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]
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]
Reviewed on Aug 10, 2022