This fangame has been pretty much unanimously shat on in the sonic fandom as of its release, and is it deserved? Well, kind of.
This game nails THE most important thing for any sonic game, the controls/game feel. Running around with this game's physics and controls is great fun, the floaty boost allows for chaining enemies and boosting around with such freedom, it's great. The Infinity Engine obviously carries this game and is the main reason it is even remotely playable. After that, however, more or less everything else is far from perfect.
Before we can even get into the rest of the gameplay, the story; Since this is a fangame it of course has a lot of fanservice in it, which is great most of the time and starts off neat with little callbacks and nods to previous games. But this fanservice devolves into a crutch and the main plotline consists of 2 of these crutches. One ofwhich being linked to Sonic X and the other to Unleashed. Chris Thorndike and Chips bracelet are key pieces to this game's plot, but really make little sense without prior exposition and are just there for the sake of it, this can also be said about Marias bizarre appearance, the game tries to rewrite canon and retcon lore, but it just comes across really shabby to me.
This game also actually has fully animated and voiced cutscenes, and to its credit, the animation is stellar, I honestly don't think we've ever seen Sonic look this expressive in a non-pre-rendered environment before it looks fantastic. The facial expression can look a bit strange/overly animated for characters like Tails and Eggman, but Shadow and Sonic look amazing. However this is all for nought as the voice acting is ATROCIOUS, it drives these cutscenes and the story as a whole from pretty great to downright unwatchable. The only character I can stand listening to for more than 2 seconds is Exiled, who only shows up near the end. I will not go into detail for every performance but Sonic himself, which is honestly one of the LESS bad ones would you believe it or not, is just terrible. Every single line is read with the exact same delivery, it just reads off like a YouTuber doing a Jason Griffith impression for a voice reel or something, and a bad one at that.
The graphics are very divisive, to me I think it looks really good. I can understand the hate towards its artstyle as a'OMG SO REALISTIC SEGA HIRE THIS MAN RIGHT NOW' type of deal. But, eh, I like it and I could run it so I didn't care.(Apparently, people complain this game is optimised poorly but it ran fine for me) The UI on the other hand looks incredibly ugly, its clearly based on Forces, and I have to ask, why? Its so basic and bland compared to literally ANY other sonic UI, very disappointing.
The soundtrack is fine, nothing ear grading, nothing really great. It's just very generic, I can remember none of the songs in this game at all, which is quite a letdown for a Sonic game.
The level design is not good. Thankfully the great feel of the characters usually makes this a moot point, as even the most basic of level design is quite fun to blast through, but then they throw in monotonous platforming/combat sections. And they are also incredibly conservative with the boost gauge, it takes so many rings to fill and one little touch and it's all gone. They also gave Shadow a ton of Chaos attacks/powers which are so unnecessary and hardly ever used. Sonic also has a few extra things, and I did not even realise he had half his extra moves until I had already finished the game that's how unneeded and unutilised in the level design they were, the only times the powers are used are in arbitrary "This is the part of the level where you must stop what you are doing and use shadows chaos spear to hit a button" segments.
But, overall so far so good, amazing animations, fantastic game feel, hit-or-miss level design but shit voice acting. Oh, what's that? There's more?
Yes. For some baffling reason, they also added PLANE LEVELS. And let me tell you, they are total garbage and there are THREE of them! They are a complete pace breaker and just soo boring. You must slowly manoeuvre back and forth attacking and killing enemies to progress, making these sometimes the longest levels in the game. Despite having a large health UI, two little taps to the plane and your getting sent back to do it again, WHY? There is a huge health bar for no reason?? If you're going to add these stupid side modes (Which are mandatory) at least make them relatively easy/mindless. But no, have fun spending 15 minutes redoing the same section in a plane over and over.
And then, the bosses. Again, so. boring. You walk about until the boss is open, then you attack, and for some reason, every boss has a million health and you have a set amount of rings. It's not challenging, it is simply time-consuming because one little slip-up and you're all the way back to the start and you have to sit and wait for the boss to be open again. These are the worst types of boss designs in gaming and they are littered in this game.
The Plane and Boss segments of this game are by far the worst part and hugely diminish my enjoyment of playing the campaign, those alongside the few similar moments in the actual levels. Overall, a meh fangame with a fun engine and a bunch of shit extra stuff tagged on. Not that good, but definitely not the dumpster fire Twitter would have you believe it to be.
This game nails THE most important thing for any sonic game, the controls/game feel. Running around with this game's physics and controls is great fun, the floaty boost allows for chaining enemies and boosting around with such freedom, it's great. The Infinity Engine obviously carries this game and is the main reason it is even remotely playable. After that, however, more or less everything else is far from perfect.
Before we can even get into the rest of the gameplay, the story; Since this is a fangame it of course has a lot of fanservice in it, which is great most of the time and starts off neat with little callbacks and nods to previous games. But this fanservice devolves into a crutch and the main plotline consists of 2 of these crutches. One ofwhich being linked to Sonic X and the other to Unleashed. Chris Thorndike and Chips bracelet are key pieces to this game's plot, but really make little sense without prior exposition and are just there for the sake of it, this can also be said about Marias bizarre appearance, the game tries to rewrite canon and retcon lore, but it just comes across really shabby to me.
This game also actually has fully animated and voiced cutscenes, and to its credit, the animation is stellar, I honestly don't think we've ever seen Sonic look this expressive in a non-pre-rendered environment before it looks fantastic. The facial expression can look a bit strange/overly animated for characters like Tails and Eggman, but Shadow and Sonic look amazing. However this is all for nought as the voice acting is ATROCIOUS, it drives these cutscenes and the story as a whole from pretty great to downright unwatchable. The only character I can stand listening to for more than 2 seconds is Exiled, who only shows up near the end. I will not go into detail for every performance but Sonic himself, which is honestly one of the LESS bad ones would you believe it or not, is just terrible. Every single line is read with the exact same delivery, it just reads off like a YouTuber doing a Jason Griffith impression for a voice reel or something, and a bad one at that.
The graphics are very divisive, to me I think it looks really good. I can understand the hate towards its artstyle as a'OMG SO REALISTIC SEGA HIRE THIS MAN RIGHT NOW' type of deal. But, eh, I like it and I could run it so I didn't care.(Apparently, people complain this game is optimised poorly but it ran fine for me) The UI on the other hand looks incredibly ugly, its clearly based on Forces, and I have to ask, why? Its so basic and bland compared to literally ANY other sonic UI, very disappointing.
The soundtrack is fine, nothing ear grading, nothing really great. It's just very generic, I can remember none of the songs in this game at all, which is quite a letdown for a Sonic game.
The level design is not good. Thankfully the great feel of the characters usually makes this a moot point, as even the most basic of level design is quite fun to blast through, but then they throw in monotonous platforming/combat sections. And they are also incredibly conservative with the boost gauge, it takes so many rings to fill and one little touch and it's all gone. They also gave Shadow a ton of Chaos attacks/powers which are so unnecessary and hardly ever used. Sonic also has a few extra things, and I did not even realise he had half his extra moves until I had already finished the game that's how unneeded and unutilised in the level design they were, the only times the powers are used are in arbitrary "This is the part of the level where you must stop what you are doing and use shadows chaos spear to hit a button" segments.
But, overall so far so good, amazing animations, fantastic game feel, hit-or-miss level design but shit voice acting. Oh, what's that? There's more?
Yes. For some baffling reason, they also added PLANE LEVELS. And let me tell you, they are total garbage and there are THREE of them! They are a complete pace breaker and just soo boring. You must slowly manoeuvre back and forth attacking and killing enemies to progress, making these sometimes the longest levels in the game. Despite having a large health UI, two little taps to the plane and your getting sent back to do it again, WHY? There is a huge health bar for no reason?? If you're going to add these stupid side modes (Which are mandatory) at least make them relatively easy/mindless. But no, have fun spending 15 minutes redoing the same section in a plane over and over.
And then, the bosses. Again, so. boring. You walk about until the boss is open, then you attack, and for some reason, every boss has a million health and you have a set amount of rings. It's not challenging, it is simply time-consuming because one little slip-up and you're all the way back to the start and you have to sit and wait for the boss to be open again. These are the worst types of boss designs in gaming and they are littered in this game.
The Plane and Boss segments of this game are by far the worst part and hugely diminish my enjoyment of playing the campaign, those alongside the few similar moments in the actual levels. Overall, a meh fangame with a fun engine and a bunch of shit extra stuff tagged on. Not that good, but definitely not the dumpster fire Twitter would have you believe it to be.