Definitely the best Boom game, which isn’t saying a whole lot but at the same time I would definitively put this game in the decent to pretty good camp.

I do get the impression that Sanzaru games acknowledged the criticisms against Shattered Crystal, since in a lot of ways this does carry a lot of what worked decently well about that game and improved it. Level design is more dynamic and interesting compared to the more blocky, Metroidvania-esque level design of the previous game, while still keeping a lot of that exploration aspect. And on that note, exploration and completion isn’t forced in this game like it was in Shattered Crystal, meaning that replayability actually feels more meaningful outside of just beating the game.

Controls have some improvements too, feeling more fluid and the ‘Fire and Ice’ mechanic adds a bit to the moveset. Though I still feel the other characters feel too situational (I can only recall a couple instances where I even used Knuckles), and while it’s nice to have Amy playable there’s still not a lot of development on that element.

Still, I’d say this game is worth trying. Not the best handheld Sonic game (I’d still give that to Advance 1, 3, Rush Adventure and Triple Trouble), but definitely the best out of the Boom games and even out of the 3DS Sonic games.

This is the best Sonic Boom game by a country mile but that's still not saying much. Fire & Ice is a perfectly serviceable experience with nothing much else to it at all.

I can give props to Sanzaru games for obviously listening to feedback, taking what didn't work from the previous title and improving upon it. They even delayed the game for added polish and when on earth does THAT ever happen for Sonic? The end result is a MILES better game than the absolute slog of Shattered Crystal. Gone is the overly long jumbled mess of stage design, metroidvania philosophies, needing to get nearly EVERY collectable to progress, here it's short, sweet high speed point A to point B stages with no fluff in between. There's some exploration here and there but it's rarely a 3 second distraction before you loop back around to the main path and proceed with the rest of the level. Things keep moving at a consistent pace which works wonders for the game. The fire and ice mechanics, despite being in the title, admittedly aren't very interesting or intricate. You see water that you need to run on, you switch to ice to make them solid platforms. You see ice than you need to go through? You switch to fire to make it melt. That's really all there is to it, and later in the game they do mix it up quite a bit by having more interesting puzzles with the fire and ice abilities but it still doesn't really feel like a fleshed out mechanic. Still it's a decent reaction based way to keep your brain engaged and it doesn't hinder the experience in any way so I'll let it slide.

It's not just the gameplay, presentation got a huge boost too with fully animated and voiced in game cutscenes (and the dialogue can admittedly be pretty funny at times), more creative stage themes, and actual BOSSES as opposed to...none of that, which is what Shattered Crystal was. There's still an assortment of collectables you can find hidden throughout the stages and even secret challenge rooms that put you through gauntlet challenges as well as racing minigames. With all that said, the collectables don't really mean much so there's not much of an incentive to get them unless you REALLY want to. I'm glad they aren't mandatory, but I wish they were more enticing to grab in general.

Still though at the end of the day this game just exists. The design is well made, the game is entertaining, but it doesn't have the insane fun movement system of Sonic Rush gameplay and it doesn't have the physics based exploration filled design that the classic games had so it just exists in this weird vacuum. Not the worst, not the best, just alright. I think for a Sonic Boom game that should in and of itself be an absolute miracle.

Now this is easily an improvement over the previous Sonic Boom 3DS game, though that's only because the first game was that awful in my opinion. While this game could still definitely be improved like I feel like multiple characters aren't really used all that well and there is way too much automation in this game, especially in the races. It can still be a fun time here and there.

I also really gotta give it to the dev team for actually fixing some issues the last game had and making it a better experience, was actually really surprised just how much of the criticism I had with Shattered Crystal was not present in this game. If they were given a third game, I could have totally seen it being a good game but as it stands, this one is fine and if you see it for like $10-15, it couldn't hurt to try.

The sequel to Shattered Crystal, this gives Sonic and team fire and ice powers. It’s mainly used for freezing and melting blocks of water, but I think the simplicity helps the game. However, the most significant change in this game is how the collectibles are handled.

In Shattered Crystal, you had to go slow and explore every inch of the map in order to progress. In Fire & Ice, the collectables are still there with sections of the map to find and discover, but the collectables are all entirely optional. Although I think this game goes slightly too far as the rewards for doing so are quite meaningless. On the flip side, it does mean you can blast through all the levels as Sonic, and doing that is quite a lot of fun.

Other than the first few levels, which introduce the different abilities of each character, the character abilities (other than a few Sonic-only racing levels) aren’t actually used in the “main path”, they’re only used for finding collectables. So if you aren’t bothered by them, then your choice of character makes no difference, which can be a good or bad thing.

That said, with the jump, homing attack, grapple and switching between fire and ice powers, there’s a lot of abilities to play around with. The game is at its best when you get to string along these abilities, it feels almost like a rhythm game where you have to quickly press the correct buttons. The game will go from these sections that require precise timing to sections of the game where you don’t have to do anything at all for a bit.

Overall, Sonic Boom Fire & Ice isn’t a bad game, but it’s also not terribly exciting. It’s fine for a quick blast through, ignoring all the collectables.

Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice is a huge improvement over its predecessor.

This game's main gameplay is at its core the same as the previous game, but there have been some changes made. First of all, Amy is now playable, using her hammer to break things and move platforms. The characters have modified movesets, the most significant change that comes from this is that Sonic is now a lot faster due to a heavily buffed spindash and the air dash carrying momentum. The spindash also has slope momentum which is huge for the cool shortcuts and tricks Sonic can do.

The main addition to the game are the fire & ice powers. Characters when they or one of their attacks collide with certain objects, will be able to freeze them into solid ice, or melt ice into water, allowing you to pass through them. It's a fun mechanic that spices up the game.

The level design is really good. The only complaint I have is that the levels could all stand to be a little bit longer. Other than that, the levels are faster, feel less tedious, and include less slow bits.

The game now has boss fights, they're all pretty cool, there's nothing special about them. Graphics wise, the game now has a lot of CGI cutscenes that look almost on-par with the show (which is relatively quite bad for Sonic standards, but not an issue at all), plus we now have fully animated and voiced cutscenes, which is a first for a 2D Sonic game. The music is a huge step up, while it's not quite as good as most Sonic OSTs, I still enjoy it.

Overall, I recommend this game to any fan of platformers or Sonic games.

I feel like this gameplay style has a lot of potential. Like the focus on long levels, reactionary platforming and multiple playable characters combined with a fleshed out Fire and Ice mechanic would be peak 2D Sonic. And it felt like that at times. But everything else from the story, music and locations feels... Soulless. The entire plot feels like the most unambitious, low stakes plot ever. It actually felt deflating to play at times. It's one of those times where gameplay can't entirely carry a game

The reveal in 2015 that Sanzaru Games had been developing another handheld Sonic game was one of the biggest shocks this franchise had ever produced.

On a retrospective first glance, this may seem odd to say. It wasn't like Sega had ever been opposed to keeping their contracted developers around for more games, for one. With the Sonic Rivals duology, for instance, they’d made pretty clear that mediocre reviews weren't going to lead to any bad blood between them and a promising developer. Plenty of Sonic games otherwise seen as mediocre had received sequels, and plenty more Sonic games out there had far more bizarre concepts bound to cause more discussion upon their reveals, so what was it about Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice’s reveal specifically that set the fanbase ablaze for a few days?

Well it's right there in the title, isn't it? It's Sonic Boom.

Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric left the brand scarred in a way it hadn't been since after Sonic 06, now released in a time where online video game content was many times hotter than it was before. Essays, lets plays, reviews and breakdowns came out every week detailing how Sonic Boom marked the end times of the franchise, the new low, the sign that it was finally time for Sonic to give up. Most people, especially those not invested in the franchise, weren't really aware of the decent 3DS game, or the pretty good TV show, because the main thing the brand was pushing was an absolute failure of a product with "Sonic Boom" as the big headline. So while games like Sonic Rush, Advance, and even the handheld version of Colors were discussed and perceived on their own terms, the splash zone of Rise of Lyrics explosive failure was simply too large, and Shattered Crystal kind of got caught in the blast because of it.

So when it all settled, one year after it’s reveal, Fire & Ice's release itself had far less fanfare to it than just the fact it existed at all. Despite being Sonic's lone 2016 game, and despite an "infamously high" 7.5 score from IGN, the game wound up forgotten and lumped in with Sonic Boom as a whole as a large failure. Which sucks for many reasons, but to me stings most because Sanzaru Games as a developer had an edge with Shattered Crystal that Sonic Team and SEGA as a whole rarely ever had: Improvements in Iteration.

Sonic Team's Sonic games, even at their worst, are very rarely lacking in ambition or new ideas. That goes the other way too: Many of Sonic Team's biggest smash-hit games, from Sonic Adventure to NiGHTS into Dreams, stem from radical departures and daring new risks, rather than a gradual sense of improvement from game to game. Its a design quirk kind of synonymous with Sega as a whole: One second you're drawn to Yu Suzuki's work on tightly-packed fighting games, then his next game is a grand RPG-esque adventure. So in the great westernizing process of Sonic Boom's many branches, Sanzaru Games had no reason at all to try and adhere to that kind of mantra with the second chance they had been given. Within all of Shattered Crystal scatterbrained design and seemingly rushed production lay a surprisingly stable groundwork, Sonic controlled absolutely beautifully and levels would often allow the player to truly express themselves in how they chose to navigate them as effectively as possible. Rather than reinvent or tweak the controls to fit a radical new direction, Fire & Ice keeps everything that made the controls in Shattered Crystal work and plainly improves upon them. The same great mix of double jumps and airdashes is still here, but Sonic’s airdashes now no longer stop him briefly to charge, and the speed gained in the airdash is maintained moving forward, much like it works in games like Colors or Rush. Levels in the prior game had a great sense of scale yet often felt like they could go on for too long, so now instead of one big level per world each area has three to four smaller ones, now also no longer requiring collectibles to progress. It’s a rare instance in the Sonic series of a game being made seemingly entirely with player feedback in mind for the entire creative process, where the creative vision was simply to iterate and improve rather than make the game stand on its own.

Which of those two is better is debatable, but it’s really interesting that the areas in which the game suffers the most are the ones where it remains too stubborn to change. The implementation of multiple characters in Shattered Crystal was a flaccid inclusion alleviated somewhat by how most of their “required” uses could be bypassed with Sonic, but now in Fire & Ice it’s as if the developers really wanted to double down on forcing you to use Sonic’s entire crew. Amy is added to the mix with her sole purpose being to move walls only she can move, and Tails is given a new puzzle-solving laser to solve pace-breaking puzzles occasionally sitting in the way. Pair that with a quick-select function that asks you to fiddle with the touchscreen with your imaginary third hand, and that the aforementioned smaller levels means more of these obstacles are bound to appear in your main path, and it becomes a weird clash of genuinely better game feel and pointlessly re-included gimmick mechanics. The game’s main claim to fame, the Fire & Ice system itself, also kind of feels like this: You use either shoulder button to switch between being lit on fire or emitting a cold aura, which freezes blocks of water and melts blocks of ice. It’s nothing more than a reflex game, like Ikaruga’s polarity system for dummies, and feels only slightly less tacked on than the additional playable characters. What’s worse, having to use L and R means that bottom screen navigation now requires using the touch screen, whereas before pages on the bottom screen could be switched between with them.

I want to reiterate: Every good element from the previous game feels as if Sanzaru Games made a genuine effort to improve upon them. The shorter and snappier levels are all filled with great level design, the enerbeams swinging physics work amazingly with Sonic’s airdash, the environments and music are all leagues above what they were before, and the pacing of the game as a whole feels far less like a game struggling to even be released and more like a full-on polished product. It’s all of the things surrounding that, the mediocre mechanics they were too stubborn to let go of and the pointless gimmicks that were included despite sometimes harming the preexisting foundation, that end up souring the pot more than it needed to. In some ways, it reinforces why the developer’s direction was never optimal for this franchise: They lack the confidence in their new ideas to truly build the game around them yet feel obligated to include them to make the game still stand out in some way. You compare that to Sonic Team, who without hesitation made an entire game centered around swordplay because they thought it would be a cool evolution of the Storybook gameplay, who gave Silver the Hedgehog equal screenspace with the series’ protagonist because they wanted to use the Havok physics engine for something new, and so on, and it’s in a way understandable why a game as otherwise safe and standard as Fire & Ice has fallen by the wayside.

Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice isn’t bad, and despite its missteps still feels like a genuine, heartfelt attempt to improve upon Shattered Crystal’s foundations, and I’d say it still is a pretty good game. But it’s a game that makes complete sense: Every decision made in its development has clear, predictable reasons, everything about its buildup and release went pretty much exactly as one would expect, and its new mechanics wound up just as unremarkable as you would expect by how safe the game otherwise plays it. That cutting-edge feel, that strive to be different, that conviction to whichever new idea is being pursued that Sonic and SEGA fans in general have come to adore is missing here, and that in my eyes is the main reason this game has wound up so forgotten. In its aim to satisfy, in its attempts to fix the flaws of its predecessor, flaws which arguably has made that entry stand out more in retrospect, Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice just became yet another entry in the series. Despite being a fun time with lots to like about it, even well after its release, the most shocking part about the game still just wound up being the fact that it was able to exist at all.

[Playtime: 12 hours]
[Key Word: Crowdpleaser]