see most of the levels, than trudge through only one level in this over the same time period.

Freedom Planet is not as good as people should be let on to believe. There are obvious faults with the game and the people giving five star ratings to it are either under heavy doses of nostalgia or really big furries. To start with, the story mode is an absolute joke. They hired about one or two decent people, and then picked random people on the internet to voice act in it. Plus the cutscenes are on average about 10 minutes long and they're terrible, and not even in a good way, they're just boring and not funny. The dialog is so ear gratingly bad it's unbelievable nobody spoke up and said "Hey guys, this isn't even close to funny." There's a mode that let's you skip the entire game's story, which is what I'd recommend if you ever do pick this up. The gameplay itself is a simple "I am not sonic please don't let anyone tell you otherwise" game. You have a health bar and levels with loops and crazy hills to run fast in, but it's not a sonic game. The level design remains largely unchanged for the 3 characters in it, even though the characters are different from each other. The level design becomes a mess where nobody really gets a good time from the characters. Plus they tweaked the physics to allow characters to just walk up walls and ceilings because they couldn't redesign or give them different levels. The controls are responsive however and at points the level design can be decent, so when the game does play well, it's fun. The graphics and music are very well made. Graphics have nice little qualities in them and overall are very pretty. The character designs are trash though, they've made little effort hiding the fact that they're just sonic ocs, and said effort makes them look ugly. The music is very well composed however, and since you're getting the soundtrack, enjoy. Overall, freedom planet is still an okay game, sometimes good when it can be, but there's a lack of focus in the gameplay department that can leave this game pretty mixed to people.

CONSPIRACY BELOW!!!! DON'T READ IF YOU GET SPOOKED EASILY Does anyone think its a little suspicious that four different 5 star reviews were posted on the same day (12/2/14 just like mine). Well it is, and here is why: the freedom planet creators have been cheesing up the reviews of their games. Need proof? Well you could look at this page, or you could go to the freedom planet page on steam and look at the reviews there to see the colorful mess that there is. All the negative reviews were marked down as overwhelmingly unhelpful: "0 of 16 people (0%) found this review helpful" "7 of 85 people (8%) found this review helpful" "37 of 250 people (15%) found this review helpful" Or if you wanna look at the positive section you can find colorful characters like this one: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198155870927 http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198155870927/recommended/248310/ This account has 103 hours of game time i freedom planet, and only 3 other games (1 being free to play). Either this person must really like freedom planet and not many other games or its a person who created a fake account just to post a review. Congratulations to the group who probably spent a few hours creating steam accounts to rate positive reviews up and negative ones down If you are genuinely trying to find out if this is a good game, go watch some game-play or something, don't listen to the BS reviews. I picked the first 3 reviews i got from google and posted them here, knock yourselves out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGU4QZlBKFc www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjhuMDHktL4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=19uo8ax4Jho

This is so cringe-worthy i made a second account just to show it http://i.imgur.com/GDPbBO2.png F*** what these guys are doing