As someone who's played a bit of the OG SRB2 Kart but wasn't an avid player, I had no idea how I would feel about Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers. Frankly, I didn't even know I was gonna be able to play it but as it turns out there's a Mac port. If anything, that gets props from me. I'm seeing a lot of very polarized reviews on here, either 1s or 5s, but I don't think I've ever played more of a 2.5 Star game in my life.

Ring Racers can be best described as maximalist in every way, it does so much, too much even. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The presentation just exudes that Sega Saturn vibe, it's polished to a glowing sheen and looks incredible the whole way through. The song selection is a mix of original tracks and existing remixes and it's immaculate, special mention goes to that Tokyo Active NEETs cameo in the first cup. There's a lot of mechanics and a decent amount of them are fun, even if only in theory. Putting Advance 2's mid-air tricks into a racing game? A ring-based resource management system? There's some neat stuff here. There's also a lot of content, over 200 tracks reportedly, and the ones I've played so far are pretty solid and densely-packed with secret areas and branching paths. With how many unlockables there are, I could definitely see myself coming to Ring Racers every once in a while just to chip away at them.

That being said, for every good idea, moment of brilliance, or genuinely great element, Ring Racers also comes with a lot of bullshit. I know SRB2Kart already kinda felt like bumper cars at times, but man does the pacing of races in this game feel really start-and-stop a lot of the time. It either feels like you're moving too slowly or too fast with little in-between. There are so many mechanics that none of them have any room to breath. Half the stuff you learn in the tutorial are barely used, at least in the early game, and several functions being tied to the same button can make it very easy to misinput. And some of the mechanics are just baffling, why would you add a spin dash, which requires the player to stop in place, to a racing game? Speaking of the tutorial, I'm not the first to say it's way too long and overindulgent, and even after it, there's still a ridiculous amount of insignificant nuances the game never teaches you. Some of the tutorial missions could actually have been fun in a separate challenge mode, but not as a wall barring you from the rest of the game. So much of Ring Racers is locked behind doing other tasks, which feels like such a step-back compared to how SRB2 Kart was so easy to immediately jump into even when you just start playing.

I don't think Ring Racers is bad, it's an obvious labor of love, an impressive technical achievement, and has a decent amount going for it. But I wouldn't say it's good either, it's way too overstuffed and has too much holding it back. For any other fan developers working on a passion project, or really just developers in general, PLEASE try to be mindful of feature creep. Sometimes, it really is better to go simple than let your project balloon into an ginormous mess of good ideas.

The lowly console owner that I am, I spent two years waiting to be able to play the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time. After all that, there's no way it could actually live up to the lofty expectations I had set for it, right?

Right?

Yeah, Freedom Planet 2 is freaking incredible, it's wild how much it blows its predecessor out of the water in terms of polish and scope. If FP1 was in my Top 20 favorite games, then FP2 is a Top 10, maybe even a Top 5. It pretty much checks every single box in terms of what I want from a game. Complex and fluid movement, satisfying combat with a high skill ceiling, level design that's consistently fun and inventive, bombastic boss fights, loads of side content, adorable character designs, an engaging character-driven story (seriously it's way better this time), utterly gorgeous and cartoonishly colorful visuals, and an incredible soundtrack. It elevates Freedom Planet from a lovely homage to the Genesis era to an all-timer platformer series that can stand on its own alongside some of my favorites in the genre.