The people stating that this is better than Frontiers are on massive copium I'm sorry LOL.

Hardlight's newest mobile endeavor is indeed an ambitious title for a mobile game. A fully 3D platforming-focused Sonic game is something I'm kind of surprised hasn't already been attempted at this point...though considering most of Hardlight's other titles are more simple pick-up-and-play arcade-y high score-based affairs, it's easy to see why this hasn't been attempted before. I've seen a lot of backlash against this game being Apple Arcade exclusive, and while I do agree that offering the title to more people that can play it is a good thing to do, those asking for a legitimate console port...guys, c'mon...it's a mobile game.

Should start there before I talk about anything else I suppose. Sonic Dream Team is a mobile game at its core and it is fundamentally hindered by being an experience crafted for mobile. What do I mean by this you may ask? Imagine a typical 3D Boost game (the kind that's roughly similar to Frontiers, Colors, Gens, etc) except with a pathetically weak boost, no airboost, no stomp or slide, no wall jumping, and a free camera that fights against you most of the time. That's Sonic Dream Team. It's a boost game but worse. The only things it has going for it movement-wise are the ridiculous range on the homing attack and uh...slope jumping I guess. That's really about it. It's still kinda fun to play on a basic level but like, would I rather play this if I pitted it against any of the other boost games besides Unleashed and Forces? Absolutely not lmao. Seriously, the lack of a stomp really hurts this game more than it should. Precise platforming is a chore because you don't have an effective way to stop quickly enough. And I know they couldn't add these elements in because, again, it's a mobile game. Everything needs to be extremely simple otherwise your fingers would become a pretzel trying to chain all of these different actions together. I played on a controller during my playthrough, and while it is...marginally better than using the touch screen, it only further reminded me of how much lesser this game is than the other boost titles, but I digress. You can also play as multiple different characters but their unique attributes aren't anything to write home about. Amy and Sonic can lightspeed dash, Tails and Cream can fly with a clunky feeling stamina meter, and Knuckles and Rouge can glide (heavily nerfed and plummets like a rock) and climb walls. You can also swap characters on the fly once you've unlocked them but doing so requires you to come to a complete standstill halting the pace of the stage completely. What's worse is that this is even mandatory for specific acts to complete them.

Despite this, the main levels (I'm talking like, the first stage of the act with the red rings and the blue coins) can be pretty fun and well-designed, once you get the task of “collect 3 keys to progress” taken care of anyway. I particularly had a lot of fun with Ego City and the final couple of acts with Nightmare Maze. Scrambled Shores is...fine as a starting level, does what it needs to do. Dream Factory is...also fine. Aesthetically it looked too much like Sweet Mountain and the most interesting aspect it has to offer is rising and lowering platforms. Wooo. Much like Secret Rings (and because, again, it's a mobile game), Dream Team has multiple missions within each act offering various objectives, from time trials to checkpoint gate races. These wildly vary in terms of actual quality. The "get the dream orb" challenges are pretty good. They typically involve completing a satisfying platforming obstacle gauntlet challenge to get a single dream orb. Short, sweet, and to the point. The time trials and the checkpoint gate races are mainly just an excuse to play the same level again with a slightly different goal. The crystal hunt missions are just bad. I don't have anything positive to say about them. Imagine bumbling around a giant closed-off maze looking for a set number of trinkets. It's about as exhilarating as it sounds. The game at least looks pretty nice for a mobile game and the animated intro is fantastic. The animated cutscenes are surprisingly really REALLY impressive and invoke an expressive fluid style of animation we haven't seen since...geez, Rise of Lyric on the Wii U. The problem is that there are only like, 5 cutscenes in the game and the rest of the game's story presentation is in comic book slide show mode with voice over. Hearing Michelle Ruff as Cream again was kinda jarring but I guess it's mainly due to how long she's been from this character. Sadly I don't have much to say on the soundtrack aside from the main theme and the final boss theme. It's fine I guess, nothing terrible to listen to but it just feels like background noise a lot of the time.

Again, for a mobile game, it's pretty interesting and a good step for Hardlight to develop something truly special; but as is, I dunno if I'd ever want to go back to it instead of replaying the dozens of other Sonic games I already have a lot of fun with. Such is the mobile curse.

This game sucks. Sorry, but it does.
One of my earliest memories of being on the Internet outside of Roblox and this one other niche game-making website was finding out that Sonic Generations wasn't the grand finale to the franchise that ten-year-old RJ could only picture it as.

I think I speak for the entire fandom when I say that just about everyone who still cared about Sonic by this point was on the edge of their seat, deep in anticipation of what the next big, mainline Sonic game could possibly be. (We don't talk about Sonic """"4"""")

Then, the reveal trailer dropped. I think my brain went on autopilot when I was watching it. I was just so confused, and too young to process what I was witnessing - but I understood one thing: This was not Sonic Generations 2. This was not Sonic Colours 2. This wasn't even Sonic Unleashed 2. This was something else entirely.

And hey, who knows, y'know? "Something else entirely" wasn't the worst thing this game could've been, hot off the trail of an incredibly fun, well-made game with next to no originality factor whatsoever. Unfortunately, however, this game turned out to be a slimy example of "too different."

There is a genuine element of appeal here, let me get that out of the way now; I found legitimate enjoyment in a lot of aspects of this game. It's creative and conscious of its predecessors in more ways than people let on. For example, I didn't know it even had a bounce until I played it myself, and you'd think the Internet would've been screaming over that, considering how infatuated everyone is with Sonic Adventure 2. There's a fairly creative story premise at play here, and even the antagonists aren't inherently bad ideas. The art-style, while I and many others personally find it unpleasant and mundane, never evokes the feeling of "they weren't trying." There's some clever ideas, gimmicks, more effort to cross over with other franchises than ever before, and until the updated Sonic Frontiers, the best post-game content we've ever had, by far. That's not a high bar, but it's still an achievement nonetheless.

Sonic Lost World can be summed up in one sentence:
"This game had already aged poorly when it first came out."
- Me, circa 2023

To elaborate, this game clings so tightly onto design philosophies and concepts that are either dragged - kicking and screaming - out of their appropriate time periods, or simply deeply flawed to begin with. All-in-all, this is an insanely frustrating experience.

My first time playing Sonic Lost World was the 3DS version, which I found myself rather apathetic towards, it was an inoffensive, weird game that felt more like a discarded, high-ish-effort spin-off than a big mainline follow-up to Sonic Generations, but despite my poor memory of the experience, I must've enjoyed it, because once I beat it, I even started a hard mode playthrough (very cool idea on the developers' part, by the way). It took me about nine years before I actually had the opportunity to play the official version, with-which I downloaded a few mods to get closer to the proper Wii U experience, as well as the community code that added a retry button, because I did NOT have the patience to put up with this game's rubbish without one - still, the broken resolution and janky controls were more than enough to break me even without the PC port's numerous other ridiculous problems.

Playing this game is like being Sisyphus, pushing that boulder endlessly up the mountain. I don't mean in the sense that it feels never-ending, but rather, every time you get a good flow going, or feel anything other than animosity towards the experience, you'll receive a swift slap to the face from yet another inconsistency or piece of game design so questionable, it makes you wonder if this was an early testing ground for AI Game Development.

I know this review has been scathing up until this point, but I will give credit where credit is due, and say that this game did evoke many thoughts within me of how much potential it has, and how it's completely understandable to find enjoyment within the spaces between its flaws. It's by no means broken, or anything like that, it's just... a mess.

Though, to be honest, most of my personal enjoyment of the game came out of repeatedly thinking about how miserable I was with Sonic Adventure 2, and finding it difficult to believe that this could possibly get any worse, which it didn't, surprisingly.

I don't know what else to say about this game, really, it's just a weird specimen of a product that had the ingredients of greatness tossed into it, but they were all mouldy, and were thrown against the wall repeatedly, in hopes of at least some of them sticking. Did some of it stick? Well, maybe, but the ingredients aren't any less rotten because of it. God only knows what they were trying to cook with that mission/achievement system.

At the end of the day, this is an incredibly stupid, low-mediocre game that I can't really explain nor justify the fun I had within, but hey, at least it wasn't so torturous that it took me nearly a year to beat, right?

...How did my life wind up at this point?