

Stephen DiDuro/GalaxyTrail‘s demo of Freedom Planet for Windows is a breath of fresh air for indie platformers, filled with large, colorful worlds to blaze through without brutal punishment or rote memorization, all to the tune of utterly epic non-chiptune music.

Diehard Sonic fans may be offended by how many pages Freedom Planet takes from its inspiration, but I didn’t mind. It felt 70-80% as fast as old Sonic, but the spectacles like loops and wall runs weren’t as magical to do or watch.

Touch damage is gone, making the game somewhat easier than Sonic. Also gone is the familiar ground dash, but in its place is a special meter that allows for eight directional air-dashing like Sparkster of Rocket Knight Adventures. The hidden red coins of later-gen Sonic take the form of 10 cards placed around the huge areas.

Comparisons aside, Freedom Planet plays and sounds like butter. Sample the audio after the jump.





While the music collaboration from the developer, Blue Warrior from VGMusic and Woofle from FurAffinity was amazing, I could not discern the disappearing shield sound effect in Freedom Planet from Sonic, so if this game goes commercial, some SFX will need tweaking. There may be other borrowed SFX audiophiles will catch.

Visually, I feel the characters are rather colorful and well-animated (not as smooth as current games, but it fits the 16-bit vibe). The brown foreground was a bit bland, though; I felt it drowned out the vibrant, multi-layered background. Maybe less brown set lower so we can see the beautiful beyond?

Still, I think every platformer fan should grab the Freedom Planet demo from IndieDB. I hope DiDuro does a Kickstarter so we can have the full game before YouTube-commented release estimate of 2014.