Yet another game I try in my quest to play something on my phone without resorting to emulation.
There isn't much to say as it's just another runner game, and not a particularly fun one because it's easy to lose due to pickups obstructing the view. Character cards are particularly bad.
On that note, that's the main way to unlock characters. The game is actually quite generous with them but as far as I can tell a legendary character is exactly the same as a common one.
Finally, your score is an arbitrary number times a multiplier instead of the distance traveled making it harder to figure out that you are actually not improving and higher scores are achieved through grinding instead of skill. What a joke.

I've played this over the years and saw how it evolved gradually in order to prioritize ads and in app purchases and I just find myself annoyed at how this could be great. It's a promising concept but it ends up feeling too shallow. It's too easy generally so the game decides to give you some really shitty obstacle spawns that are impossible to avoid. But the grind is so fucking agonizing that you wonder why you're still playing.

Not to mention ads on mobile games have gotten so fucking shitty that half the time they don't even work so trying to revive with an ad is a total crapshoot.

Ultimately Sonic Runners was way better and should have been the one that stuck around if one of these games had to die.

An endless runner inspired by the success of Temple Run, Sonic is definitely a good fit for the genre and Dash does a good job of making it a Sonic endless runner and not just Temple Run starring Sonic.

Gameplay is simple: Sonic runs forward, you swipe left and right to move across the three “lanes”, jump to jump over obstacles and spin dash to roll under obstacles or defeat enemies. After a section of “track”, you will hit a spring (which can lead to different locations or boss encounters, and you can pick one of three), bank the rings you have collected and carry on. Each time you get to a spring, the rings you have collected will be times by how many springs you have reached in this run. If you hit an enemy, spikes or bomb, you will lose your rings (and get hit again and you’ll die) but hit a wall of some kind and you’ll instantly fail and your score will be counted up.

That’s how it is in theory, but due to microtransactions and adverts it doesn’t work like that. When you die, you can watch an advert or pay in one of the premium currencies (red rings) to come back to life. In order to create a sense of progression, rings can be spent upgrading characters, making abilities and power-ups last longer. You also gain XP by levelling up or completing missions (simple things like “kill X enemies, collect X rings”). The more XP you have, the higher your score multiplier. You can also buy one-off boosts to move you along faster.

While it’s nice to have progression, these all make the score utterly pointless. There’s no reason to aim for a high score when you can just grind or pay money to get a better score. It turns a simple but fun idea into a game where you play to get rings, so you can spend rings to be able to get more rings.

One nice thing that you do unlock are new areas, based on different zones. You can choose to start out in any zone you wish, but springs will take you to the other zones. There’s no difference to the gameplay, but they all do look gorgeous and it’s nice to change the environment up.

Sonic Dash has fun gameplay, but it’s a score-based game which has a meaningless score. It’s nice enough to play every now and then, but you have little incentive to go further than you did last time.

The only reason I installed this again was to have an excuse to play Seaside Hill while at a beachside vacation lol.

Anyway, it's not really my thing. Gameplay-wise, it's a pretty decent adaptation of the quick step parts of games like Unleashed and Generations to an endless runner, but the abundance of bullshit traps and farming schemes to unlock stuff just makes me zone out of it very quickly. Hopefully that Dream Team game scratches my itch for a 3D Sonic game on mobile that's genuinely completable and replayable.