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.
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.
2 Comments
Thanks lol, I tend to go in depth on almost all of my reviews, glad someone took notice 😅
Biglightning
2 years ago