It's another short Sonic game gear game.
I don't think its nearly as bad as everyone says it is. The game is an isometric puzzle game where Sonic must collect 3 keys in each stage and make it to a goal.

The soundtrack is actually quite good but it only features 4 levels tracks which play in every world so The Labyrinth of the Sky and The Labyrinth of the Sea have the same music which is a bit disappointing as I would've prefered one track for each world.

The problems I had was that the game was rather slow and you basically have to spin dash everywhere and the speed up shoes make the screen flicker which could cause a seizure in someone sensitive to that.

Still I think Sonic Labyrinth is disappointing and doesn't feel like a Sonic Game. Only play this if you really feel like it.

"We took away Sonic's speed aka the one thing that's supposed to make him unique."

What could possibly go wrong?

Looks at average rating

Oh...

Slow, clunky and tedious. Sonic Labyrinth spends most of it's time being boring with occasional breaks of being confusing or frustrating instead. Sonic is slow and miserable to control when you're not spindashing and when you are he's so wild and bouncy that the only close-to-sensible way to move around it to tap the spindash followed by the brakes over and over again to get where you're going, leaving you vulnerable to clipping an enemy and tossing your keys everywhere. The levels are same-y looking mazes, the key mechanic uninspired, and the whole game just generally not very fun. I went to the bonus stage and should have had the sixth emerald but it gave me the bad ending anyway, fuck you too Sonic Labyrinth.

Beaten on the GG2SMS patch (yes, with all that junk on screen)

My family's moved house two days ago on march 15th 2024, and amidst the memories I had in that other home, fights between my family and all that, I remember waking up early as a kid to go boot up Sonic Gems Collection on the PS2. I even remember trying to beat Sonic Triple Trouble in that collection, the game in which the character I have as a pfp originated from (this pic goes hard, feel free to screenshot) before going to an english exam in the morning and not being able to beat Tidal Tempest Act 2.

And yeah, among all those Game Gear titles there were two that didn't caught my attention so much as a kid, Tails' Skypatrol, which as an adult feels like an unrelated game with weird characters with the character slapped on it; and this one, which sadly feels like a special stage stretched to a whole game, bizarre just for the sake of being bizarre (oh, and with some epilepsy inducing special effects), but damn if I didn't enjoy most other things in that collection as a kid.

With the house no longer of our property, even with the posibilty of being destroyed, at least I hope this review and some videos I recorded in there keep the memories alive.

Okey, Labyrinth.

The big butt of jokes constantly perpetuated by primarily Nintendo focused video game reviewers of the early/mid 2010s and beyond.

"Why would you make a Sonic game where Sonic is slow? Why would you name it after the worst zone in Sonic 1? Why is this game so bad lol!"

To which I must ask the question, did you even play the fucking game?

This game is fast, REALLY FAST, it's as fast as your skill level allows it to be!

"But Sonic's running speed is sooooooo slow!" You say, but.

His spindash isn't, his spindash is extremely fast, and much like Sonic Adventure, you can uncurl out of a spindash to kill your speed and come to a halt, so.

It becomes a game of spindashing everywhere at great speeds, properly timing your uncurls, taking the most efficient routes possible through stages, and beating them in less than a quarter of the time given you.

The level design compliments Sonic's controls greatly, the level design is genuinely incredibly fun, with a ton of different routes and paths you can take through levels on repeat playthroughs for you to form an optimized route, and to execute it to perfection... much like every other Sonic game!

So basically, to those who say the game is slow, give it a genuine try, play it with an open mind, don't just fucking walk everywhere, use your damn spindash.

And to those who have played it and still call it slow, skill issue in my humble opinion.

The bosses are utterly atrocious though, that's one part of this game I won't defend.

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played on Retroarch

Yet another entry in my Sonic marathon, and one that before playing I heard numerous negative reviews consider this one among some of the worst Sonic games ever made. After playing for myself...I don't really understand the hate? I mean it's not great, but it's not bad either, just pretty mid.

To get the negatives out the way, 3-3 is a bit annoying with how to get the last key, the 2nd and 3rd boss can be a bit annoying with the spindash but nothing that would make me hate it, and the way to get the 6th emerald is pretty dumb. That's really about it for negatives.

Otherwise it's a mid puzzle game. Yeah, the spindash can be a bit to get used to, but I got used to it pretty quickly and outside of the two bosses I mentioned being a bit annoying I didn't have much problem with the physics or anything, especially since you can stop Sonic from bouncing all over and also set how hard you want him to accel. Outside of the one time in 3-3, I was able to find all the keys pretty easily with some searching around with 4-3 being the hardest cause the maze but even still I didn't need to look it up.

If anything the problem with the game is just that it doesn't really take advantage of the more puzzle spinoff focus of things. I could see potential in a Sonic style puzzle game where you can't necessarily rely on your speed to get you through things, it's just that the game doesn't really take advantage of that and is pretty easy to clear stages without nearly running the clock out. It's super short too, I beat it in pretty much an hour of playing in one sitting, probably less if I didn't ever tab out or anything,

So yeah, don't really get why this is so hated? As I said it does have it's problems, but nothing that made it unbearable to play through, plus it doesn't overstay it's welcome, if anything it finishes way before reaching a point of settling down. It was nowhere near the likes of something like Sonic Spinball or Knuckles' Chaotix in where I just wanted to drop the game as I played. Just a mid Sonic game that's neither great nor bad.

(Played via Mega Collection Plus on PS2.)

I wanted to check this out after hearing many stories about how awful it is, with some even going as far as to call it the "worst sonic game" or "one of the worst" and yet I came out being pleasantly surprised. This game received a lot of flack over the years about having janky and awkward controls that are difficult to figure out but I was able to nail the controls after the first couple of levels. The presentation is a little lacking, with some of the zones looking and feeling too similar to the last with the only thing that differentiates them sometimes is the colour of the checkboard you walk on. The soundtrack is good, cute and bouncy 8-bit tunes that won't leave any Sonic fan disappointed with. Controls are a little awkward to learn at first which was one of the biggest reasons this game flopped but they don't take long at all to master. There's no running or jumping like you're standard Sonic romp though, as this game forces you to walk and spin-dash only. You hold down the X button (played on PS2) to charge up the spin-dash and use the d-pad to select the direction you want to go. You hit the same button whilst rolling to come to a stop. Easy to learn, but takes a level or two to really figure out and nail. Boss fights in this game were also a little too easy, with the first 2 being able to be beaten by bouncing around from spin-dashing if you're lucky enough.

TL;DR

- Visual presentation is lacking, even for GameGear standards.
- An alright soundtrack worth checking out.
- Slightly awkward controls, but not as bad as people make them out to be.
- Boss fights are a little too easy.

A bad game to me is one that's poorly designed, and never really meets its intention. Never once did this game make me feel cheated, or felt like it was poorly designed. The game just felt overall boring. I couldn't even finish it because of how boring it was. I thought it was fair to drop this mid-review, as the game has nothing else to offer. It's honestly just the same gameplay with different key placement and boss gimmicks.

The levels are all vomit-colored, with a nice topping of seizure inducing hues. The music is awful; it all sounds the same! I wouldn't be surprised if it were used in a torture chamber somewhere.

By all means, this game isn't good at all. It's just a cheaply made puzzle game with "WHAT IF SONIC WAS SLOW" used as a marketing tool. The gameplay feels comparable to that of Sonic 3D Blast, except way worse. It's like Sonic 3D Blast in beta.

All and all, 1.5/5. This game doesn't suck, it just isn't fun to play.

To be positive first, this game has surprisingly nice visuals for what it is, and a solid enough soundtrack. It does a surprisingly good job pulling off isometric 3D, and I'd argue that it's a better companion to the Genesis' 'Sonic 3D Blast' than the tie in 'Sonic Blast'. Obviously, this game is really slow, and trying to correct for that with the spindash maneuver makes you unruly to control in most circumstances. There's really just no purpose behind this game. The level design is fine, mostly too easy, the bosses are fine, it runs fine (although the jittering while moving can be a little rough), overall it's just fine. A very mediocre, fine game, with a short runtime.

It’s kind of just a bunch of mazes in isometric 3D? The instruction manual has some story justification for why Sonic moves so slow (Eggy tricked him into wearing some shoes that slow him down and he needs to collect all the Chaos Emeralds to break free of them? Yeah, idk.) Guessing the slowness is actually just because of the isometric perspective, because Sonic 3D blast is also slow as heck for a Sonic game.

So, yeah. This isn’t great. The levels and gameplay are repetitive as fuck, and not particularly rewarding. Other than Sonic Eraser, which barely even counts as a Sonic game, this is pretty easily the worst game I’ve played so far in this project.

I guess the only real positive thing I can say is that it apparently served as an inspiration for the drastically superior aforementioned Sonic 3D Blast? Not that that’s one of the best Sonic games of all time or anything, but it’s at least pretty decent, which this is... not.