Game review: Sonic Forces

Sonic has had a long and storied career in videogames with a few successes and a veritable cornucopia of failures. Recently the dial has pointed more and more towards the terrible side, but how does Sonic Forces fall on the good or bad side of the quality wheel of fortune?

Luckily for any Sonic fans in existence, Forces falls on the side of “maybe being good if you’re in the right mood and you’ve got nothing else going on”.

Starting up the game you’re put straight into what I presume is a continuation of the story that began in 2011’s Sonic Generations and focuses on the ever expanding wave of destruction created by Dr. Robotnik as he moves from conquering to destroying the world that all your furry friends inhabit. Honestly, from start to finish the story makes zero sense to the point that by the time I’d got to the end of the three-hour campaign, I had already forgotten the beginning and had to watch the intro cut scenes again so I could grasp what was going on, and even then struggled to understand what was actually happening. Of course, no one is really buying Sonic games for the story, so we can let that go and focus on the gameplay that’s hopefully better than “not great”.

So gameplay, let’s look at it:  throughout the game, you play the game in three distinct styles. Modern Sonic, sees you playing in the conventional 3D style where you push forward at great speed with brief forays into 2D side scrolling. Classic Sonic is all about the moving left to right like the early days of Sega older fans will remember, and finally Avatar mode, where your custom designed character who plays kind of like modern Sonic but with a hefty dose of attitude. In my opinion, only one out of three of these play styles works, and even then it doesn’t work 100% of the time.

Modern Sonic is by far the best and honestly showcases the peak of what I think a modern Sonic game will ever attain in regards to gameplay and graphics. It’s fast, fun and gives you a pretty good sense of speed and 85% percent of the time it’s super fun to play. The other 15% was me trying to play levels with such broken physics I almost lost my mind replaying parts over and over again.

Classic Sonic plays worse than I could have thought possible, taking the ideas of the original Sonic games and just grinding them into the floor until all that’s left are small particles of what was originally there, which happens to be a stupid slow jump that can barely clear anything. These are the worst parts of the game by far.

Your custom designed character in Avatar mode is pretty boring and doesn’t really work. It takes the controls of Modern Sonic mode and slows them down and makes them worse, but then adds grappling hooks and lightning whips and it really doesn’t make sense, but their inclusion does open up something that I never thought I needed but I really did and that is…. dressing up a bear as a multicoloured party boy with pink hi tops and real cool sunglasses. I liked earning prizes for getting the highest ranks in all the levels, and gaining new clothing was what kept me going all the way to the end. Also, there’s bonus bit where you play as Modern Sonic and your custom character and it kind of feels like a better version of Sonic Hero’s but maybe not that much better.

In hindsight, I feel like I spent too much time dressing up a cartoon bear and running really fast, but I had some fun with it even though the story was ridiculous and most of the game was a mess of half finished ideas and levels. You should play it just so you can feel the joy of unlocking a pink gas mask for an anthropomorphic animal of your choice.

Author: Hal, Plymouth store