Recent reviews by The Dastardly Dick Gumshoe

I actually really like pineapple on pizza, go try some.

Bought this game thinking it'd be a lot of fun and at first I was right I was really having a lot of fun. Then a few hours later i began to realize that this wasn't fun anymore.

So first things first, lets talk about the best part of the game- the platforming. I think this was amazing, it was super fun. Many of the levels felt like they were designed to be explored so that you could find new shortcuts to beat the level faster and faster. Definitely a game meant for speedrunning.

Since I'm done explaining the good lets move onto the mediocre. The music for the game is forgettable. I played the game yesterday and the only theme i can remember is the racing theme. While its not bad, its just not on a level of good. Another thing I strongly dislike is the collectibles. Each level has several goals to to achieve that create a dragonfly stone? gem? (idk what to call it). Thankfully frogun's devs made it so that progress towards those goals through several attempts (i.e. meaning you dont have to do all the goals in one run.) One of my issues with those goals is finding all the coins within a level. There have been multiple stages where I have scoured the entire level and I end up missing a few coins and I just don't know where they are. Either it means I missed an area or they're in one of the jars I thought I broke, but I can't tell which I've broken or not because they all respawn when you die. Another issue for me was aiming your frogun. There were multiple times in a stage where I was unable to properly aim the frogun which lead me to some deaths. While i did find this to be very annoying, I do feel like playing on the steam deck was also part of me not being able to aim to well (that or I'm just being too nice). Race levels were also a thing but most were super exploitable that it kinda doesn't really matter, in the end it just felt like another normal level. Thou cheers to them for getting the player to be able to explore the level after the race. Also theres a story in the game but it just kinda happens. Nothing really too interesting overall about it.

Finally, the bad part(s) of the game. Lets start with the bosses. I think these were the worst parts of the game. Many of the bosses had attacks that felt too unpredictable and would end up damaging you. Not all bosses had these but most of them did. The bosses felt as if they were design to be a boss where you have to keep dying over and over until you understand their attacks, which i think is dumb for a platformer. Another thing that actually pisses me off about bosses is that you can grab onto them with your frogun which drags you towards them. The only ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ purpose this serves is to damage you except for one boss. Why even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ add it for all of the bosses, just add it for the one. The other issue I have with this game is the glitches/bugs. Some of them are relatively harmless. Others were just plain ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying. One of those bugs is enemies being able to hit you if you are next to them one block below or above them. Nothing indicates where they're touching you but it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying. Lost too many stage and boss attempts to that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Overall for a developer's first attempt at a platformer its ok (not game they have made two other games before this), but its flaws caught up to me and I couldn't find it fun anymore. I myself cannot recommend this game to anyone. But hey, maybe you're different then me and can find a way to make these faults fun. 5/10

First thing I want to say before I get into this review, I thought this was a fine game. Yes I know its a negative review but that will be explained later.

Freedom Planet 2 was a game I was waiting to play for several years after I played and enjoyed the hell out of Freedom Planet. While I enjoyed this game, I feel like it completely failed to live up to its predecessor's legacy.

Pros:
-The platforming is really good. The momentum, speed and physics are very fun and it feels/plays similar to the original game which is great. I was very glad it was like this for this game.
-The updated sprites look really good, lots of characters got huge visual upgrades and the backgrounds within the game look great.
-The hub worlds which I thought would be pretty bad addition to this game, were surprisingly nice to have. They felt like needed breaks in-between the story and game play.
-Character interactions were great, there was a lot of comedy that got me laughing (especially mayor zao, phenomenal job on his part).

Cons:
This is going to be a long one, I really wish I had less complaints with these games
-Combat. I didn't like how this game wanted to become more of an action platformer. In the original, bosses took damage when you hit their weakpoint. In this game you have to hit the weakpoint multiple times just to remove one bar of health (I beat the game with lilac so it might be easier with other characters). I think adding hp bars to the bosses was dumb as it felt more annoying to deal with bosses compared to its predecessor. It also makes me feel as if I'm playing a megaman zero or megaman x game instead of something like sonic. I understand why they did it as they wanted to move the series away from being a sonic clone, but I believe they perfected it in the original.
-Backgrounds. While I do love the backgrounds, it really makes it hard to tell what I can and cannot jump on and this has lead me to die several times within the game.
-Sprites. The only sprite change that I didn't like was Lilac's. I was always a fan of her original design, other than that everyone else's sprites are very good.
-Story. While I don't think the story is too bad or too good, there definitely felt like various moments were shoehorned in to add more of a dramatic tone shift. That mixed with the limited sprites for the characters made some of those moments feel awkward or failed to get my attention.
-Guarding. Guarding is super awkward to the point where I don't know if I'm actually guarding properly or it just doesn't work because I still end up taking damage.
-Level design. While some of the levels in the design are really fun to play through, a lot of levels later on feel really poorly designed. The puzzle levels were obviously very annoying because they're puzzles. There were times where I would get hit by projectiles that were off screen or I was completely unable to dodge an enemies attack at all because I was simply unable to see them. The inclusion of guard is only because they couldn't properly design levels without you taking a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of damage. I don't understand why the level design ended up this way because they did a great job with levels in the first game.
-Music. There were a few songs in this game that were pretty good, but for the most part it is all super forgettable. The first game had some of the best tracks I've heard in a video game and when compared to this its just very sad to see.
-Spoiler Getting the true ending. Finding the first memory/log was really cool and I thought finding the other would be that way. Nope just do like 13 levels of the battlesphere and you're done. It just didn't make sense to me at all. Why not try hiding them in the hub world or maybe hide some in the stages. This was just handled poorly. Also, many of the battlesphere levels were very tedious as they felt like the same thing being done over and over again with minute changes or they had broken mechanics that made me unable to progress unless i restarted.
- Another spoiler The whole final level against syntax was also pretty poorly designed. I don't know why the game didn't show you the amount of lives you had or the timer which just confused me. The search light mechanic was also dumb because it guaranteed that if this was your first time in the level you would die. Hiding should have at least lowered the security alarm for syntax but it didn't and I have no idea why
-Glitches. I had gotten "softlocked" on 3 separate occasions during this game and they were all when I had gotten pretty far into a stage. It felt annoying that I had to keep restarting/reloading to a prior checkpoint because I was "too fast" for the game.

Overall, I really wanted this game to be just as great as the original. When I played that first demo, I definitely knew something was up with this game and I tempered my expectations. While I've only done a run of one character, that being lilac, I do plan on playing as the rest of them and seeing how their respective playthroughs work. This is a good game and I don't hate it, but in good faith I cannot recommend this to someone who's played and loved freedom planet.

This game makes me wanna ♥♥♥♥ myself in anger over the amount of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ there is.

Good game
9/10 would highly recommend

Ryan please stop buying me these games

Chihiro the best waifu and if you disagree you're a sinner

meg

Hey guess what don't buy this game if you want to have fun. Legit this is one of the worst experiences in gaming I've ever had. I lost eight dollars to ♥♥♥♥ like this, please go waste your money on something better or even a damn gasha game.

Uno

This game, This game was phenominal. It's been the best thin gI've played so far this year in 2018. I have next to no complaints about this game, either its irrelevant or about the games difficulty. If you're a fan of hard games and or beautiful and stunning games, this game is that one.

Time for me to climb my own mountain.