It’s 2025, and the first order of business is… resurrecting Timely Reviews. Remember when we sometimes wrote reviews of random old games? We’re bringing that back, and hopefully for more than two reviews. Released in 2014, developed and published by GalaxyTrail, my game of choice for resurrecting Timely Reviews is Freedom Planet.

Do you remember when I did my old reviews of the first two Sonic games on the Genesis? Those two reviews were one of my primary impetuses for reviewing this game, because this game originally started development as a Sonic fan game before it gradually became its own thing. Even if it wasn’t technically a Timely Review by name, my review of the first Sonic game was the first of what would eventually become Timely Reviews. As such, what better way to resurrect the series than with a game that owes its existence to the game that started it.

Wait, This Isn't Sonic!

There’s no Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles here. Instead, your story in Freedom Planet follows Lilac, Carol, and Milla. Unlike the Sonic games on Genesis where they mostly played the same except for a few character-exclusive abilities, all three characters in Freedom Planet play very differently from each other:

  • Lilac is probably the most basic character in the game (although she’s also my favorite in terms of character design and general playstyle). Her basic move set consists of melee combat, being able to attack enemies by kicking them or whipping her hair at them. She has a “Cyclone” ability, which is a double jump combined with a spin attack. This is really useful for exploration and aerial combat, and ended up being my de facto main attack against most bosses. She also has a “Dragon Boost” ability which allows her to dash horizontally or upward-diagonally at an incredibly fast speed (or a “sonic” speed if you will), which is extremely useful for exploration, and will also attack any enemy it runs into. Her main disadvantage is the fact that most of her attacks require her to get up close and personal with her opponents, although the boost ability can be used as a makeshift ranged attack.

  • Carol is another melee fighter, which requires her to get even more up-in-their-face than Lilac. Carol has more traversal options than Lilac. Carol can jump off of walls and cling back onto them (giving her a primitive form of wall climbing), can jump off of special pads akin to the number pads from the first Sonic Adventure, and can break red jerry cans to access her motorcycle which increases her acceleration and can drive directly up walls. She is extremely dependent on her environment, as she excels in close confined spaces, but she struggles quite a bit with aerial combat. What she can do in the air though is a pounce move which thrusts her forward and she can follow it up with a special kick attack. She has another special move, which is a Chun-Li style rapid kick attack.

  • Milla plays vastly differently than either Carol or Lilac. She comes with quite a few disadvantages. Her maximum health pool is smaller, consisting of only 4 feathers instead of 7, has a slower average speed than either Lilac or Carol, and all of her attacks have some slight charge up time making her quite vulnerable in fast-paced combat. This all sounds quite bad, and well… it is, but she has one very major advantage: Ranged combat. Her primary attack is the ability to create green cubes out of thin air and throw them at enemies without needing to get close to them. She can also create shields to stop projectile attacks from hitting her, and even has the ability to shoot lasers from these shields. Both of these abilities allow her to outright trivialize some of the larger enemies and bosses because she can attack them while staying out of harm’s way. She can also flutter her paws which allows her to fly upwards for a short period of time, and dig on the ground to find items.

The story of the game is a simple “power of friendship, we can do anything!” plot. Instead of Robotnik/Eggman, we have Lord Brevon, an alien whose spaceship has crash landed on the planet of Avalice, where the entirety of the game takes place on. While on the planet, Brevon and his alien forces kill the king of Shuigang and wants to steal the Kingdom Stone.

While this is happening, there is also a conflict between the three major cities in the game: Shuigang, Shang Mu, and Shang Tu. It’s up to Lilac, Carol, Milla, and non-playable ally Torque, to bring all of the cities together to fight Lord Brevon and get back the Kingdom Stone, but this won’t come without a lot of excess obstacles in the way.

This is a fairly basic storyline that writes itself like a Saturday morning cartoon. Given the IP that the game is constructed off of, this is probably intentional. It’s not a deep or subversive story by any means, but given that this is basically a kid’s game, I would say that this is fine. It’s also the first game made by the studio, so I assume that they wanted to keep things simple. Different than the Sonic games of this era is the fact that the story is played through cutscenes and all of the characters are voiced acted.

The game can be played in either “Adventure” mode or “Classic” mode. Adventure mode plays all of the story-relevant cutscenes in-between each stage to give you the whole storyline experience, and Classic omits all of the cutscenes entirely and instead takes you directly to the next stage after each time you beat one. The storyline of each playable character is interlinked, though they have their own differences to warrant a run as each of them on Adventure mode. Characters will even go their own path and have their own stages to complete.

Familiar, Yet Very Different

In gameplay, you will find yourself traversing through several different stages with your character of choice. As the game was initially conceived as a Sonic fan game, there’s a lot of typical Sonic elements you’d find here from the fast-paced combat and stage design to the occasional loop-de-loop to go through. This is generally where the similarities end though because Freedom Planet is very much its own thing in spite of its Sonic influence. Over its development time, the game became less an inspiration from Sonic and more of a collage of platformers of the era in general.

On your HUD, you have your current number of lives and your gem count up at the very top. Every 200 gems (or 300 if you chose the Hard difficulty) will give you an extra life. Gems are scattered around the stage as you would expect, but you can actually get them through defeating enemies as well, meaning that to some degree, you are actually encouraged to fight the enemies instead of running past them. The red feathers are your health, though if you pick up red feathers while you’re already at full health, you’ll get a gem instead (as opposed to most other games where it would do absolutely nothing). You can grab any of these through the numerous item containers in the game, though you will also come across different colored crystals which give you shields or invincibility. Along the way, you’ll also find these orbs that don’t seem to do anything. They’re important for a bonus game you can access by collecting a hidden yin-yang symbol, but otherwise the game doesn’t attempt to explain what these are. You can also collect hidden cards in each stage which unlocks things in the gallery.

As Lilac or Carol, you have a blue bar at the top-left of the screen which is your "energy" meter, which allows you to perform special attacks, and will fill up gradually over time. As Milla, this bar is replaced with icons telling you what your "Attack" and "Special" buttons do at any given moment.

You've Gotta Fight For Freedom (Planet)

One of the game’s most characteristic elements are its boss fights, both in the form of mini-boss and traditional end-of-stage boss fights. The enemy design in the game is predictably reminiscent of Sonic with its numerous robotic enemies. This design philosophy however doesn’t normally carry over to the boss fights, which do sometimes consist of robots made by the villains, but the way bosses work in this game is a huge separator from the Sonic series. Whereas bosses in Sonic are mostly about waiting for the right opportunity to attack and dodging about two attacks or so, bosses in Freedom Planet are much more involved.

The super involved combat and boss fights with lots of different attacks are also what give the game its difficulty. I played the game on Normal difficulty for the review, and while I wouldn’t say that the game is super difficult, it would be folly to expect an easy time in the cute, colorful world that the game presents itself in. Even when you’re familiar with the way the characters play and the enemies fight, dodging everything can still be quite a challenge. Without spoiling anything, the final boss is incredibly difficult and not that fun. It didn’t take me that many attempts to actually beat it, but on your first couple of attempts, you’re basically guaranteed to die without really being able to see how you dodge the attacks.

Overall, the gameplay is fun, generally fast-paced, and fairly challenging though it’s not unfair (except for that stupid final boss). The combat is fun and the bosses are quite skill-intensive. Given each character’s different playstyles, you are also encouraged to figure out how each one works in its favor against the particular boss in question.

Setting the Stage

What you might have noticed from looking at all of these screenshots in the article is how beautiful the art style of this game is. It perfectly replicates the look of the best-looking Genesis platformers. Everything in this game all looks wonderful, and it feels like it could’ve been a Genesis game whilst simultaneously being one that would’ve staked itself as one of the best looking games on the system. My favorite stage in the game from an aesthetical viewpoint was definitely Fortune Night. That said, every stage in the game looks great.

Speaking of the stages, the stage design in the game encourages a lot of exploration and finding ways to go fast. Whilst this is fun and increases replay value, I think the combat system and the fast, flowing stages sometimes work at odds with each other. Much of the stage design (and some achievements) encourage you to find fast ways to move through the levels, whereas the way combat works (especially as Milla) and the fact that almost every enemy takes multiple hits to kill entices the player to be more slow and methodical. You can skip most enemies in the game by simply running past them, but then you miss out on grabbing gems and therefore accumulate extra lives slower. This isn’t like the Sonic games where almost every enemy dies in one hit. Rather, you start to pick up speed, then you have to stop for a while to take out enemies (unless you really want to just run past them), then start back up again, and then stop again. There’s no point in the game where these at-odds design philosophies are problematic, but it feels like the game would have benefited from focusing on one or the other instead of trying to balance both.

My first playthrough of the game took me about 4 hours to beat (factoring in the length of sitting through all of the cutscenes, and the amount of times I died and needed to try another part over again). This is a bit short, but the game is replayable with three playable characters, several hidden collectables and a total of 56 achievements to grab. My recommendation is to do your first playthrough as Lilac since she’s the most beginner-friendly character in my opinion (and also the most fun).

Freedom Planet is a really great game that you can find on Steam, the PlayStation store, the Switch store, or on GoG, for $14.99. This is somewhat steep for what is basically a 10-year old "Genesis" game, but it’s a really fun game that has a lot of replay value so if you’re a fan of platformers in general, I’d say the price tag isn’t bad. On Steam, you can also buy the official soundtrack for $6.99, and the soundtrack of the game is quite good.

The game’s two main cons are that its speed and combat designs don’t often mesh with each other that well, and the stupid final boss, but I’d definitely recommend this game to fans of the genre like me. You’ll find a lot to like here.

But what I haven’t told you is that the game had a sequel released for PC in 2022 and for consoles in 2024. That’s right. My next review is going to be Freedom Planet 2, so join me for that review when it comes out.