Now I wouldn’t say I am the biggest Sonic fan in the world and to be honest I’ve not played all that many titles especially in the last 10 years or so. This one did however catch my attention with the bigger bosses and open areas. I thought it’d be worth giving a go as something different if nothing else.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect and colour me surprised that it ended up being far better than I anticipated. It doesn’t deviate that much from your standard Sonic game most the time. A lot of the same features return, some for the better some for the worst it’s a bit of a mixed bag. This all melds together with the added emphasis on them happening in a bigger play area for you to run around at high.
You still run around everywhere at a faster pace, with boosts and bounce pads dotted around everywhere with automatic rail grinding allowing for the most effective gold ring collecting. Which still make that ever so delightful noise when collecting or getting them knocked out of your fuzzy blue fur. I do feel the if you are able to keep up with boost and hitting all the pads effectively you’d have a better time with traversal, I enjoyed it but I often whiffed it or had to slow down which ruins the flow a tad.
The game has 5 open areas to explore, there’s not too much to find. You have your portals which you unlock with gears from beating the bigger enemies on the island. Which in turn reward you with keys to unlock chaos emeralds. There’s enemies specific to each island dotted around with a few bigger enemies to fight. With a mechanic robbed from Breath of the Wild and Tears of The kingdom, who I’m sure pinched from another game. But they all reset after awhile re-spawning to be a hindrance again. There’s fishing spots which allows you to trade coins for useful items. And there’s music to collect which you can play at your leisure then. The OST for this game as some real highlights especially the big Titan battle music it’s legit great, with Kellin Quinn from Sleeping with Sirens on vocals for them.
These portals are more classic Sonic in that you have to reach the goal in a set time, and you have to avoid enemies, spikes falling platforms, do many loop the loops collecting rings along the way. If you hit the four extra missions within these you get an extra key for each of them. Luckily you don’t need to get each bonus key to move on with the story as some of the timings are ridiculously tight. It’d cause a raging aneurysm in the average person if you did.
There’s more RPG elements to this game with a small skill tree that isn’t the best but adds extra combat moves mostly. You can level up your defence and damage from item drops which you take to the Hermit Koco. Then the Elder Koco you collect missing smaller Koco’s which give you higher ring capacity and extra speed. For the most part it doesn’t feel like levelling these up make all that difference. Even by the end of the game you still getting your shit kicked back in by basic enemies from one hit and you lose about 120 rings ago which seems excessive to me.
There isn’t much a fast travel system but each portal unlocks a rail you can follow to other portals for easier traversal, then if you fish out the two scrolls for the Koco’s you can travel to them. Then once you’ve unlocked the entire island by doing the little challenges you can fast travel to each portal but thats mostly redundant if you don’t intend to 100% the game.
The big Titan boss fights where you go super sonic with the power of all the chaos emeralds are the highlight of the game. It really imposes a sense of a bigger world. The are great fun and make use of parrying and a quick time events along with the aforementioned great songs playing in the background.
I would say the Islands can feel a bit empty, a few more enemies and varieties of them to pad out the areas between checkpoints wouldn’t go amiss. The combat isn’t the most intuitive and is basic at best even with the extra skills you get. There aren’t any side missions as such, each island is dedicated to telling the story of one of Sonic’s companions so you talk to Tails, Amy, Knuckles and Sage. This happens by collecting an item specific to them to trigger a cutscene. Eggman isn’t in it all that much considering he’s the big bad usually. There’s a few mini-games which break up the standard gameplay. Again a few more of these would help pad the game out a tad. The game itself looks and ahndles compentently enough for a three year old game. It’s defiinetly not the shapest and a bit more fineses on the finer details would help it pop a bit more.
Overall I’d rate this game a solid 7/10, Positively Tasty.
It’s a nice change of pace from the usual Sonic game’s I’ve played in the past and for the normal sort of games I play. It took me around 25 hours to get the Platinum so it doesn’t over stay it’s welcome and nothings too tasking. The game needs a bit more content which could easily come from what’s already there. Combat needs tweaking and one or two more big boss fights just because they were really fun and I want some more banging tunes. I believe there is a second title in the works and I will be getting it as if everything here is built on then I have no doubt will it’ll be a stellar game. Ultimately it’s a small twist on a tried and tested formula of whats come before but will hopefully continue to propel the series forward.
Released 8th November 2022 on Sony Playstation 5.
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