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.
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.