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.
