Freedom Planet 2 Review

I played the first Freedom Planet about a year ago and I didn't even know for the longest time that there was a super lengthy wait for it's sequel, the console port for the 2nd game came out 2 years after the PC release and now that I finally played it, I think FP2 is a better game than the first and the first to me was already a solid game. The best way of describing the Freedom Planet games is that it's 2D Sonic for those who aren't big on classic Sonic.

I'll start with what I dislike out of the way first since well there is a number of things that bugged me about it, the first Freedom Planet was a pretty challenging game especially on the bosses and I had to beat it on casual mode, FP2's continue system felt like the devs' heart was in the right place and I'd even say it's innovating for a 2D platformer game like this. It has a continue system and a lives system, you can use up 2-3 lives depending on difficulty when you die and you can be revived on the spot if you lose all your HP, if you get a full on game over, you can restart from last checkpoint, this all sounds pretty good on paper, but there is two major issues with this, one checkpoint restarts require gems and if you don't have enough it's a level restart. Thanks to this I set the assist mode option in the game to cheaper continues, and infinite revivals as well as putting the game to easy mode since easy mode has cheaper continues as well as letting you making them even cheaper in the assist options in the off chance that I did get an actual game over, I won't be as punished upon getting a game over. Getting a hard game over is rare since the only thing that you can't use infinite revivals on is getting crushed and dying to a put a death pit, the latter only happened with Kalaw boss. This feels like what Nintendo tries to do make their Mario games more "accessible" but I'm not sure if this was a good way to do it.

Due to all this, it feels like the intended challenge the devs seems like they wanted me to have might've been lost. The only geniunely hard parts of Freedom Planet 2 is when during a platforming run, you might not 100% not to be sure on where to go since some areas require you to puzzle solve, have forced combat sections or just not be clear on where the beaten path even is. This is where much of the challenge of the game can lie if you did what I did, and I'm not big on this, I prefer to just be simple linear stages for 2D platformers like Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze or the Rayman games.

With all that out of the way, I do enjoy this game, first thing I liked about it is the story, I will admit, I didn't really pay attention to the first game's story since I was surprised there was even an indepth story in a 2D platfomer at all. With FP2 however, I was much more engaged with the story, it's surprisingly well written for a 2D platformer which I didn't expect. The voice acting is pretty good too for an indie game. The game has a pretty big an expansive world and characters like the Magister and Merga are well written as well. Magister especially for being a guy who is wise but isn't afraid to admit who is wrong from time to time. The character interactions might annoy some people but I found them moderately engaging since the characters were friendly with each other while also showing signs of disagreement too. I only did Lilac's run and the story is your typical story about good guys with the power of friendship beating evil but it's the voice acting and character interactions did make the story endearing especially for the kind of game it is.

The moment to moment gameplay is pretty good too minus the occasional part I got stuck, FP2 much like the first is about gaining speed and going fast, and surprisingly the game even address what people complained about for the longest time in 2D Sonic where there are explamation marks for upcoming enemies and nearby obstacles you could run into. Knockback and guarding can be turned off too which is another thing I like all though I'm not sure if that is how the game was intended to be played but it does make the game less frustrating to me.

The level design is a massive improvement over the first game. The artstyle looks colorful and vibrant and the levels themselves have a wide variety of gimmicks to them. There are levels where you need to do combat, puzzle levels, traditional speed challenges and keeping momentum. There are handle bars, teleporters, grind rails, parts where you got to swim, avoiding magma, jungle levels, highways, a courtyard when it comes to variety Freedom Planet 2 has it. The last few levels will even have gimmicks interwining with each other a highlight being Inversion Dynamo where you have to use teleporters and grind rails. Clockwork Arboretum where pretty much every previous level gimmicks is rolled into one level. Level design is mostly good.

Overall, FP2 is a good game while not really 100% being into high speed platformers, it's still a well made game.