I recall buying this for a rock bottom price on Amazon a few years ago, heard shitty things about it, but the kid in me really wanted to try the character customizer at least.

Couldn't recreate my character, because apparently Sega doesn't think Fox OCs exist. No Blue Tails for me, imagine making a game whose character customizer gets it's ass kicked by a game from 1994. No reptile characters, so no lizard boy OC. Couldn't even make a nice rabbit character because the ear options were all dogshit. That's fine, I never wanted to be Sonic's friend anyway, bad guy OCs for life.

Big word of advice for aspiring fan fiction writers, never trust a corporation to bring you what you want. Your own creativity with pencil and paper will always win.

Sonic Team are so bad at this that you start to actually feel bad for them. Of course games like Sonic Heroes and Sonic 06 had these unnecessarily tortured developments that resulted in completely unwarranted human suffering, especially Takashi Iizuka on Heroes. But then you get games like Unleashed or Forces which are just flatly bad, and from what I've looked for I couldn't find any horror stories about developing them. The directors just came in and said, "alright, let's make something truly hideous."

I am not a nintendo fan, I resent them and their fans, but I do at least admire that they have some kind of quality control for their brands. If a Mario game comes out it can be relied on to be good if not great, but Sonic has absolutely zero quality control. It's why the average movies have garnered such rapturous reception from Sonic fans despite being otherwise generic kids movies: they are FINE!!! Do you know how long it has been since Sonic Team has made a Sonic game that can even be described as fine?? People joke "hire this man!" about fan content, but when Sega hired that man a good Sonic game came about it!!! It's genuinely baffling.

You don't really need to say anything about Sonic Forces to review it, honestly. People can see that it says Sonic and was developed by the Sonic Team and put 2 and 2 together that the game isn't good, no review needed. "Oh it controls so bads!" Yeah man, it says Sonic Team on the front doesn't it? "Christ I'm clipping through the floor!!" Hey buddy, didn't you see the Sonic Team logo there? This team developed some of my all-time favorite games in the 90s...Sonic Adventure, Nights, Ristar, Burning Rangers, they were just bursting with creativity of what games could be and what an interactive experience meant.

I don't wish to put all the blame on the developers, as a lot of them are just doing their jobs. If management says make a dogshit stage for Knuckles you aren't just going to refuse. I empathize with people working on something that probably isn't going to turn out very good. The leadership at Sonic Team and Sega seems woeful and the directors of these games seem to come in with their worst ideas underlined and bulleted. It's mostly just sad, Sonic Adventure obviously has a lot of jank but is so creative and energetic, so passionately made, that I admire it even when it is being willfully bizarre. I'm willing to go on that journey with Sonic Adventure because I know I'm not getting it anywhere else. Sonic Forces feels like it was made by the bargain bin, for the bargain bin, it's just nothing.

The amount of negative criticism towards Forces really lowered my expectations, and because of that, I got surprised about how much I actually enjoyed the game.

Yeah, objectively speaking it's rough as a rock, but despite that, it was a fun experience, and you kinda learn how to exploit the roughness to your advantage or how to avoid it.

The story is just incomprehensible and uninteresting.

Also, the gamer cap is sick drip, want that irl ngl 🥶

Indo sem expectativas e ignorando todo o marketing que a SEGA fez encima desse jogo, papo reto.... não achei ele tão ruim.

Sonic Forces pode ser decepcionante pra um senhor caralho, mas me rendeu uma experiencia decente.

As fases tem bastante problemas mas são divertidas, todas tem um level design MUITOOOOOO SIMPLES, tipo, simples até demais, mas ainda é funcional e divertido. As fases do Sonic moderno são bem daoras, a do Avatar são do mesmo nivel, mesmo que a gameplay de plataforma em 2D dele seja bem merda (pelo menos não é usada com muita frequencia). E as fases do Sonic Clássico são as piores coisas do jogo, tanto em level design, como em gameplay. Quebraram a fisica completa do coitado.

O avatar é uma ótima ideia, essa sensação de nos inserir na história do jogo é sempre bem vinda, mesmo que aqui seja bem simples. Os cosmeticos do avatar são bem toscos na maioria das vezes, o que é bem triste, tenho certeza que se eles tivessem feito essa parte com mais detalhes e UM BOM DESIGN seria um dos pontos mais legais do jogo.

Gosto também como usam os whisps, literalmente nenhum ''carregamento'' pra eles, que acaba quebrando a velocidade do jogo, tudo flui muito bem. Não só os whisps mas também a mecanica das armas que pegamos com o avatar.

A trilha do jogo é SENSACIONAL, tipo, uma das minhas favoritas. Meu problema com ela são os instrumentos horriveis do Sonic Classico (tiveram a brilhante ideia de usar bagulho de mega drive) e os sintetizadores das musicas normais que são usadas a EXAUSTÃO, se tivesse mais instrumentos seriam músicas mais incríveis ainda.

Os temas das fases também são meio meh, principalmente por repetirem elas MUITO durante o jogo. Tem alguns legais? óbvio que sim, a Metropolis é muito bonita e a Cidade destruida é o cenario que representa esse jogo. Mas a reutilização da Green Hill, Chemical Plant deixou metade dos temas bem cansativos.

Enfim, Sonic Forces é medio em tudo, acho desproporcional o odio pelo JOGO EM SI, deveria ser total ao marketing corno da SEGA.

Ok wow, I didn’t expect to warm up to Forces nearly as much as I did on this replay. I’ve had the idea of giving Forces another honest shot for quite a while. This is both because some discussion of the game I’ve seen on twitter made me start to see the game from a perspective that I previously hadn’t really considered before, and the fact that it no longer has the awkward stigma of being the “big new Sonic title” now that Frontiers is on the horizon. I had a pretty deep hatred for this game because of how it represented the current state of the franchise, where the series had a pretty grim future if this is the best that they could do with the IP. However, the time where it was the current state of the franchise appears to be well behind us. Having that grandiose viewpoint of Forces was a bit silly in retrospect, and I feel like thanks to it not having to be in the spotlight as the most recent big flagship title, it’s much easier to look at the game on its own terms. But beyond that, I mentioned a perspective that I hadn’t considered with the game before, and I’m honestly a bit embarrassed how I didn’t think of it; speedrunning.

With this playthrough I decided to take the route of attempting to speedrun the game’s levels, learn them inside and out and master them as I would any other Sonic game that I’m fond of. Taking this approach was incredibly rewarding in the case of modern Sonic and the avatar, and it helped me appreciate what makes Forces unique to the other boost games. Biggest thing that stood out to me was the way Sonic’s boost functions. It’s a far cry from any of the previous boosts mechanically with how it can influence aerial movement, whether it’s timing it just right with a jump or using the new aerial boost to fly through the sky. The latter is definitely my favorite inclusion to Sonic’s kit, it opens up options for shortcuts quite considerably, allowing for some insanely cool skips throughout levels. I wouldn’t mind seeing this form of the boost more often in games moving forward. Speedrunning levels in this game in general gives a much heavier emphasis on sequence breaking than I’ve experienced in other entries. More often than not, if there’s a scripted cinematic element to a stage, live an automated rail loop, there’s a way you can skip past it. Noticed this especially with my attempts on Metropolitan Highway, my favorite stage in the game. There’s a good amount of automated parts like the rail spirals at the beginning that you can go right past with skillful maneuvering. It’s kind of ironic how the biggest problem I had with the game mechanically was its heavy automation, while what made me love the game so much more on this playthrough was being able to blow right past it. I don’t prefer this approach to the level design of Unleashed or especially Generations, definitely not, but it was really enjoyable. This also applies to a smaller extent to the Avatar stages, with how Wispons can change the way you approach level design and your loadouts. This also made me appreciate how the Wisps are much more seamlessly integrated into gameplay than their previous appearances. Though it is slightly dampened by the Drill Wispon just being the best one for tearing through levels, but even then there’s some fun to be had by ripping stages to shreds with a Giga Drill Break ripped right out from Gurren Lagann.

The biggest problem that Forces has as a game is that it does not make for a good casual playthrough. If you’re just planning on going through the whole story and nothing more, then I can’t say that Forces will be worth your time in that regard. However, if you are willing to approach it with the philosophy I have with most Sonic games, that repeated attempts at mastery and getting faster can transform the experience of them like no other, then you might be in for a surprisingly fun experience.

Tldr: It's a perfectly fine game that's really fun to sink your teeth into, but came out at a time when it really wasn't what the series needed

Side Note: Classic Sonic is still garbage, has no place in this game and I better not see him in 3D ever again.

Jesus, man.

Sonic Forces isn't even an embarrassingly bad game. This isn't something like Sonic '06 where it's like a train wreck you can't take your eyes off of. Forces is more like a car accident in which a family was killed upon impact. I went into this replay expecting to think maybe this game was a bit better than I remember it being, but it's like, just as bad. Nothing level design, characters that handle like shit, and such a depressing waste of potential for a sick concept like Sonic and friends at wartime. Forces is not devoid of good qualities because I think the soundtrack is still pretty alright, some stages are better than others, the Avatar is a cool concept I'm surprised hadn't been done sooner, and in general this game does feel pretty bombastic in its presentation compared to Colors, Generations and Lost World before it. It really does feel like Sonic Team wanted to up the ante in that regard, and it's something I see in the upcoming Frontiers as well to an even larger degree.

But fuck me man this game is depressing.

Uno de los peores juegos producidos de Sonic y sin exagerar. Es increible cómo antes me quejaba de lo brainlet que era el diseño de niveles de Generations, su mal sistema de puntaje y lo corto que era, pero pasa y resulta que este juego es lo mismo pero PEOR. Buffearon de una forma conmensurada el boost a tal punto que ni para saltar lo llegas a necesitar, ya que por alguna razón si haces ese comando en el aire (ya sea saltando o cayendo) dará un salto por automático, volviendo aún más soporiferos los niveles. Los niveles del Sonic clásico, por alguna razón, llegan a asistir DEMASIADO con los trampolines, pero a un punto donde incluso no te deja morir metiendo uno secreto en los pozos, ¡¿que carajo estaban pensando?! Para colmo, sus fisicas son aun peores que las de generations, ahora siendo super resbaladizo y su gravedad es muy aleatoria, a veces cayendo en velocidad normal y otras como si fuera un puto imán, y el hecho de que hayan agregado el drop dash sin hacer un diseño de niveles medianamente interesante con este como sí hicieron en Mania hace que el juego sea aún mas facil. El Avatar literalmente me enteré luego de acabar el juego que debia cambiar de arma para usar otros wisp, siempre usaba el wisp de fuego y con eso conseguí casi todos los Red Rings, por lo que el diseño ni siquiera te invita a usar otras herramientas.

Francamente no encuentro algo bueno de este juego, Sonic post Adventure 2 solía tener cinematicas medianamente bien dirigidas pero acá parece hecho por un amateur de universidad, y la historia a pesar de tener un contexto demasiado grave (nivel Sonic SatAM para que se hagan una idea) se siente todo sin ningún ápice de peligro o tensión. Y hablando de eso, ni me hagan mencionar a los jefes... tres se repiten con diferente skin, el jefe final es un plagio al del Sonic Colors de Wii pero super bajado de huevos, y los mas "originales" solo se basan en alejarte de ellos, ver que se atontan, acercarte y spamear el ataque y ya, super aburridos todos.

Al menos la música está bien, pero ya es un meme de que Sonic solo hace bien eso que francamente no lo haría tan meritorio. Ni vale la pena que se lo compren/descarguen, literalmente hubieron casos de gente que ni son profesionales en Sonic que pudieron terminar el juego antes de que se cumpla el tiempo de reembolso LMAO.

Por favor SEGA, tú sabes mas que bien que el boost system no está mal, Unleashed es mi Sonic 3D favorito y Colors es un juego sólido dentro de lo que cabe. Lo que está mal es que te enfocas en otras pendejadas que no valen la pena, traer a classic Sonic no está justificado bajo ningún motivo y solo a tus fans mas pendejos les molestó conseguirse todos los trajes del avatar y quedarse 60 horas personalizandolo. Ponganse las pilas ahora que Unleashed sí está siendo glorificado como se merece, vuelvan a hacer un diseño complejo como sus niveles diurnos que nadie les echará el mal ojo.

imagine playing a game where you can finally play as your own Sonic OC, and then it turns out to be the world's shittiest character customizer attached to one of the shittiest Sonic games ever made.

awful game, a barely two-hour slog through Sonic Unleashed's leftover scraps featuring the absolute worst of what the already-outdated Boost Formula system has to offer. don't worry, the Classic Sonic stuff sucks, too. just in case you were worried that this game might have something redeemable about it.

What's ultimately the saddest part about all I'm about to describe is that I was legitimately hyped for this game. No joke, when it was unveiled as Project Sonic 2017, I was ecstatic. I didn't care if Classic Sonic was coming back, I loved Generations and if this was just more of that with original level themes and ideas then so be it. Unfortunately when the following trailers started to spill out, more and more red flags were raised, and then afterwards the game was unceremoniously released. I didn't think it was bad on my first playthrough back in Christmas of 2017, just kinda whatever, bit disappointing and not as good as Colors or Generations, but still better than Sonic Lost World (which I also thought was just kinda ok back then). Years passed and now I have officially 100% Sonic Forces (don't ask why, I don't understand myself), and after experiencing everything this game has to offer, I can confidently say that this is a game that I thought was originally just kinda ok to mediocre to a game that is flat out bad.

There's a lot I want to get into but I think it would be simpler to discuss the main gameplay styles before talking about the rest of the game as a whole. First I'll start with regular Sonic. He brings the boost formula back as seen in Sonic Colors, Unleashed, and Generations though his gameplay leans more towards Sonic Colors but worse. His movement is stiff and the 3D movement is terrible, his acceleration is jacked (he goes from a slow walk to an extremely quick sprint in a millisecond and it's super jarring), his jumps are sluggish and the double jump barely does anything at all, the stomp often feels bad to use, the only fun (huge asterisk) movement option he has is his airboost which allows him to completely Superman leap over ridiculous distances and skip huge chunks of the level. I don't think his movement is too big of an issue since boosting makes the handling a non issue most of the time, but he's still not as fun as he was to control in Colors, and he's nowhere NEAR as fun as he was in Generations. He also doesn't have a drift which just kind of confuses me seeing as how there are plenty of ample opportunities to introduce sharp turns to make the levels more exciting (and sometimes they do that but the turns feel automated), but they often don't because he doesn't have a drift.

Classic Sonic is the one I constantly hear as being labeled "the worst one" but honestly, I found Classic Sonic to be the best part of Forces lol. That's not to say he's good, far from it. He's nowhere near as fun as the actual Classic Trilogy and Mania, and he's nowhere near as fun as Classic Sonic in Sonic Generations, but his controls worked with the levels fine enough, drop dash is still fun to use, the time trial missions with him can be pretty fun and there's pretty decent design to be had with his levels (Ghost Town and Chemical Plant in particular), but that's about all I think he has going for him.

Avatar is the new playstyle introduced in Sonic Forces. While I will praise the character customization till the cows come home (because it is pretty neat admittedly), it is by far the worst part of this game. His handling is just as bad as normal Sonic's except you don't have a boost to fall back on so you're stuck with the awful jumping and 3D movement. The homing attack is slow and sluggish, and the grapple points where you use their grappling hook to traverse through a stage happens automatically via homing attacking a point or just letting the game use it for you so this mechanic is just uninteresting. The main form of attack the Avatar has is a Wispon, a gun that takes on the properties of certain Wisps (and yes Wisps are indeed back for this game). The enemy encounters just boils down to "mash/hold the right trigger to win" because they're disgustingly overpowered, have obnoxious range and so any enemy encounter the game throws at you is pure fodder. You have a variety of options to choose from in terms of which Wispon you equip but when it comes to combat all are pretty much the exact same in terms of effectiveness, you would only pick a particular Wispon to use the specific Wisp that goes with it (such as Lighting for the Lighting Wispon, allowing the Avatar to use the light speed dash) to access certain pathways.

In terms of level design, this game offers almost nothing of worth. Sonic's stages are literal straight lines most of the time, with occasionally interesting 2D sections but most of the time are awkward in design with sluggish simplistic platforming. Classic's stages as I said earlier are probably the most enjoyable but still have their fair share of an abundance of hidden springs and boosters and obstacle placement that just feels really odd. Avatar's is probably the worst offender in this category, if it's not blatantly recycling Sonic's stages (like Park Avenue), it's chock full of a bunch of wisp capsules, rings and dash rings splattered all over the place and hardly any of it matters. There are also tag team stages that puts you in control of Sonic and your Avatar at the same time. It's not like Sonic Heroes where you can switch between these characters on the fly, you just control Sonic one moment, and when you use a wispon you control the Avatar the next. Nothing really noteworthy in any of those stages besides the memeworthy double boost sections. All of these stages fall short in terms of length, some being roughly a minute long and not much more than that. Way too many stages in Sonic Forces have issues with being overly automated and just sort of ending abruptly. I don't think besides Ghost Town that there's a genuinely decent satisfying level in the entire game, and when I find the design of a stage to be somewhat interesting I can't even enjoy it because it's like 30 seconds in length. The bosses are unremarkable too. The first Infinite fight is surprisingly pretty solid but everything else is not very good, and quite often they just recycle bosses they've already used previously but with a new coat of paint.

As for the 100% completion I managed to achieve, getting everything in this game is simply exhausting. You know how dumb it was in Sonic Generations where you basically had to replay Classic Sky Sanctuary a minimum of 3 times just to get all the red rings because 3 of them were on separate paths? Well imagine this being the case for EVERY SINGLE LEVEL in Sonic Forces. There are 3 collectables in each stage: red rings, silver moons and numbered rings (with only the red rings actually being anything of worth and actually unlocking anything). The thing is, the numbered rings don't appear until after you grab every single red ring in the stage, and then afterwards the silver moon medals don't appear until after you've grabbed all the numbered rings. This equates at the very MINIMUM for 3 playthroughs of every single stage, which is ridiculous. I didn't like playing through these stages once, let alone 3 times each. And on top of that, you have all the missions and achievements to collect, one of the achievements asking for you to get 100,000 rings. That isn't an achievement, that's a literal grind, and that's what all of this feels like - a grind. It got so tiring so fast that I wanted to put the game down and quit several times with how monotonous it got, and playing through these stages multiple times only further highlighted the issues I have with the design structure and pacing with each of them.

Finally, and I do think I need to address this, the amount of blatant asset reuse is ridiculous. There is so many elements ripped straight from Sonic Lost World that you would be forgiven in wondering if there were any original assets in here at all, from the sound effects, the character animations, the returning numbered rings, even the final Infinite fight and the Metal Sonic encounter has them inexplicably summon the "cutesy" motobug from Lost World because they couldn't be bothered with making something else. Apparently even the controls and coding were reused from Lost World as well. Wanna know why Sonic's acceleration is so janky? It's because they just took the run button from Lost World and smoothed it out to try and turn it into a proper acceleration, and it worked as well as you would expect (even the boost is just Super Sonic from Lost World). There are even rumors stating that the code for wall running and parkour is still leftover in the game but was never put in.

I think the most sad and disappointing thing in all of this is how I had no incentive to play more of this game. Even on my first playthrough, I wanted to jump back in the game and get more S ranks and unlock more stages, but I then realized that the stages themselves and the unlockable stages are shallow and bite sized, and S ranks are stupidly easy to obtain anyway. There was just...nothing left for me to do. I think that's probably one of the worst feelings in a game you wanted to like at first, and replaying these same stages over and over again for 100% completion certainly didn't help either. I sincerely hope Sonic Team is taking their time and really making the next game in the franchise a special one, but because of this, I'm allowed to be skeptical. I'll wait and see what happens. Fingers crossed.

look i'm not gonna pretend this game is the scourge of the earth. i'm also not gonna pretend i have anything new to say about it. it's the incredibly middling end result of sonic team being pressured to make something shippable in time for christmas. it has more focus on spectacle than anything, and that would overall be fine if it didn't feel like levels were bland and tedious, and the controls weren't outright unsuited for standstill platforming.

loses a point for classic sonic's iron fortress. i'm glad sonic team is finally getting their way for frontiers, tho.

Enjoyment - 3/10
Difficulty - 3/10

This is a slog of a game. There are hype moments, but those would make up 0.5% of the game. The rest was disappointing and boring.

Bare in mind for those going for achievements / trophies, Ring King is a GRIND!

Also, why was there no love for Chaos :'(
🏆

Sega is no stranger towards showing their appreciation to the Sonic fans out there. Just look at titles like Generations and Mania. Both games remade/remixed levels from all across the series' long history, serving as history lessons and nostalgia trips. Forces continues the trend of loving on the community, but does so in a much different way. It may use Generations' main hook of having two Sonics from different time periods, but the levels are all original. The real treat here is that one can create their own original character to fight alongside the blue blur and his pals. For the first time ever one can truly be part of the Sonic universe.

The character creation system is a wonderful new addition and hopefully a staple going forward. You can choose which animal you want to be, each of which has their own special abilities, and there are a wealth of cosmetic options made available to you through beating stages and completing optional side-objectives. You can even pick your own weapon powers. You get to play as your custom avatar at regular points throughout the game as a key player in the story. The other levels are broken up by sections where you play as either modern or classic Sonic.

Graphically, the game is stunning. It's vibrant, bright, and oh so colorful. Really a treat for the eyes. The voice acting is good, but some of the actors feel like an odd pairing with their characters as their voice work is much too serious for the appearance we see onscreen. The plot itself is fine and introduces us to a new villain, but much like the infamous Sonic '06 it's incredibly awkward and even a little uncomfortable when it tries to be serious. It's hard as heck to not be thrown off when a talking, bright, red echidna starts to talk about someone getting tortured. Especially when a chili dog joke follows just minutes after. It's just off-putting to see some genuinely dark stuff happening.

The 3D entries in the franchise have always had a rough go of things. However, their reputation has been turning around ever since the release of Colors. That trend continues here. This is some of Sonic's finest 3D gameplay yet and the best controls I've experienced in the series thus far. There are still those bullcrap moments that have been a plague since '06, such as careening offscreen to your death for seemingly no reason and a ridiculously cheap final boss battle, but those are much more rare than in previous releases. The level design is pretty great with branching paths and those hidden red rings. Whatever style of gameplay one could want from a Sonic game, it's in forces. 2D levels, 3D levels, platforming, and my oh my is there speed. It's got just about the perfect balance of all three. There's also a healthy amount of content and quite a bit of replay value.

Simply put, Forces is a real treat and one heck of a platformer. It shows Sonic Teams' desire to move away from the mistakes of their past. They also once again say thanks to the fanbase by allowing them to create those original characters they dreamed up in their heads and bring them to life onscreen. After all, what super-fan hasn't wanted to pal around with the lightning fast hedgehog? This continues the series' uphill climb and may even win over some new supporters. It could even pull back in former ones. Whatever the case, I can say that I was largely pleased with it.

8/10