Freedom Planet 2

Let’s clear the air on the awkward origin story first. Freedom Planet began life, years ago, as a Sonic the Hedgehog fan project before GalaxyTrail stripped out the Sega DNA and built something entirely its own. That first game was scrappy, ambitious, and rough at the edges. Freedom Planet 2 is what happens when a small studio spends the better part of a decade proving the original wasn’t a fluke.

This is a 2D action-platformer set in the anthropomorphic world of Avalice, and it wears its influences openly: the breakneck momentum of classic Genesis-era Sonic, the boss-battle theatrics of Treasure’s Gunstar Heroes, and a combat system with more depth than either of those touchstones ever attempted. You pick one of four heroines — dragon-girl Lilac, wildcat Carol, hound Milla, and franchise newcomer Neera — and blast through 24 stages of dense, layered level design.

Where most retro-flavored platformers coast on nostalgia and call it a day, GalaxyTrail built an actual game underneath the pixel art. There’s a fully voice-acted Adventure mode with a genuine story campaign, an elemental shield system that rewards experimentation, unlockable abilities, and a Boss Rush mode for players who want the fights without the connective tissue. It launched on Steam on September 13, 2022, at $24.99, before making the jump to Switch.

Market positioning? This is a mid-budget indie punching well above its weight class. It costs a fraction of a AAA release and delivers more mechanical craft than most games five times its price. The reputation it earned wasn’t handed to it by marketing dollars. It was earned stage by stage.

• Four genuinely distinct heroines: This isn’t palette-swap “character choice.” Lilac’s Dragon Boost rockets her across the screen like a guided missile. Carol wall-jumps and commandeers a motorcycle for entire sequences. Milla fights with shields and blast attacks. Neera freezes the battlefield with Frost Arts. Each rewrites how the same 24 stages feel.
• Momentum-driven movement with real combat: Most speed platformers make you choose between going fast and fighting well. This one refuses. The result is a combat-platforming hybrid that few games have managed to balance.
• A story mode that actually commits: Fully voice-acted cutscenes, an expanded Adventure campaign, elemental shield mechanics, and hidden paths give the whole package the depth of something far larger than its origins suggest.

The Gameplay Loop

The core of Freedom Planet 2 is a tension that most of its peers never resolve: speed versus control. Go fast in a platformer and you surrender precision. Demand precision and you kill the flow. GalaxyTrail’s answer is a movement system that makes velocity a tool rather than a liability. Lilac’s Dragon Boost, for instance, works as a directional dash you aim, a combat opener, a gap-closer, and a puzzle-solver depending on the moment. Mastery here means reading a stage’s geometry at speed and knowing exactly when to unleash it.

That’s the deceptively deep hook. The stages aren’t corridors you sprint through. They’re layered, multi-tiered playgrounds riddled with alternate routes, hidden collectibles, and vertical branches that reward players who experiment. Take the same level with Carol instead of Lilac, and the wall-jump opens paths that Lilac’s boost simply skips over. The replayability isn’t a bullet point — it’s structural. Four characters times 24 stages is not 24 stages of content. It’s closer to a hundred.

Then there’s the combat. This is where Freedom Planet 2 separates itself from the pack. Enemies aren’t obstacles to bounce off of; they’re threats with patterns. Bosses are the main event — long, multi-phase, bullet-hell-tinged spectacles that demand you internalize their tells. On paper, the design of weaving through a boss’s assault while chaining attacks is the kind of exhilarating loop few modern games bother to chase.

Where the Loop Strains

It’s not flawless. The story is long and dialogue-heavy — ambitiously so. For players who came for the platforming, the volume of voiced cutscenes reads like speed bumps on a racetrack. GalaxyTrail clearly loves its world, and that affection occasionally overrides pacing discipline. You can skip much of it, but the campaign wants you to sit with its story in a way that not every player signed up for.

The difficulty curve is the other friction point. Early stages ease you in. Late-game bosses do not care about your feelings. The spike toward the end is steep enough that the fights demand near-mechanical precision, and the generous early game doesn’t fully prepare you for the punishment ahead. Whether that’s a flaw or a feature depends on your appetite for challenge. Purists will love it. Newcomers may bounce.

The onboarding also leans heavy. With four characters, elemental shields, unlockable abilities, and RPG-lite customization, there’s a lot of systems to absorb. The game trusts you to learn by doing, which is admirable, but the opening stretch asks you to hold more in your head than a genre newcomer might expect.

The art is hand-drawn pixel work that refuses to look dated. This is the “retro-but-refined” school done right — sprite animation with the fluidity of a modern production and the character of a Genesis cartridge. Backgrounds are dense and expressive, character animations sell every dash and impact, and the whole thing is built with a clarity that keeps the action readable even at breakneck speed. That last part matters enormously in a game this fast.

The soundtrack deserves its own paragraph. It’s a genuine standout — an original score that channels the golden era of arcade and Genesis composition without feeling like a pastiche. Boss themes hit hard. This is a game people buy the OST for.

Performance expectations differ by platform, and that’s where the caveats appear.

On Steam, this is the definitive way to play. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the PC version is the natural home for a game built for a d-pad and face buttons — pair it with a controller and the momentum-driven design gets the input precision it wants.

The Nintendo Switch port is the compromise. It’s playable and portable, and there’s real appeal in having Avalice in your hands on a commute. But a fast, timing-sensitive game like this is exactly the kind where any frame-rate dips and longer load times on lesser hardware aren’t cosmetic — they can cost you a dodge in a boss fight. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s a step down from PC, and demanding players will feel it.

Freedom Planet 2 is the rare sequel that justifies its existence. It took a fan-project’s premise and matured it into one of the most mechanically satisfying platformers of recent years — a game that understands the difference between going fast and feeling fast, and nails both. The four-character roster isn’t a gimmick; it’s a multiplier on an already-generous package. The art and music are excellent. The design is confident.

Its flaws are real but forgivable: a story that overstays, a difficulty wall that will test your patience, and a Switch version that asks you to trade some performance for portability. None of that undoes the fundamental achievement. GalaxyTrail set out to prove the first game wasn’t luck, and they cleared the bar with room to spare. We recommend it without hesitation to anyone with a controller and any affection for the genre — with the caveat that the story’s length and the late-game difficulty demand some commitment.