From the forge of Donut Steel: Freedom Planet

While Sonic After the Sequel, made by one LakeFeperd, remains firmly in the camp of fan game not all Sonic fan games remain as such. To my understanding, Freedom Planet is the effort of a team that started out making a fan game and then realized they'd, you know, actually like to own their work. This is of course something of a double edged sword, as a Sonic fan game gives you a built in audience - LakeFeperd went on to begin working on Spark the Electric Jester, with a kickstarter and all though - but also you can't monetize in any real way.

Well, sort of. I mean Team Four Star does "fan parody" work on youtube and they've monetized the crud out of that. There's often ways around. But regardless, Freedom Planet's team wanted to actual make money off the game, maybe not some alternate channel, so it ended up as whatever you want to call it now.

I find it kinda jarring when people describe a game as a "fangame of X" and then go on to then admit well ok it's actually a fangame of X, Y and Z and then also a weeb fantasy and a lot of weird stuff that kinda makes me think furries got worked into the game past the Sonic threshold to boot. And don't get me wrong, Sonic is on a threshold and he crosses it in some games as well. Don't make out with teenage human girls Sonic. That's wrong.

Freedom Planet is, ultimately, more or less it's own thing. Whatever people claim is a big part of the game honestly comes off as utterly diluted into the larger whole of the game's influences until while you might recognize an individual part, the gameplay of the gestalt is not really recognizable. I think that's sort of a plus or minus; if you're looking at this review as a review of a "Sonic fan game" no, not really.

But if you're looking for a game that doesn't play a lot like other games in the genre and feels like something unique - for better or worse - I actually think Freedom Planet does manage a lot of that. How well, though, eh...

As an aside, I played about an hour of Freedom Planet several months back (actually maybe in 2015, I'm not quite sure) and then shelved it. The game just didn't grab me, but, given this was just the Summer of Sonic I felt like if there was a time to play it, this was it. 

Ok so what actually "is" Freedom Planet? It's essentially a 16-bit styled Platformer, with deeper than usual controls, a health and energy bar, running sort of akin to Sonic but not nearly as close as they'd like you to think. There is sort of vaguely inertia, but gravity is confusingly implemented. I'm not comparing the controls to Sonic 4 in terms of quality, but it reminds me a lot of Sonic 4 in how context matters more than the overall whole. You can run straight up walls if there's a curve and along ceilings at

Unlike Sonic, you have a move set. I played the game through the Sonic analogue, a purple dragon lady thing, who has a charged up M. Bison style air drill dash, a floating cyclone jump, an uppercut and then some usual looking punch/chop/kick whatever. I like this system, as it gives you more control over movement and pace, and offers movement options. No, I don't like this game anywhere near as much as classic Sonic, but this works well.

The game actually ends up resembling Megaman X, to me, perhaps more than intended. A lot of enemies can shoot; in fact, some stages contain nothing but enemies that shoot. Projectiles move fast and enemies become aware of you from off the screen. You're not rewarded for playing 'like a Sonic game', you're rewarded for playing more like a Megaman game, being cautious, looking for patterns and staying out of harm's way. It's janky. Once you get that down the game works a lot better.

The game's art influences are a major turn off for me, resembling some sort of hybrid of Avatar, anime in general and furries of the more benign kind but still kinda "eh". That's not to say the game is incapable of being visually enjoyable, it's a nice looking game, but it loses a lot of its luster when the elements weirdly contradict against each other. A good example is the excerpt from wikipedia explaining the game usually uses Chinese characters on screen. But there's katakana under the title of the game, which is Japanese, and it gives it this weird conflicting style that permeates the production. It's like if you make a game using Teutonic era theming and then slap a french subtitle on it. And then make everyone a furry.

this is a boss fight

I think other people won't mind as much. They also rotate, rather than redraw, sprites on curves. This looks sort of like your character is being manipulated in photoshop in real time and it is not good.

Also, the game's voice acting... Like, I honestly feel kinda bad. If you pause and listen, the voice acting is clean, clear and a well-delivered. The voices are good. The dialogue is atrocious, it's d-list anime trope festival nonsense. It also repeats during the boss fights, like a punishment for failing, and just uggh.

So I like the visuals (mostly) except when it presses too hard on the influences, and I like the voice acting except when I actually listen to what they're saying. The music, to finish this off, is... There. It's certainly not "bad", it's not "Sonic 4 earpain" or something. It's kinda generic sounding, it suits the production but nothing I'll remember a day later. It's nothing compared to Sonic ATS, for example.

I absolutely loathe the storytelling. I'm playing with the cutscenes and stuff off and just find the game disjointed and jarring for the presence of something I didn't want in the first place. The game's zones don't have any flow at all; they're worse than Sonic 2 and feel completely random, probably because I'm supposed to play with the precious story on. It's funny, thinking back on recent platformers I've played, I wanted more story from Odallus. Going further back, I liked the story in Steamworld Dig and Shovel Knight. But this? Zero interest instantly. It might be the combo of "Sonic fangame" and "storyline" being a magical spell for "avoid at all costs" though.

this is not even vaguely impressive

Oh, and this game has that insufferable moronic attitude of putting checkpoints not just before a boss introduction, but often in something absolutely asinine like a different room or just total dumpster intelligence production. I do not care about boss introductions in pixel art games! I mean seriously, it's pixel art, it's not some jaw dropping masterpiece to see your MS paint dragon appear on screen. Dragging this out is just adding insult to injury.

I don't know that I especially like the health system or even the usage of the health system whatsoever. I can't decide which angle it is meant to come from, as I haven't played all of the genesis or otherwise games Freedom Planet supposedly homages. From the perspective of someone looking to play a sonic like game, the overabundance of hazards coupled with the game's high speed  - or more moderate speed but with the viewing area of a gameboy game - creates a persistent drain on your health without any passive way to boost it. You end up in this odd moment where you realize you're half-dead and need to seek out the other, non-ring analogue doodles, to heal back up. While the health bar creates a more megaman and largely better than sonic feel for bosses, the level design and general feel of the game conflict with this. You just kinda bonk into things when you're learning a level. Or you play very deliberately, which conflicts with it just as much.

Added on top of that, while I generally like the fact that not all enemies do touch damage - or even any real amount - it is very difficult at a glance to determine if any enemy does, or does not. There is no real theme unifying whether or not they do, at least not that I can tell, so you end up jerking around in reaction to something that may not even be a threat until it does its thing that is a threat. I think most of them don't, but every once and a while...

The worst thing of course is multi-hit attacks, which various bosses or whatever have. Essentially, your invulnerability frames following a hit are shorter than your recovery time, meaning many attacks while going off lock you in for half or more of your health bar of damage. Most of these are avoidable, of course, but we'll get into why they're an issue a bit later. This just feels really cheap and unfair, and makes you question the health bar system more. When getting recovery items, it makes it look like you have something like twenty hits, but I'm not sure there's an enemy in the game that takes twenty hits to kill you. Everything takes big bites out of your life.

The reason this is frustrating isn't really that the game is being unfair, not precisely. Rather - the game is a 16-bit homage, so even when it's incredibly poor design, the screen size is cramped and you can't see what you're fighting much of the time. This isn't Odallus the Dark Call or Shovel Knight where the screen is the screen, the designers simply did not get what they were doing. You're meant to memorize how to approach certain sections, and since I'm doing the game once through, this means a lot of trial and error to deal with issues a decent camera would gladly solve.

It's just irritating. Once you've got a fight down and remember what it is going to do, sure, you can avoid it. But you're relying on memorizing the patterns, not reacting to the fight. When you add in the fact you can lose 75% of your health in an attack you didn't dodge properly (because you can't see it and haven't memorized it) the bosses begin to get really unenjoyable. I'm not big on trial and error learning in the way this game presents it.

Anyway, if you haven't picked up on it, I found this game mediocre and not at all living up to the hype around it. I have this feeling for why it gets so hyped, but I'm not going into it. As a Sonic fangame, it's hyper-terrible, but I don't think it's a Sonic fangame by any means at this point. If the movement system is even meant to give the feeling of Sonic, well, that's laughable. There's a bunch of reviews on Steam essentially claiming it's "like Sonic but good" and I'm pretty sure none of those people have actually played a Sonic game. When reviews are built on a crux of memes, eh, I think there's something disingenuous about it.

What the game actually is, is a junction of various ideas with little real concern for how they combine together. The different systems, and how the character moves, do not quite fuse together right and often leave you feeling the jank of sloppy controls with overlapping systems that jerk from context to context. There's stuff in the game that works great, and I'm not saying I didn't have fun, but I spent most of my time with this game honestly wishing I was playing something else. I could probably push through the rest of the game, but I have other games I want to get finished and this is not a 'great' or even good experience of a game.

I don't really know who you recommend this game to, either. It's a 16-bit homage to maybe too many games at once, so the end result is something I struggle to articulate. I mean this game isn't Sonic Lost World level frustrating, but in terms of enjoyment, it's a long way from as good as Sonic or Megaman X.