Freedom Planet (Wii U) Review

Freedom Planet doesn't just take inspiration from Sonic the Hedgehog, it understands and recreates its core principles. It knows how to imitate the feeling while still giving it an (ahem) fresh spin. Arguably, it does this better than its inspiration has in quite a while.

It flicks you seamlessly between precise and skilful high-speed platforming and spectacles that merely look precise and skilful. It's creative in its levels and highly satisfying to wiz around them. When real skill does come into it, players will find a challenging game; you can't just grab a ring and run right here. Some levels, and especially bosses, will take a lot more attention. In some cases, however, the difficulty might be more down to the player not knowing their character's capabilities.

There is little explanation for anything, which sounds okay. It's a 2D platform game - what's to know? Run about, smash things, get to the end. The special moves at least should be pointed out, though, else some naive players might get stuck halfway in a level not realising they could do a huge dash-in-the-air diagonal jump thing. This is especially true, as the game also has multiple characters to learn, each with their own moves and thus potential ways to progress over a level.

Aside from a few repeated bosses, nothing about the game seems lazy. From the multiple characters, to collectables to hunt down, to multiple difficulty settings, the developers seem to have filled Freedom Planet with everything they could think of. There's even a professionally voice acted story to the whole thing. Players can disable this story if they want to - but its inclusion raises the bar, giving it a more modern "playing a cartoon" feeling, despite the graphical style making this look like "just" a very good 16-bit game.