Last year, Yacht Club Games's Shovel Knight blew our minds as the ideal example of an indie retro platform game. It perfectly captured the pristine controls, level design, and 8-bit graphics of classic Capcom platformers, and if we didn't know its official launch date it would have been easy to see it as a forgotten gem of the NES era. In a very crowded market of retro games by small developers, it stood out. GalaxyTrail's Freedom Planet ($14.99) didn't stand out when it debuted around the same time as Shovel Knight, but it absolutely deserved to. This PC-only retro platformer is to games like Sonic 3 and Rocket Knight Adventures what Shovel Knight is to Mega Man and DuckTales. It looks and feels like a game made by Treasure, and it can stand proudly alongside 16-bit Sega royalty. Freedom Planet is a must-buy PC game for anyone who fondly remembers the days of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It's currently PC-only, but a Nintendo Wii U version will be coming out in August.

Cute and Colorful

Freedom Planet is colorful sci-fi adventure with a distinct anime style. The visuals are a mish-mash of high technology and fantasy, with a strong streak of Chinese feudalism running through it. Warring city-states filled with panda people, cat people, and fox people are at each other's throats, and an insect-like alien warlord looks to take advantage of the chaos to steal a powerful energy source. Lilac (a dragon person), Carol (a cat person), and Milla (a bunny person) are recruited by a mysterious turtle-duck named Torque to save the world. It's pretty silly, and would be right at home in any 16-bit platformer, if any of them were fully voice-acted.

Incidentally, the voice acting is thorough and comprehensive, but it's also pretty amateurish. The actors have plenty of potential and loads of enthusiasm, but they're clearly inexperienced, and they're not helped by the dialogue. I'd love to see them return to the microphones with some more practice and better writing to work with. If the voice acting really bothers you, you can simply play Classic Mode, which presents the entire game without cut scenes.