Like Sonic? You Should Try The ‘Freedom Planet’ Demo

Freedom Planet by GalaxyTrail isn’t officially a Sonic fan-game. Sure, there’s Hedgehog-like characters and they occasionally run fast, but there’s no Sonic here, no Robotnik and no rings. There are health bars, melee attacks, and interesting character abilities like a Sparkster-esque chargable air-dash. Frequent boss battles, too, to the tune of several per level. There’s also a bouncy soundtrack and a lot of pretty intricate platforming. Not convinced? Here’s some gameplay footage:

The playable demo currently contains one stage (split into several acts), although it’s pretty long and has multiple boss encounters. As a full sixth of the final game, it’s definitely enough to give you an idea of how the game is shaping up. It definitely went and put the game on my radar. As an additional challenge, there’s a time-attack goal time of 6 minutes and 15 seconds to complete the level – if you can beat it, it unlocks a second character to play as.

From what I’ve played so far, I’m really rather pleased with how this is shaping up. It’s classic 16-bit platforming with nice chunky sprites, bounding along at 60fps solid with bright and colourful environments and an upbeat soundtrack. It sounds like the game is aiming to be a commercial release (hence the important ‘not actually a Sonic game’ deal). If they can keep up this level of quality for the rest of the levels, I reckon it might just be worth a few bucks. You can grab the demo for Windows PCs on the game’s IndieDB page here.