Hello everybody and welcome to the second part of my two-parter review, and this time, it's Freedom Planet 2! In my last review, we looked at the original game from 2014, which started its life as a Sonic fan-game until developing its own distinct identity midway through development. The inspiration from the blue blur wouldn't stop there though because that game would get a sequel eight years later.

Released in 2022 for PC and 2024 for consoles, developed and published once again by GalaxyTrail, today we’re taking a look at Freedom Planet 2.


It's Been a Long Time

People and their appearances can change quite a bit over the course of eight years, and that’s exactly what happened here. Lilac, Carol, and Milla are playable once again and have had some substantial visual overhauls, presumably as a means of distancing itself from its original Sonic roots and as a way to show character development over the course of the events of the first and second games. After acting as an antagonistic NPC and mini-boss fight in the first game, Neera Li makes a playable appearance in this game and tags along with the other three throughout the course of their adventure. The returning characters play as you would likely expect them to, but there’s quite a lot of new details to go over:

Lilac plays most similarly to her appearance in the first game compared to all of the other characters. She retains her basic combat move list and gameplay attributes from the first game, although her “Dragon Cyclone” ability no longer costs any energy to use so it’s readably spammable. She has the fastest average movement speed and the simplest combat to learn, being mostly a melee fighter that can boost herself forward super quickly. Her “Dragon Burst” ability remains the same as it did in the first game. After guarding, she has the ability to “blink” forward giving her extra distance and momentum. In the middle of stages, she can pick up spheres which give her a ring-boomerang projectile attack.

Carol keeps her basic structure from the first game, being a melee fighter who attacks with her claws, although her Chun-Li style kick attack from that game is replaced with an incredible new move for her, the “Jump Disc”. Alleviating her biggest weakness from the original, the Jump Disc finally gives Carol a proper ranged attack, and one that’s both strong and multifunctional. It’s effective as an offensive move, and will even continue to deal damage as it comes back to you, but Carol can also throw it and then teleport to where she threw it, functioning as both evasion and stage traversal. Her motorcycle powerup from the first game returns, but now you have the ability to throw it to use as a weapon and store it, and then bring it back later whenever you want.

Milla has the most differences to her Freedom Planet 1 appearance out of the three returning playable characters. Her biggest weakness from the first game, her health deficit, is gone so she can actually take some hits this time (her health is now the same as the other characters). In this game, she also has proper melee combat, so gone are the days of awkwardly needing to crawl around close-up enemies to hit them with thrown cubes. As in the first game, her combat revolves around ranged combat and creating shields, and her abilities are more streamlined and easier to use in this game. Her ability to pick up objects and throw them is gone, and her Phantom Cubes are instead created by guarding. She can also pick up a powerup that gives her three Phantom Cubes worth of abilities.

Neera Li utilizes a lot of ice-related abilities, many of which are moves exported from her boss encounter in the first game. Using her spear, she has competent melee combat, and can fire projectiles from it (although sadly she can only shoot them forward). She can fire an ice boomerang which freezes enemies in place (and allows them to be used at platforms), can damage enemies overhead with a whirlwind attack, and can lay ice spikes along the ground. By guarding, she’ll enter “Focus” mode which increases her attacking speed and stops her from flinching when she takes damage. She can pick up ice skates which increase her momentum and attacking speed, and allow her to use her special attacks without draining her energy bar. Compared to the other three characters, she is quite difficult to learn and her stage traversal options are lacking in potency.


New Game, New Plot

Compared to the first game, the story this time around is much more involved and the game makes great strides in expanding the lore of Avalice. The game takes place three years after the events of the first one, in which Lord Brevon is absent and is replaced by a new main antagonist, Merga, a water dragon looking to get revenge on the earth dragons for wiping out the rest of her race a long time ago.

When Lilac’s treehouse is destroyed by villain attacks that have been happening around the kingdom, she and her friends are called by the Magister to find out who’s instigating the attacks and what they’re after. From this point onward, most of the major characters in the first game (minus Torque and Lord Brevon, neither of whom appear in the game at all) are all here for the exposition, and it doesn’t take too much time before a new title means new enemies all teaming up with Merga. This game also goes into more personal details about all of the playable characters than the first one did, as at some point, we have to deal with important emotional dilemmas from each of them, which give everything more weight than the story in the previous title.

In my review of the original Freedom Planet, I compared the story to that of a Saturday morning cartoon. If the story in that game is the plot of an episode of that cartoon, then the story in Freedom Planet 2 is like the plot of a movie of that cartoon. It’s longer, grander, and the tension is higher. Merga as a villain has much more depth than Lord Brevon as we see her story and her thoughts as we understand her goals and motivations. I actually understand why she’s doing what she’s doing as opposed to Lord Brevon, who had basically no backstory explained at all. There’s many more story elements I could discuss, but I’d rather you experience them for yourself by playing the game.

Even though the story this time around is a big improvement over the first game, I can also tell that it still isn't perfect. The story often relies on using the same tropes multiple times throughout, whilst still expecting there to be a major impact on the player every time. By the fifth time the same twist happened, I ended up rolling my eyes as if the game still wanted this part of the story to be meaningful in any way.

All four playable characters go through every stage (a difference from the first game), and the base storyline is the same no matter who you play as, although the way each character’s interactions differ slightly does make a story playthrough with each character worthwhile. As with the first game, this one can be played in either Adventure or Classic mode (the latter mode being unlocked after beating the game in the former mode once) where the former tells the entire story through relevant cutscenes at various moments in gameplay, and the latter is a simple level-to-level romp where the story doesn’t interfere.


Little Changes With Big Impacts

As you'd expect from a sequel game, the gameplay is very familiar, yet also very different, and significantly so in some ways. Just like the first game, you have different difficulty options when you boot up a new save file. You’re also given an optional tutorial stage to learn all of your character’s abilities, although it weirdly doesn’t teach you about the elemental shields which reappear from the first game.

Your two main collectables from the first game, crystal shards and petals, function the same as they did there. You will grab an extra life when you grab enough crystal shards (which is 250 by default, as opposed to either 200 or 300 in the first game, depending on what difficulty you chose) and life petals transform into crystal shards if you have full health.

Your lives are where things get quite interesting because they work quite a lot differently this time. Here, you start each stage with 2 lives regardless of how many you had at the end of your previous stage. When you lose all of your health, you will have the option to either respawn back at your last checkpoint with full health or get right back up from where you are with a sliver of health left. I’m personally a fan of both of these systems since it gives you flexibility in how to proceed and it also keeps the right amount of tension throughout the game without letting the player get too comfortable or frustrated.

This might sound like it makes things a bit difficult, but that’s the perfect time to discuss two new features in Freedom Planet 2: The first of which is “guarding”, which is an action you can perform at any time to give you a split-second of invincibility, and it is great. You’ll learn to love this feature and you will use it a lot. The second of which are items which can be found in treasure chests or bought in vendors at the shops (more on that later), which alter certain gameplay aspects to make the game easier or harder.

There are quite a few quality-of-life features in the game. By default, the game will display a table of what your main gameplay buttons will do at the bottom-left. Once you become more comfortable with each character’s playstyle, you can turn this off, but I decided to keep it on in the screenshots for the sake of enticing appeal for readers who haven’t played the game. While you have a shield, your amount of hits on that shield is now visible in your health bar and your extra hits can even stack as you grab more shields (although you will only have the bonus effect tied to your most recently opened shield). Speaking of health bars, you can now also see how much health each boss has as you fight it. Very good addition!


There's a Whole World Out There

One of the ways that the world of Avalice really feels alive in this game compared to the first one is in the hub areas. These serve multiple purposes. One of them is that they serve as a means of story progression and word building.

These hub areas all have shops that you can use to buy items. One of the most interesting ways this concept is applied is through the numerous items that you can buy and equip on your character to make stages easier or harder (which will also affect your gem payout at the end of each stage). Playing on Normal difficulty, I managed to complete the game as all four characters without needing to equip any “positive” items, but they’re there if you want/need to use them.

Hub areas also give you a chance to access the side content. Stuff like a training center, mini-games, and a museum where you can see the game’s bosses that you’ve beaten. You can also talk to the NPCs in the hub area, most of which serve no purpose other than to have tiny amounts of personality to add to the hub area. This isn’t an RPG, so this doesn’t really add anything, but I admire the attempt to add life to the world.

On the topic of the world, it’s much bigger in this game than it was in the first one, which consisted of just three towns and the outside areas surrounding it. Much more of Avalice is explored throughout this adventure, though paradoxically, the levels got shorter as the world got bigger. Compared to the first game where nearly every level was some sort of endurance test that lasted for about 15 to 20 minutes on average, the level length has been scaled back quite a bit here. Most of the levels this time can reasonably be beaten in less than 10 minutes even if it’s your first time playing it and aren’t reasonably trying to go fast. This is of course, made up for by how much more content exists. The smaller level length does also mean that the “start-stoppy” nature of the first game is lessened to some degree.


A Much Grander Adventure

Freedom Planet 2 as a game feels much grander as a whole compared to the first one in nearly every way. It's longer and filled with more content, and the story is more impactful and more grounded to earth (even though the writing of the game is still imperfect in many ways), and everything feels more refined where the first game may have suffered from "first-game syndrome". There’s much more side content and replayability here than there was in the original. In many ways, Freedom Planet 2 feels almost more Sonic-influenced than the first game, although in other areas, is also an attempt to make Freedom Planet into its own thing.

That’s not to say that everything has seen a direct improvement. There’s no stage selection feature in the game unless you play on Classic mode, meaning that Adventure mode players are forced to move through the hub world to find the stages they want to replay. Unlike the original game, hidden (as well as purchased) collectables do not carry over across multiple save files and I’m not entirely sure why this was changed as this was something I appreciated about that game.

The item system also presents a weird conundrum where you need gems to buy the items, but then using the items to make the stage easier rewards you with less gems and a lower rank compared to if you didn’t use them at all. This makes sense as a “punishment” on the player for making the levels easier, but it also disincentivizes you from experimenting with said items because you’re not only getting a lesser reward of the item you need to buy them, but once you get good enough at the game and won’t need the items anymore, they serve basically no purpose anymore. At that point, only the “negative” items would mean anything since those increase your ranking at the end of each level (and are borderline required for S ranks, which unlock some achievements).


A Sequel Worth Waiting Eight Years?

Overall, Freedom Planet 2 is an improvement over the first game in most ways, though I believe the first game is still worth a playthrough too. I doubt that we’ll ever get a third title as it’s already quite a miracle that we even got a second one. If it does happen though, I’ll be sure to have a go at it. If you’re an enjoyer of the 2D Sonic or Mega Man games, you’ll almost certainly enjoy this game. The game is simply a natural progression of what both of those franchises put together would’ve looked like with new lore and new characters.

Pros

  • Improved graphical quality.
  • Story that is more believable and impactful, with character motivations that are more dimensional than just "evil guy is causing trouble, go stop him".
  • Larger worldbuilding over the first game.
  • Quality of life features/additions.
  • More replayability than the first game due to extra playable characters, side content, and incentive for better stage ranks.
  • The "start-stoppy" nature of the first game is not as egregious here as it was in the first game.
  • Guarding mechanic (yes, this mechanic is so good that it justifies its own pro).

Cons

  • Story writing could've been better by not relying on the same twist so many times.
  • Collectable progress is no longer carried over across multiple save files (though if you're used to old platformers like I am, you'll already be well acquainted with this).
  • Item system paradoxically works against itself, since it cuts your gem payoff... which you need to buy them in the first place.

The game can be bought on Steam or the Xbox store a price that's a bit bigger than the original. It’s normally that same price on the PlayStation and Switch stores too, although at the time of writing this review, it’s on sale for the first game's normal price on both of those stores until January 30th. Unlike the first game, you can’t buy this one on GoG at all. Weirdly there’s also no option to buy the soundtrack on Steam like that gane had.

Even at the “full” price, the extra cost compared to the first one is well justified because there’s so much more to this game. The extra $10 or so is well worth how much extra time you'll get out of the game.