Wimpyfox
2014
The movement options in Sunset Overdrive are some of the best I've ever seen. Just moving around the open world feels fantastic, and the way your moveset gradually expands as you play is expertly done, making the wealth of movement options not seem overwhelming.
The weapon system is incredibly similar to that of Ratchet & Clank. The combat is never unfair, yet always challenging enough to be engaging and fun. Combining the awesome and unique weapon variety with the fantastic movement creates a fantastic game feel.
The games upgrade system is somewhat flawed unfortunately, it relies heavily on an amp/overcharge system which is mainly serviced by a skill tree (Yuck). I never really cared to manage these amps to closely nor pay much attention to my style gauge as the benefits just aren't that game-changing, or at least don't convey much power visually. This somewhat lacking system, fortunately, does not take anything AWAY from the game, it just lacks to really add anything meaningful in my opinion. The style gauge is a great idea to encourage combos and fluid movement, but, thankfully, you don't really even need the extra encouragement to play "correctly" as moving around the environment and racking up combos is prebuilt into the game's design, as if you just sit still and shoot, you will soon get beaten.
I also didn't particularly feel much encouragement or reason to invest in buying any more weapons, other than sheer intrigue. Especially considering some weapons are just direct upgrades to others, I think perhaps it would've been better if when reaching their final level, the weapons simply upgraded themselves similar to Ratchet & Clank, having a smaller weapon roster, each with a unique transformation. But, its not as if I'm saying all the weapons in the game are necessarily redundant, I just didn't really feel any need to actually purchase/use any of them, so maybe some more incentive or ease of unlocking could have been implemented. The challenge side missions which give you the weapons for a brief time did a decent job and intrigued me to go and actually buy them, and some Main Missions give you weapons also to somewhat mitigate this issue.
The Tower Defense missions and trap system was quite underwhelming for me, they feel quite mindless and chaotic. I suppose you could argue that the chaos of the waves is the appeal, but while it is entertaining to watch a bunch of enemies get blown up, its rather boring standing around waiting to just spam attack on tons of enemies, and the traps, I hardly even noticed or cared they even existed. They aren't "Bad" but they certainly weren't something I was looking forward to revisit.
A similar thing can be said about the brief flying segments, they're similar to the ship levels from Ratchet & Clank, but much slower and more boring. Nothing awful, but certainly nothing to be excited about.
The submissions are usually very good, although the "Find X item 3 times" submissions are a real drag. You are often tasked with finding some (Usually rather small) items within a circled area. These missions drag the gameplay to a halt and have you slowly searching an area to find this one specific thing, unless you get lucky and find it instantly, these missions are painful. Sometimes they are gracious enough to highlight the items with big blue glowing effects and a pulsating noise, other times, they just don't.
The animation for the cutscenes is fantastic. I struggle to think of many games nearly as expressive as Sunset Overdrive, in every aspect. The art design is spot on, with great stylisation not only in its cutscenes but also its world design, taking the somewhat generic "post-apocalyptic" city theming, and making a beautiful colourful world to style off buildings and hop across boats inside of. The design of interactive objects in the world is also spectacular, the collectables are integrated naturally into the world yet still clear to see, and objects you can grind and bounce upon are always made clear through colour/shape whilst still blending into the world. The overall art design of this game is second to none.
The writing is also top-notch, it takes a playful approach to the fourth wall but somehow succeeds in doing it in a way that isn't cringe-inducing / annoying. My only disappointment was the ending, it's quite abrupt, feeling like any other mission, especially considering other more climactic encounters throughout the game. Although this issue is somewhat remedied by the DLC, which has a much better Final Boss, even with that, the plot feels unresolved and isn't much of a satisfying "ending".
Aside from my few gripes, however, Sunset Overdrive is an excellent game which I would highly recommend to all.
The weapon system is incredibly similar to that of Ratchet & Clank. The combat is never unfair, yet always challenging enough to be engaging and fun. Combining the awesome and unique weapon variety with the fantastic movement creates a fantastic game feel.
The games upgrade system is somewhat flawed unfortunately, it relies heavily on an amp/overcharge system which is mainly serviced by a skill tree (Yuck). I never really cared to manage these amps to closely nor pay much attention to my style gauge as the benefits just aren't that game-changing, or at least don't convey much power visually. This somewhat lacking system, fortunately, does not take anything AWAY from the game, it just lacks to really add anything meaningful in my opinion. The style gauge is a great idea to encourage combos and fluid movement, but, thankfully, you don't really even need the extra encouragement to play "correctly" as moving around the environment and racking up combos is prebuilt into the game's design, as if you just sit still and shoot, you will soon get beaten.
I also didn't particularly feel much encouragement or reason to invest in buying any more weapons, other than sheer intrigue. Especially considering some weapons are just direct upgrades to others, I think perhaps it would've been better if when reaching their final level, the weapons simply upgraded themselves similar to Ratchet & Clank, having a smaller weapon roster, each with a unique transformation. But, its not as if I'm saying all the weapons in the game are necessarily redundant, I just didn't really feel any need to actually purchase/use any of them, so maybe some more incentive or ease of unlocking could have been implemented. The challenge side missions which give you the weapons for a brief time did a decent job and intrigued me to go and actually buy them, and some Main Missions give you weapons also to somewhat mitigate this issue.
The Tower Defense missions and trap system was quite underwhelming for me, they feel quite mindless and chaotic. I suppose you could argue that the chaos of the waves is the appeal, but while it is entertaining to watch a bunch of enemies get blown up, its rather boring standing around waiting to just spam attack on tons of enemies, and the traps, I hardly even noticed or cared they even existed. They aren't "Bad" but they certainly weren't something I was looking forward to revisit.
A similar thing can be said about the brief flying segments, they're similar to the ship levels from Ratchet & Clank, but much slower and more boring. Nothing awful, but certainly nothing to be excited about.
The submissions are usually very good, although the "Find X item 3 times" submissions are a real drag. You are often tasked with finding some (Usually rather small) items within a circled area. These missions drag the gameplay to a halt and have you slowly searching an area to find this one specific thing, unless you get lucky and find it instantly, these missions are painful. Sometimes they are gracious enough to highlight the items with big blue glowing effects and a pulsating noise, other times, they just don't.
The animation for the cutscenes is fantastic. I struggle to think of many games nearly as expressive as Sunset Overdrive, in every aspect. The art design is spot on, with great stylisation not only in its cutscenes but also its world design, taking the somewhat generic "post-apocalyptic" city theming, and making a beautiful colourful world to style off buildings and hop across boats inside of. The design of interactive objects in the world is also spectacular, the collectables are integrated naturally into the world yet still clear to see, and objects you can grind and bounce upon are always made clear through colour/shape whilst still blending into the world. The overall art design of this game is second to none.
The writing is also top-notch, it takes a playful approach to the fourth wall but somehow succeeds in doing it in a way that isn't cringe-inducing / annoying. My only disappointment was the ending, it's quite abrupt, feeling like any other mission, especially considering other more climactic encounters throughout the game. Although this issue is somewhat remedied by the DLC, which has a much better Final Boss, even with that, the plot feels unresolved and isn't much of a satisfying "ending".
Aside from my few gripes, however, Sunset Overdrive is an excellent game which I would highly recommend to all.
1989
My feelings on the plot for this game are hard to describe. On the one hand, it is incredibly lacklustre, things in this game happen, and there is a flowing narrative throughout, but; there is very little cause and effect. Events occur more or less out of nowhere and with no particular importance over each other. When you complete dungeons, you progress by unlocking more of the map, yet there is no narrative throughline you simply are able to access more areas. The melodies are earned often seemingly at random.
The main characters are similar, they have interesting moments, but that's about it. Lloyd is a nerd whos weak and gets picked on, but eventually overcomes this, Ana dreams of meeting the protagonist, and then she does, she joins your party, says nothing, and then confesses her love. Teddy shows up, is a brute, then somewhat gets humbled, and leaves. They have character arcs, yes, but depth? Not really at all.
However, the actual world itself is much more interesting. Firstly, for the time (and even now to an extent) I find the setting of a more modern world (at least by 1989s standards) to be refreshing. You can also freely explore this world and each area is recognisable enough to not get completely lost or feel aimless, which is an issue I feel is prominent with this game's contemporaries. The dialogue within this world is what redeems this game's incredibly weak plot for me, nothing mindblowing again, but it's charming, enough to make me actually want to talk to NPCs and progress through the game.
The soundtrack is also filled with charm, lots of unique battle music and overworld tracks that are all incredibly iconic.
The gameplay also has its jank. The controls are quite unresponsive, lots of input delay in movement and menus. And the encounter rate is ridiculous, but then again, you're gonna need it because this game is grind city (Another thing it shares with its contemporaries), even after grinding for forever you'll still often be overwhelmed. But once the grinding is over, the combat is pretty fun, you have a ton of special moves in your arsenal and each character serves a unique purpose.
The main characters are similar, they have interesting moments, but that's about it. Lloyd is a nerd whos weak and gets picked on, but eventually overcomes this, Ana dreams of meeting the protagonist, and then she does, she joins your party, says nothing, and then confesses her love. Teddy shows up, is a brute, then somewhat gets humbled, and leaves. They have character arcs, yes, but depth? Not really at all.
However, the actual world itself is much more interesting. Firstly, for the time (and even now to an extent) I find the setting of a more modern world (at least by 1989s standards) to be refreshing. You can also freely explore this world and each area is recognisable enough to not get completely lost or feel aimless, which is an issue I feel is prominent with this game's contemporaries. The dialogue within this world is what redeems this game's incredibly weak plot for me, nothing mindblowing again, but it's charming, enough to make me actually want to talk to NPCs and progress through the game.
The soundtrack is also filled with charm, lots of unique battle music and overworld tracks that are all incredibly iconic.
The gameplay also has its jank. The controls are quite unresponsive, lots of input delay in movement and menus. And the encounter rate is ridiculous, but then again, you're gonna need it because this game is grind city (Another thing it shares with its contemporaries), even after grinding for forever you'll still often be overwhelmed. But once the grinding is over, the combat is pretty fun, you have a ton of special moves in your arsenal and each character serves a unique purpose.
2022
I didn't play before the new update that "fixes the game", but it still kinda sucks.
The entire format is repetitive, you have to view the same jokes over and over in the voting process, and with these types of games the initial shock value/impact is usually what makes these kinds of jokes funny, so having to see them again kind of kills that. This format also reveals the loser of each vote first, which is kind of demoralising, when you make an unfunny joke you'd rather just move on, but instead you and only you are pointed out to the voters.
The cosmetic system is also bunk, you start with next to no clothes, and when creating a character its set to random cosmetics, but 99% of the cosmetics are hijabs which cover your entire head so you can't see what hair you have until you go and turn that off, just give me an option for a blank slate to start customising. The store has a teeny tiny amount of things to buy at a time, which is just stupid, I'm not going to be checking the store of this game to see the items change, just let me buy what I wanna buy.
The matchmaking is OK, but there's no way to add people you've met in a lobby or even so much as speak to any of them at any point, which is a bit of a downer for such a social-based game.
The music is also insanely annoying and repetitive, and there were some visual oddities, the game clearly isn't made for a widescreen/1080p+ display.
The entire format is repetitive, you have to view the same jokes over and over in the voting process, and with these types of games the initial shock value/impact is usually what makes these kinds of jokes funny, so having to see them again kind of kills that. This format also reveals the loser of each vote first, which is kind of demoralising, when you make an unfunny joke you'd rather just move on, but instead you and only you are pointed out to the voters.
The cosmetic system is also bunk, you start with next to no clothes, and when creating a character its set to random cosmetics, but 99% of the cosmetics are hijabs which cover your entire head so you can't see what hair you have until you go and turn that off, just give me an option for a blank slate to start customising. The store has a teeny tiny amount of things to buy at a time, which is just stupid, I'm not going to be checking the store of this game to see the items change, just let me buy what I wanna buy.
The matchmaking is OK, but there's no way to add people you've met in a lobby or even so much as speak to any of them at any point, which is a bit of a downer for such a social-based game.
The music is also insanely annoying and repetitive, and there were some visual oddities, the game clearly isn't made for a widescreen/1080p+ display.
2022
Finally, the next mainline Sonic game! But is it any good? Well, I refrained from looking at much promotional material for this game but, it seemed promising from the little I did see, however knowing Sonic Teams' previous efforts, I set my expectations to be, well, realistic.
Before we even start the game there are already a few things to discuss. Firstly, SEGA, Sonic Team, or whomever makes these decisions, what is with this asinine "Digital Deluxe" crap you keep pushing? First Sonic Origins now this. The main advertised feature is free collectables as soon as you install, well, I've never even played the game before so how am I supposed to know if this is a worthwhile investment?! Counter to this, it's pretty cool of them to offer up the SOAP shoes from SA2 as a FREE bonus, if you signed up for a newsletter, although the fact there are these shoes and some other (much duller) brown shoes and gloves as a preorder bonus, makes me wish there actually was some customizability for sonic in this game, akin to that one Generations mod. Secondly, the game once again launches with Denuvo, which I know pisses a lot of people off, and is annoying if you're playing on a lower-end system, but it doesn't really affect me, so I'm not going to go on about it, but, just another knock right out the gate. And if screwing over low-end players wasn't bad enough, high-end players get bent over to since the game has minimal graphics settings, for some reason its capped at 60 fps and the pop in is just atrocious, right at the start of the game there's a cutscene that zooms across the first area (Basically for no reason) and it immediately demonstrates its lack of graphical fidelity as the grass follows the camera popping-in in a little circle throughout. Why did they even bother making that cutscene its literally just there to like "flex" how pretty the area is but has the total opposite effect. In fairness, however, the actual render distance is satisfactory, you can see really far out and its very useful when exploring. The game is clearly just optimised for lower-end systems, and sheer incompetence made them not bother adding options to turn off these optimisations.
With that aside, lets actually open the game. The first thing that stood out to me was options of difficulty and seemingly customisable controls, which is a rather new concept for a Sonic game, but a welcome one I suppose. I really have no clue why you wouldn't just choose the "faster" play style though, this is a SONIC game for crying out loud! But whatever, if you want a worse controlling Sonic its there... I guess.
After a brief introductory cutscene, we're thrown into the first segment of gameplay and it's.... oh.... oh god... Green Hill Zone again... and the controls... Well. Since it's the first thing we're given, I may as well get it out of the way now and go over: Cyberspace. This game has action stages not dissimilar from that of Unleashed/Gens/Forces. In fact, some of the levels are directly lifted from said games, in fact (again) 99% of the levels in this game are straight-up STOLEN from other games. And its gets better, it would be bad enough if the levels were just stolen/remixed, but not only that, they are reskinned to be GREEN HILL ZONE, CHEMICAL PLANT and SKY SANCTUARY, level themes we have seen nigh hundreds of times by now, all directly ripped from Generations. This by itself is embarrassing and just a complete and utter joke. And on top of this, instead of stealing the original music tracks of these levels, or perhaps remixing some tracks, heck, maybe even putting a spin on the GHZ, CPZ, SSZ themes, no, we're given the most mid music the Sonic series has scene since Rise of Lyric. The best way I can describe the music to you is its the type of music a Twitch streamer plays in the waiting period before they start the stream proper, I guess it appeals to some demographic, its not bad by any means, just very bland and forgettable, not up to standard for this series in the slightest. And if that isn't bad enough, they somehow have made the controls for Sonic in these stages WORSE than Forces. No, I'm not kidding! The game feel is atrocious here, Sonic is incredibly unresponsive and the boost is gimped to all hell. Not only is the boost made weaker but most of the visual effects surrounding it are removed, giving it the same satisfaction as having an on-command fart button for Sonic (although now that I think about it that sounds a lot better than what we actually got). The physics here are just a miss in every aspect, the jump arc is stiff and rigid, air movement is nill once you leave the ground, unless of course, you boost, which will instantly snap you in the direction you press the button, there is no flow or smooth transition to any action. This control scheme seems to be the outcome of the primarily automated design philosophy of modern sonic games evolving from Forces, but now the action stages are not even built with these railroad designs, as they're stolen from other titles, so almost every level you just have to spend wrestling for control of Sonic. The most fun I got from these Cyberspace segments was treating it like a trivia game to see how quickly I can recognise where the level design is stolen from. And no, these stolen tropes are not a "neat callback" or "homage" like in Generations of Mania, these are here out of sheer laziness. I come to this conclusion firstly, because its obvious, but secondly because most of the level designs aren't even big set pieces or iconic levels, quite a few are taken from more niche secondary challenge acts from Unleashed, that likely nobody would even recognise. And thirdly the in-game explanation for these recurring designs is that they're "pulled from Sonic's memory" which makes quite literally no sense, when some of these levels, I.E Sky Rail, are taken from Shadow's levels from SA2 which Sonic never even saw, clearly a haphazard in-universe explanation they rattled up in some pathetic attempt to excuse this joke of a decision. The ONE thing I must praise these stages for, is that restarting and retrying the stages is super quick and seamless, and the music continues to play, so, good job for that, it made constantly dying to the god awful controls and having to keep resetting to get a good time that bit less annoying.
Thankfully, however, these Cyberspace segments are not the meat of this game. The main gameplay is focused on open-world exploration, a new direction for a mainline Sonic game. The concept alone carries it by default to be at least halfway decent, its fun boosting around big open areas, and for some reason, Sonic doesn't move like complete crap in these areas unlike in Cyberspace, the weak boost issues are mitigated by less urgency in the design of the area, but also by speed upgrades and a new mechanic where when reaching max rings Sonic goes all electricy and his boost becomes more powerful, the "transformation" and sequence is quite akin to the way Sonic is portrayed in the Sonic Movie, which I thought was neat, if maybe unintentional.
Although the upgrade system is totally ass backward. You have 4 stats, Speed, Ring Capacity, Defense and Power. To upgrade Defense and Power you must collect corresponding items for each (The same items you could buy in the digital deluxe version), and then you can trade them in to an NPC to instantly level up to the amount of items you gave. Makes sense. The other 2 stats, Speed and Ring Capacity, you must collect Kocos, which by themselves are inherently less satisfying collect, as there is no tally for how many you have upon collection and it isn't even stated how many you spend when trading. But not only that, you must upgrade each level ONE AT A TIME. And the Menu to do so is PAINFULLY slow. It quite literally took me almost 30 minutes sat pressing the button over and over and over in the menu to level my ring capacity to the max. What the hell were they thinking, they literally already have it nailed with the other 2 stats but then majorly fucked this up? It is mind-bogglingly stupid. And on top of THAT, the ring capacity upgrade is practically useless anyway, as mentioned earlier you want to max out the ring gauge ASAP to get the electric boost mode, so why would I want to increase said gauge? Especially when the defence stat already makes me drop fewer rings? Double especially when maxing out the speed stat first gives you infinite electric mode. The design of this system is just completely ridiculous and arbitrary to begin with, just give me a half-decent Sonic by default, I don't need this upgrade crap, is it meant to be akin to that Sonic Speed Simulator Roblox game where you level up speed and such? I guess this game is actually quite similar to that game now I think about it, open world grinding with shitty action stage "obbys" damn.
But what on earth do you need a Power stat for? Well, this game introduces combat to the mix. And it's alright. It looks really cool and there is a variety of moves, although for some reason the third upgrade in the game is a "Let the game play itself auto win" mode, which just lets you spam attack to do combos. Turning this on makes every single interaction just, press attack until you win, so I recommend against it, giving this option to new players is stupid, why would a new player ever bother to actually learn how to play when they're given an auto-win mechanic at the very start of the game. Similarly, the parry mechanic seems to almost have been changed or altered from its original design. Either that or its just stupidly designed to begin with. The parry mechanic allows you to block, and if you block an attack correctly, time usually slows down giving you free hits, or sometimes, parrying is the only way to hit a boss. However, you don't actually need to do anything to parry successfully, you can literally just hold block and if you get hit, you get a free win. Since its called a "parry" and the game gives you tutorials and "challenges" where the challenge is to parry multiple hits in a row, it stands to reason that this was designed where you would actually have to hit the button at a specific time, but was then later just changed to auto parry on block, but, why? It takes away any skill or player input to any interaction with the mechanic, just sit and hold the button. Assuming you dont use the auto win/auto combo upgrade fighting bosses is pretty fun, although once you begin to upgrade you strength stat you basically just sweep everything. Some bosses however, have the painful boss design trope of "kill time until you see an opening" and are incredibly boring, specifically the few "chase after the boss until you catch up to it and get 1 shot to attack" guardians.
The Titan bosses are pretty badass to watch but rather mundane to actually play. They play like a decent final boss, all spectacle while making you look like a total powerhouse. This is great the first time, but the novelty begins to wear off on the fourth bout. But honestly the animation makes me not care so much about the lackluster gameplay, if there was just one of these as the final boss I wouldn't really have any complaints, but the fact we get these final boss-esque sequences throughout kind of diminishes the actual final boss, as its really no different, I mean arguably the REAL final boss is JUST a cutscene and the cutscene is nothing compared to actual battles you do with even the first Titan.
However, past the concept of "Free roam sonic fun" the actual design of the open zones themselves are quite honestly doing the bare minimum. The environments themselves are really quite boring, we have grassy plains, sandy area, grey area, grassy plains 2 and grassy plains 3. Not exactly riveting theming for a Sonic game, and to make matters worse the actual terrain of these areas are bland and dull, and are not even the focus of the areas. No, instead plastered around are rather out of place floating geometry for you to platform across. The gameplay loop is basically just walking around, finding the premade geometry and going through it, the physics are nothing like the Adventure titles that actually let you exploit the physics to fly around, you can dash in the air but unless the game is specifically launching you on a set path in the air, Sonic is more or less glued to the ground. Littered throughout the open zones are "Challenges" but I struggle to really call them challenges as the "challenge" is often just "interact with thing" or "go over to this thing". And this is all fine, it is the bare minimum, it gives you motivation to continue playing and boost around to your hearts content. The way you progressively unlock the map after completing these challenges is satisfying and motivation enough for me to go and interact with them all (and by map I mean visual map, the area is fully open). The game really gives you the freedom to just do what you want and play around as if its a sandbox, as all the collectables you need to progress can be obtained in a multitude of ways, and all collectables are infinite resources, which I think is a good way to go about things when designing a more open game such as this. One thing that did fall flat in terms of motivation for the player surrounding collectibles, is collecting the Chaos emeralds. On the first island its strange when you begin to get the emeralds so quickly and after long it doesn't feel that special to get one, then as soon as the second area begins, you realise collecting these emeralds is basically a waste of time, since we all know you're just going to lose them again. It seems stupid to make the player repeatedly collect something they know they're not going to be able to even keep.
The music in the open areas is a lot better than in the Cyberspace stages in my opinion, but they're a lot more ambient, they fit the gameplay and atmosphere, but there are no total bangers I'm going to be listening to outside the game.
On top of combat, action stages and challenges, another way to earn collectables is fishing. Yes. Big The Cat is a key character in this game. Huzzah. The fishing is a cool little time waster, nothing crazy deep you basically just press A at a QTE, but it looks good and the music is calming, bonus points for the SA1 reference when catching a fish. My only issue with it is that for some reason they make the fishing benefits crazy OP on the final island, you can fish for like 10 minutes and basically buy every single collectable immediately if you really want to.
The presentation. Much like Forces, the overall style has gone for a minimalist approach, which is OK, and is consistent, but its so boring. We already did the gimmick in forces where they were like, okay, lets take a bunch of reused assets from gens, but restyle them to be boring and lifeless. And now they've done it again, but this time: in pink and blue! A great example of the soulless-ness of this asset reuse then style swap, is the "Accelerator Gun" lifted from Unleashed and then bastardised in Frontiers, the gimmick basically just has sonic in a little gun, and on the gun there is a button prompt, and if you do as it says it shoots you. In Frontiers, they reskinned the gun to just have a generic blank face, and then a button prompt is superimposed on top of it via a popup when you go inside of it. WHY? If you're going to have a blank soulless new aesthetic, at least make new objects rather than just having shit versions of stuff we've seen before.
The animation in cutscenes is actually really good for the most part, this is definitely the most expressive we've seen sonic be since probably the Sonic Riders series, but here Sonic remains on model throughout while still remaining diverse in his facial animation and body movements. This animation is especially prevalent in those previously mentioned badass Titan battles.
In terms of plot, for me, it's a miss. The initial intrigue of the mystery surrounding the islands and Cyberspace had me, but the payoff is just lacklustre. And the story progression is so painfully boring, 99% of cutscenes in this game are just people standing around. And this is really a shame because the character writing is some of the best we've ever seen in the series. For some reason Sonic and Eggman are really toned down, even their vocal performances are clearly directed in a more serious and less over-the-top manner. But aside from that weird direction, the characters all have actual distinct personalities. Something that I'm really mixed on, is the constant pandering in the dialogue. The game is written like its some anniversary title, constantly name-dropping and giving nods to previous titles and lore, its cute the first couple of times but the lack of subtlety is poignant. It gives off fanfiction vibes at times, but not necessarily bad fanfiction. It honestly reminds me of Sonic Omens at times. The character writing and fan pandering just feels really wasted, as more or less nothing happens in this game, people just stand and talk. Tails goes through this arc where his inconsistent character is addressed, but he sort of just, comes up with an insecurity, thinks about it for awhile and then gets over it, nothing actually happens, and the whole issue makes sense from the point of view as looking at the series as a whole, but in the game its totally out of nowhere, Tails is conflicted over events that occurred in Forces and is given his confidence back by being reminded of events from Adventure. Why not actually have stuff happen IN THIS GAME? There is also some very questionable lore implications that I wont get into, and seemingly some setup for the plotline of future games since Tails claims he's going to be going solo after this adventure? Im assuming this will just be entirely ignored by the time the next game drops, but hey, Tails Sky Patrol 2 confirmed?
So, is the game good?
Yeah, its good. But that's about it. The game is carried by the free-roam premise and everything beyond that is really the bare minimum. The absolutely abysmal Cyberspace is honestly very worrying as it is more or less exactly what you would expect from a Forces follow-up, it evolves on all of the terrible aspects of that game, from the terrible level design, the awful movement and the shameless reuse of assets. I'm assuming this game will get relatively positive feedback so I hope Sonic Team do not interpret that as praise for these levels, as they are garbage and not what the franchise should aim to be in the slightest. The character writing on the other hand is very promising, a focus on continuity and interesting character interactions would be a lot more entertaining if these characters were put in an actual interesting plotline.
In conclusion, I think anybody can find enjoyment from the games free roam areas, its nothing deep, but it can be fun. The design is flawed but the entertainment value is there. Sonic Fan or not I think Frontiers is worth a shot.
Before we even start the game there are already a few things to discuss. Firstly, SEGA, Sonic Team, or whomever makes these decisions, what is with this asinine "Digital Deluxe" crap you keep pushing? First Sonic Origins now this. The main advertised feature is free collectables as soon as you install, well, I've never even played the game before so how am I supposed to know if this is a worthwhile investment?! Counter to this, it's pretty cool of them to offer up the SOAP shoes from SA2 as a FREE bonus, if you signed up for a newsletter, although the fact there are these shoes and some other (much duller) brown shoes and gloves as a preorder bonus, makes me wish there actually was some customizability for sonic in this game, akin to that one Generations mod. Secondly, the game once again launches with Denuvo, which I know pisses a lot of people off, and is annoying if you're playing on a lower-end system, but it doesn't really affect me, so I'm not going to go on about it, but, just another knock right out the gate. And if screwing over low-end players wasn't bad enough, high-end players get bent over to since the game has minimal graphics settings, for some reason its capped at 60 fps and the pop in is just atrocious, right at the start of the game there's a cutscene that zooms across the first area (Basically for no reason) and it immediately demonstrates its lack of graphical fidelity as the grass follows the camera popping-in in a little circle throughout. Why did they even bother making that cutscene its literally just there to like "flex" how pretty the area is but has the total opposite effect. In fairness, however, the actual render distance is satisfactory, you can see really far out and its very useful when exploring. The game is clearly just optimised for lower-end systems, and sheer incompetence made them not bother adding options to turn off these optimisations.
With that aside, lets actually open the game. The first thing that stood out to me was options of difficulty and seemingly customisable controls, which is a rather new concept for a Sonic game, but a welcome one I suppose. I really have no clue why you wouldn't just choose the "faster" play style though, this is a SONIC game for crying out loud! But whatever, if you want a worse controlling Sonic its there... I guess.
After a brief introductory cutscene, we're thrown into the first segment of gameplay and it's.... oh.... oh god... Green Hill Zone again... and the controls... Well. Since it's the first thing we're given, I may as well get it out of the way now and go over: Cyberspace. This game has action stages not dissimilar from that of Unleashed/Gens/Forces. In fact, some of the levels are directly lifted from said games, in fact (again) 99% of the levels in this game are straight-up STOLEN from other games. And its gets better, it would be bad enough if the levels were just stolen/remixed, but not only that, they are reskinned to be GREEN HILL ZONE, CHEMICAL PLANT and SKY SANCTUARY, level themes we have seen nigh hundreds of times by now, all directly ripped from Generations. This by itself is embarrassing and just a complete and utter joke. And on top of this, instead of stealing the original music tracks of these levels, or perhaps remixing some tracks, heck, maybe even putting a spin on the GHZ, CPZ, SSZ themes, no, we're given the most mid music the Sonic series has scene since Rise of Lyric. The best way I can describe the music to you is its the type of music a Twitch streamer plays in the waiting period before they start the stream proper, I guess it appeals to some demographic, its not bad by any means, just very bland and forgettable, not up to standard for this series in the slightest. And if that isn't bad enough, they somehow have made the controls for Sonic in these stages WORSE than Forces. No, I'm not kidding! The game feel is atrocious here, Sonic is incredibly unresponsive and the boost is gimped to all hell. Not only is the boost made weaker but most of the visual effects surrounding it are removed, giving it the same satisfaction as having an on-command fart button for Sonic (although now that I think about it that sounds a lot better than what we actually got). The physics here are just a miss in every aspect, the jump arc is stiff and rigid, air movement is nill once you leave the ground, unless of course, you boost, which will instantly snap you in the direction you press the button, there is no flow or smooth transition to any action. This control scheme seems to be the outcome of the primarily automated design philosophy of modern sonic games evolving from Forces, but now the action stages are not even built with these railroad designs, as they're stolen from other titles, so almost every level you just have to spend wrestling for control of Sonic. The most fun I got from these Cyberspace segments was treating it like a trivia game to see how quickly I can recognise where the level design is stolen from. And no, these stolen tropes are not a "neat callback" or "homage" like in Generations of Mania, these are here out of sheer laziness. I come to this conclusion firstly, because its obvious, but secondly because most of the level designs aren't even big set pieces or iconic levels, quite a few are taken from more niche secondary challenge acts from Unleashed, that likely nobody would even recognise. And thirdly the in-game explanation for these recurring designs is that they're "pulled from Sonic's memory" which makes quite literally no sense, when some of these levels, I.E Sky Rail, are taken from Shadow's levels from SA2 which Sonic never even saw, clearly a haphazard in-universe explanation they rattled up in some pathetic attempt to excuse this joke of a decision. The ONE thing I must praise these stages for, is that restarting and retrying the stages is super quick and seamless, and the music continues to play, so, good job for that, it made constantly dying to the god awful controls and having to keep resetting to get a good time that bit less annoying.
Thankfully, however, these Cyberspace segments are not the meat of this game. The main gameplay is focused on open-world exploration, a new direction for a mainline Sonic game. The concept alone carries it by default to be at least halfway decent, its fun boosting around big open areas, and for some reason, Sonic doesn't move like complete crap in these areas unlike in Cyberspace, the weak boost issues are mitigated by less urgency in the design of the area, but also by speed upgrades and a new mechanic where when reaching max rings Sonic goes all electricy and his boost becomes more powerful, the "transformation" and sequence is quite akin to the way Sonic is portrayed in the Sonic Movie, which I thought was neat, if maybe unintentional.
Although the upgrade system is totally ass backward. You have 4 stats, Speed, Ring Capacity, Defense and Power. To upgrade Defense and Power you must collect corresponding items for each (The same items you could buy in the digital deluxe version), and then you can trade them in to an NPC to instantly level up to the amount of items you gave. Makes sense. The other 2 stats, Speed and Ring Capacity, you must collect Kocos, which by themselves are inherently less satisfying collect, as there is no tally for how many you have upon collection and it isn't even stated how many you spend when trading. But not only that, you must upgrade each level ONE AT A TIME. And the Menu to do so is PAINFULLY slow. It quite literally took me almost 30 minutes sat pressing the button over and over and over in the menu to level my ring capacity to the max. What the hell were they thinking, they literally already have it nailed with the other 2 stats but then majorly fucked this up? It is mind-bogglingly stupid. And on top of THAT, the ring capacity upgrade is practically useless anyway, as mentioned earlier you want to max out the ring gauge ASAP to get the electric boost mode, so why would I want to increase said gauge? Especially when the defence stat already makes me drop fewer rings? Double especially when maxing out the speed stat first gives you infinite electric mode. The design of this system is just completely ridiculous and arbitrary to begin with, just give me a half-decent Sonic by default, I don't need this upgrade crap, is it meant to be akin to that Sonic Speed Simulator Roblox game where you level up speed and such? I guess this game is actually quite similar to that game now I think about it, open world grinding with shitty action stage "obbys" damn.
But what on earth do you need a Power stat for? Well, this game introduces combat to the mix. And it's alright. It looks really cool and there is a variety of moves, although for some reason the third upgrade in the game is a "Let the game play itself auto win" mode, which just lets you spam attack to do combos. Turning this on makes every single interaction just, press attack until you win, so I recommend against it, giving this option to new players is stupid, why would a new player ever bother to actually learn how to play when they're given an auto-win mechanic at the very start of the game. Similarly, the parry mechanic seems to almost have been changed or altered from its original design. Either that or its just stupidly designed to begin with. The parry mechanic allows you to block, and if you block an attack correctly, time usually slows down giving you free hits, or sometimes, parrying is the only way to hit a boss. However, you don't actually need to do anything to parry successfully, you can literally just hold block and if you get hit, you get a free win. Since its called a "parry" and the game gives you tutorials and "challenges" where the challenge is to parry multiple hits in a row, it stands to reason that this was designed where you would actually have to hit the button at a specific time, but was then later just changed to auto parry on block, but, why? It takes away any skill or player input to any interaction with the mechanic, just sit and hold the button. Assuming you dont use the auto win/auto combo upgrade fighting bosses is pretty fun, although once you begin to upgrade you strength stat you basically just sweep everything. Some bosses however, have the painful boss design trope of "kill time until you see an opening" and are incredibly boring, specifically the few "chase after the boss until you catch up to it and get 1 shot to attack" guardians.
The Titan bosses are pretty badass to watch but rather mundane to actually play. They play like a decent final boss, all spectacle while making you look like a total powerhouse. This is great the first time, but the novelty begins to wear off on the fourth bout. But honestly the animation makes me not care so much about the lackluster gameplay, if there was just one of these as the final boss I wouldn't really have any complaints, but the fact we get these final boss-esque sequences throughout kind of diminishes the actual final boss, as its really no different, I mean arguably the REAL final boss is JUST a cutscene and the cutscene is nothing compared to actual battles you do with even the first Titan.
However, past the concept of "Free roam sonic fun" the actual design of the open zones themselves are quite honestly doing the bare minimum. The environments themselves are really quite boring, we have grassy plains, sandy area, grey area, grassy plains 2 and grassy plains 3. Not exactly riveting theming for a Sonic game, and to make matters worse the actual terrain of these areas are bland and dull, and are not even the focus of the areas. No, instead plastered around are rather out of place floating geometry for you to platform across. The gameplay loop is basically just walking around, finding the premade geometry and going through it, the physics are nothing like the Adventure titles that actually let you exploit the physics to fly around, you can dash in the air but unless the game is specifically launching you on a set path in the air, Sonic is more or less glued to the ground. Littered throughout the open zones are "Challenges" but I struggle to really call them challenges as the "challenge" is often just "interact with thing" or "go over to this thing". And this is all fine, it is the bare minimum, it gives you motivation to continue playing and boost around to your hearts content. The way you progressively unlock the map after completing these challenges is satisfying and motivation enough for me to go and interact with them all (and by map I mean visual map, the area is fully open). The game really gives you the freedom to just do what you want and play around as if its a sandbox, as all the collectables you need to progress can be obtained in a multitude of ways, and all collectables are infinite resources, which I think is a good way to go about things when designing a more open game such as this. One thing that did fall flat in terms of motivation for the player surrounding collectibles, is collecting the Chaos emeralds. On the first island its strange when you begin to get the emeralds so quickly and after long it doesn't feel that special to get one, then as soon as the second area begins, you realise collecting these emeralds is basically a waste of time, since we all know you're just going to lose them again. It seems stupid to make the player repeatedly collect something they know they're not going to be able to even keep.
The music in the open areas is a lot better than in the Cyberspace stages in my opinion, but they're a lot more ambient, they fit the gameplay and atmosphere, but there are no total bangers I'm going to be listening to outside the game.
On top of combat, action stages and challenges, another way to earn collectables is fishing. Yes. Big The Cat is a key character in this game. Huzzah. The fishing is a cool little time waster, nothing crazy deep you basically just press A at a QTE, but it looks good and the music is calming, bonus points for the SA1 reference when catching a fish. My only issue with it is that for some reason they make the fishing benefits crazy OP on the final island, you can fish for like 10 minutes and basically buy every single collectable immediately if you really want to.
The presentation. Much like Forces, the overall style has gone for a minimalist approach, which is OK, and is consistent, but its so boring. We already did the gimmick in forces where they were like, okay, lets take a bunch of reused assets from gens, but restyle them to be boring and lifeless. And now they've done it again, but this time: in pink and blue! A great example of the soulless-ness of this asset reuse then style swap, is the "Accelerator Gun" lifted from Unleashed and then bastardised in Frontiers, the gimmick basically just has sonic in a little gun, and on the gun there is a button prompt, and if you do as it says it shoots you. In Frontiers, they reskinned the gun to just have a generic blank face, and then a button prompt is superimposed on top of it via a popup when you go inside of it. WHY? If you're going to have a blank soulless new aesthetic, at least make new objects rather than just having shit versions of stuff we've seen before.
The animation in cutscenes is actually really good for the most part, this is definitely the most expressive we've seen sonic be since probably the Sonic Riders series, but here Sonic remains on model throughout while still remaining diverse in his facial animation and body movements. This animation is especially prevalent in those previously mentioned badass Titan battles.
In terms of plot, for me, it's a miss. The initial intrigue of the mystery surrounding the islands and Cyberspace had me, but the payoff is just lacklustre. And the story progression is so painfully boring, 99% of cutscenes in this game are just people standing around. And this is really a shame because the character writing is some of the best we've ever seen in the series. For some reason Sonic and Eggman are really toned down, even their vocal performances are clearly directed in a more serious and less over-the-top manner. But aside from that weird direction, the characters all have actual distinct personalities. Something that I'm really mixed on, is the constant pandering in the dialogue. The game is written like its some anniversary title, constantly name-dropping and giving nods to previous titles and lore, its cute the first couple of times but the lack of subtlety is poignant. It gives off fanfiction vibes at times, but not necessarily bad fanfiction. It honestly reminds me of Sonic Omens at times. The character writing and fan pandering just feels really wasted, as more or less nothing happens in this game, people just stand and talk. Tails goes through this arc where his inconsistent character is addressed, but he sort of just, comes up with an insecurity, thinks about it for awhile and then gets over it, nothing actually happens, and the whole issue makes sense from the point of view as looking at the series as a whole, but in the game its totally out of nowhere, Tails is conflicted over events that occurred in Forces and is given his confidence back by being reminded of events from Adventure. Why not actually have stuff happen IN THIS GAME? There is also some very questionable lore implications that I wont get into, and seemingly some setup for the plotline of future games since Tails claims he's going to be going solo after this adventure? Im assuming this will just be entirely ignored by the time the next game drops, but hey, Tails Sky Patrol 2 confirmed?
So, is the game good?
Yeah, its good. But that's about it. The game is carried by the free-roam premise and everything beyond that is really the bare minimum. The absolutely abysmal Cyberspace is honestly very worrying as it is more or less exactly what you would expect from a Forces follow-up, it evolves on all of the terrible aspects of that game, from the terrible level design, the awful movement and the shameless reuse of assets. I'm assuming this game will get relatively positive feedback so I hope Sonic Team do not interpret that as praise for these levels, as they are garbage and not what the franchise should aim to be in the slightest. The character writing on the other hand is very promising, a focus on continuity and interesting character interactions would be a lot more entertaining if these characters were put in an actual interesting plotline.
In conclusion, I think anybody can find enjoyment from the games free roam areas, its nothing deep, but it can be fun. The design is flawed but the entertainment value is there. Sonic Fan or not I think Frontiers is worth a shot.
2006
The best part about Bully has to be the characters, the game instantly grabs you with each and every interaction. Near every NPC has their own unique personality that makes all of them memorable, at first I thought needing to take a picture of every single NPC would be a nightmare, but as you play and learn the characters it was hardly even a challenge (But don't worry I'll get to the other annoying collectables later). They are so great and so close to perfection that it infuriates me further that, in my opinion, they somewhat blundered the big finale and running plot thread. The character of Gary is my favourite character in the game and the primary antagonist for the later acts of the game after his betrayal. Immediately after his betrayal, he disappears and you no longer interact with him, although the odd few times you can spot him with rival gangs sabotaging you, which I thought was a really clever and subtle way to show that he is clearly involved and will return as the big bad at the end. However, this was all for nought in my opinion as in the final 2 acts, all Petey and other characters blabber on about constantly is "Oh this must be Gary's doing!" "We need to sort out Gary I bet he's behind this!" etc. etc. and it just becomes super tiresome and feels rather unearned that Gary would have this notoriety and fear from everybody when everything we've seen him do was quite subtle. Again, it infuriates me because they were so close to perfection! Remove those stupid lines bigging up Gary and it would've been a great build-up for his character, showing us his meddlings subtly rather than TELLING us how scary and involved he is.
The gameplay loop is brilliant, with short missions each with entertaining dialogue and cutscenes. I found every main quest entertaining and none of them felt like meaningless chores. However the biggest blemish on the main quests is the fail system, if you fail a quest you have to walk all the way back to the start point OR you may even have to wait the next day to try it again. This can be INCREDIBLY frustrating if you get to a quest where you do half of it, then don't know what to do, if you make one little slip up you gotta start all over again, and this can loop a few times while you're figuring out what the quest wants you to do. Some major events like boss fights actually fix this issue and just warp you back to the beginning of a segment on failure, I honestly just wish all the quests worked like this.
On top of the main questline, we have quite a variety of side content. Firstly there are lessons, which are short minigames in certain subjects that reward you with a unique upgrade on completion, these are incredibly satisfying to complete as every single lesson gives you an immediate benefit. I will say that for me, the English minigame was incredibly difficult, maybe I'm just stupid or something, but the short amount of time given and the amount of time needed to write the words was incredibly tight by the 4th and 5th levels. After that, there are errands, which are basically just the fetch quests of the game. They are OK. Although it is incredibly annoying how there is only a finite amount of them, meaning if you want to complete them all, you better keep a list of which ones you have/haven't done or you're gonna spend hours tracking down the last few you missed (I did not take notes). There are also races, on Bikes and on Go Karts, these were OK, but I felt like there was wayyy too many of them, none of them are a real challenge and it did become quite monotonous doing them over and over for little reward per race. Similarly, the Jobs feel quite pointless, as all they reward the player with is money, which if you aren't going for %100 completion is rather pointless, especially when you gain lots of cash through the main quest line and other activities.
The only real money sink in this game is cosmetics, and whilst I did say the money is pointless, its only pointless IF you aren't a completionist, as if you wish to buy every cosmetic in the game you WILL need that cash as there is a heap ton of cosmetics in all varieties and they aren't even overpriced if you're a casual player you can buy whatever set of cosmetics you like there's just so many.
Finally the finale in terms of side content and completionist content, the collectables. There are FOUR hard-to-obtain collectables in this game, that being the class photos, gnomes, G&G cards and the dreaded rubber bands. The photos aren't that bad as mentioned, the gnomes are quite fair considering there is only 25 of them and they are rather large and hard to miss. Then they dial it up a notch with the G&G cards as there are 40 of them scattered all over the map. And ONTOP of that, there are 75 rubber bands! And the main reward for these is just cosmetics! I think if maybe we JUST had the 75 rubber bands it wouldn't be as bad, but gees searching the map for hours upon hours upon hours just for some cosmetics, it loses its fun real fast. This issue is somewhat remedied in the Scholarship edition however as I believe most of the collectibles are marked on your map after you progress through the game, great change!
Overall, aside from the gripes I had with the story, which are overshadowed by the greater elements of it, in my opinion, most of the glaring problems relate to side content and completionist objectives. So if you've never tried Bully before, go play it! It's fantastic!
The gameplay loop is brilliant, with short missions each with entertaining dialogue and cutscenes. I found every main quest entertaining and none of them felt like meaningless chores. However the biggest blemish on the main quests is the fail system, if you fail a quest you have to walk all the way back to the start point OR you may even have to wait the next day to try it again. This can be INCREDIBLY frustrating if you get to a quest where you do half of it, then don't know what to do, if you make one little slip up you gotta start all over again, and this can loop a few times while you're figuring out what the quest wants you to do. Some major events like boss fights actually fix this issue and just warp you back to the beginning of a segment on failure, I honestly just wish all the quests worked like this.
On top of the main questline, we have quite a variety of side content. Firstly there are lessons, which are short minigames in certain subjects that reward you with a unique upgrade on completion, these are incredibly satisfying to complete as every single lesson gives you an immediate benefit. I will say that for me, the English minigame was incredibly difficult, maybe I'm just stupid or something, but the short amount of time given and the amount of time needed to write the words was incredibly tight by the 4th and 5th levels. After that, there are errands, which are basically just the fetch quests of the game. They are OK. Although it is incredibly annoying how there is only a finite amount of them, meaning if you want to complete them all, you better keep a list of which ones you have/haven't done or you're gonna spend hours tracking down the last few you missed (I did not take notes). There are also races, on Bikes and on Go Karts, these were OK, but I felt like there was wayyy too many of them, none of them are a real challenge and it did become quite monotonous doing them over and over for little reward per race. Similarly, the Jobs feel quite pointless, as all they reward the player with is money, which if you aren't going for %100 completion is rather pointless, especially when you gain lots of cash through the main quest line and other activities.
The only real money sink in this game is cosmetics, and whilst I did say the money is pointless, its only pointless IF you aren't a completionist, as if you wish to buy every cosmetic in the game you WILL need that cash as there is a heap ton of cosmetics in all varieties and they aren't even overpriced if you're a casual player you can buy whatever set of cosmetics you like there's just so many.
Finally the finale in terms of side content and completionist content, the collectables. There are FOUR hard-to-obtain collectables in this game, that being the class photos, gnomes, G&G cards and the dreaded rubber bands. The photos aren't that bad as mentioned, the gnomes are quite fair considering there is only 25 of them and they are rather large and hard to miss. Then they dial it up a notch with the G&G cards as there are 40 of them scattered all over the map. And ONTOP of that, there are 75 rubber bands! And the main reward for these is just cosmetics! I think if maybe we JUST had the 75 rubber bands it wouldn't be as bad, but gees searching the map for hours upon hours upon hours just for some cosmetics, it loses its fun real fast. This issue is somewhat remedied in the Scholarship edition however as I believe most of the collectibles are marked on your map after you progress through the game, great change!
Overall, aside from the gripes I had with the story, which are overshadowed by the greater elements of it, in my opinion, most of the glaring problems relate to side content and completionist objectives. So if you've never tried Bully before, go play it! It's fantastic!
2022
Shovel Knight Dig is a fun and short Shovel Knight adventure, if you liked the original Shovel Knight then check this out! Because, unlike the other Shovel Knight spinoffs, this entry has very similar gameplay to the original. This fact is one of the game's greatest strengths as the original Shovel Knight is awesome! But, its also one of the games greatest weaknesses, as this game does not really play much like a roguelike past the surface.
The game's main structure is sort of a mix between Downwell + Mr Driller. You dig your way down whilst fighting off enemies and occasionally entering side areas for shops/secrets. This structure added with the moveset and controls of Shovel Knight are fantastic and although the game is randomly generated the chunks of level blend together well and don't just feel like pure random nonsense. The level themes are interesting enough and the soundtrack for each one (and the entire game) is kickass, although in terms of actual gameplay they don't really shake things up THAT much.
As you progress through runs you will obtain upgrades, and whilst some of them are interesting, they feel more like cheats/mini buffs rather than items for a roguelike. They don't ever change your approach to playing the game, they simply make tiny alterations. The only exception to that is the relics, which are limited-use items and again, don't really shake things up all that much.
The plot is OK, but there is far too much dialogue within the actual run, dialogue that, to me, was not even that interesting, I understood the general gist of the plot seconds after I started playing, I really didn't need to read/skip through the same dialogue boxes over and over. The story is also pretty cut and dry, it starts, and it ends, relatively quickly too which is odd for this game being a roguelike.
And with that, we begin to see the issue with this game, the replay value is minimal. Which is quite a big deal for a roguelike. Once you've beaten the game once, there is really little incentive to keep playing after you finished 1 run, and getting to the point of beating your first run is great and will take a decent amount of time. But past that, the lack of item variety, and rather samey level generation, accompanied with a story that's already over just leads you to move on to the next game.
So in conclusion, as you're making your way to completing your first run, you'll have a blast, its just more of that original Shovel Knight goodness. But past that, as a roguelike, this game has little to offer.
The game's main structure is sort of a mix between Downwell + Mr Driller. You dig your way down whilst fighting off enemies and occasionally entering side areas for shops/secrets. This structure added with the moveset and controls of Shovel Knight are fantastic and although the game is randomly generated the chunks of level blend together well and don't just feel like pure random nonsense. The level themes are interesting enough and the soundtrack for each one (and the entire game) is kickass, although in terms of actual gameplay they don't really shake things up THAT much.
As you progress through runs you will obtain upgrades, and whilst some of them are interesting, they feel more like cheats/mini buffs rather than items for a roguelike. They don't ever change your approach to playing the game, they simply make tiny alterations. The only exception to that is the relics, which are limited-use items and again, don't really shake things up all that much.
The plot is OK, but there is far too much dialogue within the actual run, dialogue that, to me, was not even that interesting, I understood the general gist of the plot seconds after I started playing, I really didn't need to read/skip through the same dialogue boxes over and over. The story is also pretty cut and dry, it starts, and it ends, relatively quickly too which is odd for this game being a roguelike.
And with that, we begin to see the issue with this game, the replay value is minimal. Which is quite a big deal for a roguelike. Once you've beaten the game once, there is really little incentive to keep playing after you finished 1 run, and getting to the point of beating your first run is great and will take a decent amount of time. But past that, the lack of item variety, and rather samey level generation, accompanied with a story that's already over just leads you to move on to the next game.
So in conclusion, as you're making your way to completing your first run, you'll have a blast, its just more of that original Shovel Knight goodness. But past that, as a roguelike, this game has little to offer.
2022
A fun, simple, pickup-and-play style rhythm game. This game seems quite oriented towards more casual players, as the game overall is incredibly straightforward, which makes sense since one of the main appeals is how amusing it can be to mess up in this game. But that's not to say its so easy it becomes boring, aiming for an S rank for some of the more brutal tracks can prove a fun challenge, although I do somewhat wish the game was less charitable with its A ranks, for me if I weren't getting an S first try, it would just be an A even if I seemingly played really poorly.
The plot elements sprinkled in are honestly kind of forced, and the card collecting aspect was very tedious, making me convert one currency, into cards, to then convert into another currency to then dump in a hole on loop over and over until the end. But with that said, I did appreciate the efforts made with these side objectives as it gave me more incentive to continue replaying the game's songs aside from achievements, as I had already played every song at least once before I even realised these elements of the game existed. I also found the "joke" facts kind of annoying after a while, the jokes weren't exactly hilarious, kind of wish they just had interesting/funny facts that were actually true instead.
The song collection is pretty satisfactory, a decent amount of them with the promise of more as Free DLC. I do hope that one day this game gets good mod support as I feel community-made songs would vastly increase this game's appeal, quite surprised this wasn't included in the release.
One last nitpick is the lack of a character creation system, the characters in this game look like Mii/Xbox live avatar rip-offs, yet you can only choose from premade ones, why? Even if the character creator was super basic and literally only offered the hair and facial features currently in the game (which is not many) it would just add that extra little bit of charm to the game, which is sort of the crux of the enjoyment of this game.
Overall a quirky rhythm game with a seemingly bright future. Good game, but maybe wait for a sale.
The plot elements sprinkled in are honestly kind of forced, and the card collecting aspect was very tedious, making me convert one currency, into cards, to then convert into another currency to then dump in a hole on loop over and over until the end. But with that said, I did appreciate the efforts made with these side objectives as it gave me more incentive to continue replaying the game's songs aside from achievements, as I had already played every song at least once before I even realised these elements of the game existed. I also found the "joke" facts kind of annoying after a while, the jokes weren't exactly hilarious, kind of wish they just had interesting/funny facts that were actually true instead.
The song collection is pretty satisfactory, a decent amount of them with the promise of more as Free DLC. I do hope that one day this game gets good mod support as I feel community-made songs would vastly increase this game's appeal, quite surprised this wasn't included in the release.
One last nitpick is the lack of a character creation system, the characters in this game look like Mii/Xbox live avatar rip-offs, yet you can only choose from premade ones, why? Even if the character creator was super basic and literally only offered the hair and facial features currently in the game (which is not many) it would just add that extra little bit of charm to the game, which is sort of the crux of the enjoyment of this game.
Overall a quirky rhythm game with a seemingly bright future. Good game, but maybe wait for a sale.
2020
For this new version of Sonic World I recall the devs wanting to aim more for Quality over Quantity, removing most of the characters and stages to refine the select few they kept. I feel this was probably the best decision for this fan project. But even with that said, do not be mistaken, this fan game has a TON of unique characters and stages, far more than any other fangame or any other GAME in general really, previously it more felt there were heaps of honestly very weak content that largely overshadowed the quality within, whereas now the actual meat of this game is all your left with (Which is a good thing).
The gameplay has this free and loose feel to it, which compliments its open levels. The homing attack/air dash that most characters come equipped with, for example, is very lenient and lasts for what feels like forever in terms of its reach, which allows you to be a lot quicker and more reckless with your control/movements, and most moves in the game follow this type of philosophy, allowing for you to be fast and free with your movements, without careening of the side of the level to your death all the time, which is an issue I have in games like Sonic Heroes, which also have fast movement options.
The character selection is great, each one has a totally unique moveset, yet somehow fits into the uniform style of the game making everyone viable. It's more akin to the classic Sonic titles, whereas Sonic/Tails/Knuckles in Sonic 3 for example, all have unique moves, but maintain the same capability to blast through any level and with the mission structure of this game. The best part about the range of characters is that each character CAN excel in all mission types, but each in their own unique way, for example, you could still use a speed type character in a killing enemies mission, by blitzing all of the enemies with a homing attack chain, or you could beat them all up in a more traditional way with a power type character.
The level variety is also pretty great, pulling from a range of Sonic titles, and each level has 5 distinct missions, and even better, a lot of the missions are unique spins of the level theme, rather than a simple challenge. This can range from a second act to the level, or a totally different stage based around beating enemies. Each first act contains 5 Red Rings to find, which I found were hidden pretty reasonably, and once those are found you unlock a final Encore mission to the level, revamping the level theme into something totally different, with some pretty deep cut theme pulls, from Sonic Shuffle to Sonic R.
The game's graphical style is, amateurish. Nothing terrible but nothing great, the lighting is lacking and the textures are OK. The animation on the characters however has been entirely revamped and looks spectacular.
The seemingly "big new addition" to this release is "The Island" which is an "open world" area for you to explore, with some bonus challenge acts to unlock. But the island is more or less barren and looks really terrible compared to all the other levels in the game. The challenge acts also aren't tracked and seem quite redundant when we already have 5 missions per act, these random extra challenges just seem tacked on, and would've made more sense just having them with the other missions, not to mention these ones aren't tracked and don't unlock a thing.
Now, the bugs. This game for me was quite unstable. Every time I boot up a level I'm faced with a long load time, and a 50/50 that the game will crash and if it does load a 50/50 the music won't play until I reboot the whole game. I also had random moments of immense lag and slow down if I spent too long in a level / restarted too many times. In normal gameplay, this lag doesn't come up, but if you're doing a hard mission or something, the lag after being there for to long doesn't exactly make it easier. These load time issues and crashing issues put me off even really bothering investing much time into the Chao garden in this game, which did intrigue me at first, but I can't be bothered to sit through long load times just to crash a 100 times to keep visiting my Chao.
But even despite these issues, I have now %100 this game, all S ranks, even finished all the stupid island stuff. So is it worth playing? Definitely! And on top of all the great content left behind after the cleanup in this version, most if not all of the old, not so A tier content can be readded through the use of mods!
The gameplay has this free and loose feel to it, which compliments its open levels. The homing attack/air dash that most characters come equipped with, for example, is very lenient and lasts for what feels like forever in terms of its reach, which allows you to be a lot quicker and more reckless with your control/movements, and most moves in the game follow this type of philosophy, allowing for you to be fast and free with your movements, without careening of the side of the level to your death all the time, which is an issue I have in games like Sonic Heroes, which also have fast movement options.
The character selection is great, each one has a totally unique moveset, yet somehow fits into the uniform style of the game making everyone viable. It's more akin to the classic Sonic titles, whereas Sonic/Tails/Knuckles in Sonic 3 for example, all have unique moves, but maintain the same capability to blast through any level and with the mission structure of this game. The best part about the range of characters is that each character CAN excel in all mission types, but each in their own unique way, for example, you could still use a speed type character in a killing enemies mission, by blitzing all of the enemies with a homing attack chain, or you could beat them all up in a more traditional way with a power type character.
The level variety is also pretty great, pulling from a range of Sonic titles, and each level has 5 distinct missions, and even better, a lot of the missions are unique spins of the level theme, rather than a simple challenge. This can range from a second act to the level, or a totally different stage based around beating enemies. Each first act contains 5 Red Rings to find, which I found were hidden pretty reasonably, and once those are found you unlock a final Encore mission to the level, revamping the level theme into something totally different, with some pretty deep cut theme pulls, from Sonic Shuffle to Sonic R.
The game's graphical style is, amateurish. Nothing terrible but nothing great, the lighting is lacking and the textures are OK. The animation on the characters however has been entirely revamped and looks spectacular.
The seemingly "big new addition" to this release is "The Island" which is an "open world" area for you to explore, with some bonus challenge acts to unlock. But the island is more or less barren and looks really terrible compared to all the other levels in the game. The challenge acts also aren't tracked and seem quite redundant when we already have 5 missions per act, these random extra challenges just seem tacked on, and would've made more sense just having them with the other missions, not to mention these ones aren't tracked and don't unlock a thing.
Now, the bugs. This game for me was quite unstable. Every time I boot up a level I'm faced with a long load time, and a 50/50 that the game will crash and if it does load a 50/50 the music won't play until I reboot the whole game. I also had random moments of immense lag and slow down if I spent too long in a level / restarted too many times. In normal gameplay, this lag doesn't come up, but if you're doing a hard mission or something, the lag after being there for to long doesn't exactly make it easier. These load time issues and crashing issues put me off even really bothering investing much time into the Chao garden in this game, which did intrigue me at first, but I can't be bothered to sit through long load times just to crash a 100 times to keep visiting my Chao.
But even despite these issues, I have now %100 this game, all S ranks, even finished all the stupid island stuff. So is it worth playing? Definitely! And on top of all the great content left behind after the cleanup in this version, most if not all of the old, not so A tier content can be readded through the use of mods!
2021
This review contains spoilers
I will split the review into 5 segments, if you are yet to play this game, DO NOT read anything past Chapter 1, as this game's twists and turns are one of the main selling points, I will rank each segment of the game independently to give you an idea of my feelings towards them even for spoiler-free reading.
CHAPTER 1: 9/10 AMAZING
I adore the aesthetics of this game, the creepy atmosphere and intrigue of what's to come are really well done. The gameplay loop also works great, The fundamentals of the card gameplay is really fun, and have a lot of depth to it with deck building, and optimal move planning, whilst keeping the fundamentals relatively straightforward, slowly expanding the more loops you go through. The only downside is the lack of much replayability, especially once you have unlocked all of the hidden upgrades, you usually just end up sweeping every single run, but thankfully this has now been remedied by the free DLC which expands Chapter 1 to be basically the entire game, which is awesome!
CHAPTER 2: 2/10 POOR
I was honestly insanely disappointed by chapter 2. It takes the great gameplay of chapter 1, and throws you in the deep end, adding in magic, battery and dividing the blood and bone cards into more distinct categories. All of which is relatively useless, considering all the bosses and enemies are painfully easy now that you can create your own deck entirely at your own will, picking any cards you like any moment. The graphics are replaced with the most uninspired "RETRO" "8 BIT" "So retro!" style that every half-assed nostalgia bait £1 steam game has, and the gameplay loop is changed from a randomized roguelike, to a straightforward, kill X enemies then boss, 4 times, loop. There is very little in terms of non-linearity, there is a few hidden rooms that have what is equivalent to nothing in them, and you can choose between 2 bosses what order you do them in, but that is it, meaning there is little to no replay value at all. The dialogue from the characters in this chapter is also painfully boring.
CHAPTER 3: 7/10 GREAT
Thankfully once Chapter 2 ends we get back to the good stuff, the aesthetics are returned to be more close to Chapter 1, but now with a techno/computer theming to it, and the card types are pulled back to be focused on the battery typed ones. Now that we are limited to one card type again, it actually gives you time to learn how they work, and actually master the gameplay, rather than just sweeping everything with OP decks every game in chapter 2. The gameplay loop is kind of similiar to chapter 2, but, just better, as now the map is more open and theres more player choice involved in where you go, or atleast it gives the illusion that, that is the case. The bosses are also much better, having pretty cool gimmicks in concept, however in execution, alot of them do not really put up much of a challenge, and a lot of the time actually cause the fights to be easier rather than harder. The dialogue is also a lot more bearable than in Chapter 2 aswell. The way that chapter 2 is sandwiched between the fantastic Chapter 1, and then the great Chapter 3, just makes it stand out even further, and really highlights how shit it was, considering Chapter 1 and 3 are much much more similiar to eachother.
END GAME: 4/10 OK
In the finale we are given a brief glance at what the other types of cards could look like, if they were given the Chapter 1/3 treatment, (again showing how chapter 2 sucks in comparison), starting off with Bone cards and then magic. This segment is kind of cool, watching everything be deleted as you play, but, its really just a super long, boring cutscene where you pretend to play, but its honestly rather boring as you very quickly realise, for example, in the magic fight, that there is no way this game is gonna end anytime soon. I feel like this segment is mainly ruined due to my opinions on the overarching plot, but I will get to that shortly.
PLOT: 2/10 CRINGE
The actual plot of each chapter with you and the card master, things, is actually pretty great, especially the writing of Leshy and P03, and the idea of these cards being alive within the game inscryption and fighting over controlling it, is pretty cool, and the fourth wall breaks linking to your computer files and the like are super cool, or atleast, they would be, if they actually WERE fourth wall breaks, but no, for some reason the devs decided to make this contained within its own universe, having you actually be seeing the game from some random guys perspective, that being Luke, I have to just ask, why? I could suspend my disbelief and buy into the idea of this really being the game itself on my computer for the sake of the game splot, but instead I have to see some other random guy react to the events playing out on my game, with insanely cringe """horror""" elements thrown in. Not to mention the demands of the company to the random guy in question dont even make any sense, he emails them saying he has their game, and they respond saying "We know nothing about that game, we have nothing to do with it, also we own it and if you dont send it to us we will sue you" ????. Having to sit and watch 4 minute long videos of practically nothing happening for the sake of "lore", lore that is not even well written or entertaining was insanely boring and a real pace breaker. Not only that, but the terrible "retro" graphics and font from chapter 2 are carried over into the UI of watching the videos, which are meant to be like, saved on a computer? But it doesnt even look like a computer video players UI, its super jarring and does not work at all. Overall, insanely cringe, and ruined the ending for me entirely.
OVERALL: 8/10
The good elements of this game carry it a ton, even if for some moments the quality, really really dips. The lack of replayability also dampens the experience for the type of game it seems to be on the surface, but as a one time playthrough its a great time, and I would recommend playing it through to the end to see the high moments.
CHAPTER 1: 9/10 AMAZING
I adore the aesthetics of this game, the creepy atmosphere and intrigue of what's to come are really well done. The gameplay loop also works great, The fundamentals of the card gameplay is really fun, and have a lot of depth to it with deck building, and optimal move planning, whilst keeping the fundamentals relatively straightforward, slowly expanding the more loops you go through. The only downside is the lack of much replayability, especially once you have unlocked all of the hidden upgrades, you usually just end up sweeping every single run, but thankfully this has now been remedied by the free DLC which expands Chapter 1 to be basically the entire game, which is awesome!
CHAPTER 2: 2/10 POOR
I was honestly insanely disappointed by chapter 2. It takes the great gameplay of chapter 1, and throws you in the deep end, adding in magic, battery and dividing the blood and bone cards into more distinct categories. All of which is relatively useless, considering all the bosses and enemies are painfully easy now that you can create your own deck entirely at your own will, picking any cards you like any moment. The graphics are replaced with the most uninspired "RETRO" "8 BIT" "So retro!" style that every half-assed nostalgia bait £1 steam game has, and the gameplay loop is changed from a randomized roguelike, to a straightforward, kill X enemies then boss, 4 times, loop. There is very little in terms of non-linearity, there is a few hidden rooms that have what is equivalent to nothing in them, and you can choose between 2 bosses what order you do them in, but that is it, meaning there is little to no replay value at all. The dialogue from the characters in this chapter is also painfully boring.
CHAPTER 3: 7/10 GREAT
Thankfully once Chapter 2 ends we get back to the good stuff, the aesthetics are returned to be more close to Chapter 1, but now with a techno/computer theming to it, and the card types are pulled back to be focused on the battery typed ones. Now that we are limited to one card type again, it actually gives you time to learn how they work, and actually master the gameplay, rather than just sweeping everything with OP decks every game in chapter 2. The gameplay loop is kind of similiar to chapter 2, but, just better, as now the map is more open and theres more player choice involved in where you go, or atleast it gives the illusion that, that is the case. The bosses are also much better, having pretty cool gimmicks in concept, however in execution, alot of them do not really put up much of a challenge, and a lot of the time actually cause the fights to be easier rather than harder. The dialogue is also a lot more bearable than in Chapter 2 aswell. The way that chapter 2 is sandwiched between the fantastic Chapter 1, and then the great Chapter 3, just makes it stand out even further, and really highlights how shit it was, considering Chapter 1 and 3 are much much more similiar to eachother.
END GAME: 4/10 OK
In the finale we are given a brief glance at what the other types of cards could look like, if they were given the Chapter 1/3 treatment, (again showing how chapter 2 sucks in comparison), starting off with Bone cards and then magic. This segment is kind of cool, watching everything be deleted as you play, but, its really just a super long, boring cutscene where you pretend to play, but its honestly rather boring as you very quickly realise, for example, in the magic fight, that there is no way this game is gonna end anytime soon. I feel like this segment is mainly ruined due to my opinions on the overarching plot, but I will get to that shortly.
PLOT: 2/10 CRINGE
The actual plot of each chapter with you and the card master, things, is actually pretty great, especially the writing of Leshy and P03, and the idea of these cards being alive within the game inscryption and fighting over controlling it, is pretty cool, and the fourth wall breaks linking to your computer files and the like are super cool, or atleast, they would be, if they actually WERE fourth wall breaks, but no, for some reason the devs decided to make this contained within its own universe, having you actually be seeing the game from some random guys perspective, that being Luke, I have to just ask, why? I could suspend my disbelief and buy into the idea of this really being the game itself on my computer for the sake of the game splot, but instead I have to see some other random guy react to the events playing out on my game, with insanely cringe """horror""" elements thrown in. Not to mention the demands of the company to the random guy in question dont even make any sense, he emails them saying he has their game, and they respond saying "We know nothing about that game, we have nothing to do with it, also we own it and if you dont send it to us we will sue you" ????. Having to sit and watch 4 minute long videos of practically nothing happening for the sake of "lore", lore that is not even well written or entertaining was insanely boring and a real pace breaker. Not only that, but the terrible "retro" graphics and font from chapter 2 are carried over into the UI of watching the videos, which are meant to be like, saved on a computer? But it doesnt even look like a computer video players UI, its super jarring and does not work at all. Overall, insanely cringe, and ruined the ending for me entirely.
OVERALL: 8/10
The good elements of this game carry it a ton, even if for some moments the quality, really really dips. The lack of replayability also dampens the experience for the type of game it seems to be on the surface, but as a one time playthrough its a great time, and I would recommend playing it through to the end to see the high moments.
The feeling of momentum in Spark 3 is great. It plays similar to the Sonic Adventure titles but with a lot more speed-oriented gameplay, the level design is a huge step up from Spark 2 in my opinion, with a lot less "run in a straight line really really quickly" style design, there are still moments like this sprinkled in, but they function more as cool set pieces rather than defining the level design. Replaying the levels for the medals reveals how truly open they are, fans begging for a more open sonic title akin to Sonic Utopia should really give this a try.
The combat gameplay is hit or miss, at no point did I find it annoying or unbearable, but a lot of the boss fights boil down to standing in front of them, spamming attacks, and just shielding. I was a bit taken aback to see how little prevalence the copy forms/Spark Powers had, they were pretty important in Spark 1 and 2, and freshened up the combat with a bunch of new moves all the time. But in my first playthrough, I only saw ONE unique transformation for the whole game.
They even have vehicle gameplay, a plane, and a car! And thankfully, they are brief and easy to complete. They both maintain the high-speed feel of the normal gameplay, especially the car, and are very forgiving if you play them rather sloppily, you can easily just no brain your way through every one of these sections, OR you could play them properly and go for better times/higher points, which I think is the best way to handle these short alternate gameplay styles. For some reason when I first ever played the car section I kept flipping on the roof and getting stuck over and over which was really annoying, but I never have this happen anymore so I guess I was just doing something wrong somehow, really weird.
The graphical style suffices, some cutscenes have cool shots and look great, but aside from that it is serviceable, I would say the visuals are "Good" at best. The soundtrack is similar, with a few good tracks but nothing that really blew me away, I think Spark 1 still has the better soundtrack by a mile. The level themes are great, with clear inspirations from not only the Adventure titles but also from Heroes and even Shadow The Hedgehog.
The story is kind of a mess but entertaining all the same. I recall really hating the dialogue and plot of Spark 2, and no such hatred was felt for the storyline or characters in this entry. I'm pretty fond of Spark's character here, and again the cutscenes look pretty cool and are animated well enough. The ending is a little bit insane, but the good type of insane, although the transformations and alternate forms are kind of excessive and read off like bad fan fiction, but eh, I like a bit of cheese in my platformer.
Overall if you're a fan of the previous Spark games or a fan of momentum-based platformers as a whole, this will scratch that itch,
The combat gameplay is hit or miss, at no point did I find it annoying or unbearable, but a lot of the boss fights boil down to standing in front of them, spamming attacks, and just shielding. I was a bit taken aback to see how little prevalence the copy forms/Spark Powers had, they were pretty important in Spark 1 and 2, and freshened up the combat with a bunch of new moves all the time. But in my first playthrough, I only saw ONE unique transformation for the whole game.
They even have vehicle gameplay, a plane, and a car! And thankfully, they are brief and easy to complete. They both maintain the high-speed feel of the normal gameplay, especially the car, and are very forgiving if you play them rather sloppily, you can easily just no brain your way through every one of these sections, OR you could play them properly and go for better times/higher points, which I think is the best way to handle these short alternate gameplay styles. For some reason when I first ever played the car section I kept flipping on the roof and getting stuck over and over which was really annoying, but I never have this happen anymore so I guess I was just doing something wrong somehow, really weird.
The graphical style suffices, some cutscenes have cool shots and look great, but aside from that it is serviceable, I would say the visuals are "Good" at best. The soundtrack is similar, with a few good tracks but nothing that really blew me away, I think Spark 1 still has the better soundtrack by a mile. The level themes are great, with clear inspirations from not only the Adventure titles but also from Heroes and even Shadow The Hedgehog.
The story is kind of a mess but entertaining all the same. I recall really hating the dialogue and plot of Spark 2, and no such hatred was felt for the storyline or characters in this entry. I'm pretty fond of Spark's character here, and again the cutscenes look pretty cool and are animated well enough. The ending is a little bit insane, but the good type of insane, although the transformations and alternate forms are kind of excessive and read off like bad fan fiction, but eh, I like a bit of cheese in my platformer.
Overall if you're a fan of the previous Spark games or a fan of momentum-based platformers as a whole, this will scratch that itch,
2022
I played this as somebody who is NOT a fnaf fan, I am aware of the game's existence and have tried out Fnaf 1 for a few brief moments but that's about it. So for the most part any deep-cut lore or fan service will go over my head, which i'm sure for a lot of fnaf fans is the entire appeal of any game in the franchise, However, with that said, I still did actually really like this game.
For starters, the most obvious part of the game, the graphical style, is awesome. The Atari / Arcade style graphics are a nicely done inspired tribute to the style, not some shoddy "So retro!" type shit you would perhaps expect from such a title. The implementation of being able to actually see the Arcade cabinet at all times it also stellar, it looks fantastic with so much detail and flourishes. They really did not need to add such great detail to what is essentially a game that "Looks old", but they did and for me, it really paid off. The soundtrack accompanying is also great, and was another opportunity for them to leech of the "Its old so it sounds terrible" crutch, which can especially be applied to these Atari esque titles, but they didn't and made some pretty great sounding tracks while still fitting the style.
The gameplay at first seems like it's going to be realllly bad, but thankfully, it isn't! At the beginning of the game you can do nothing but basically, just sit and spam attack, praying you to win. It's like this for quite a while and is rather boring, I can see how it would immediately put people off, being stuck with such bare-bones gameplay for what feels like half the game. But, by the time you complete the first half, you now have more moves and more challenging opponents, which leads to a quite fun and strategic combat system that at the heart is still incredibly simple, reminiscent of the games its paying tribute to, whilst maintaining an actual sense of playability.
My enjoyment of the story will probably not compare to that of an actual fnaf fan, but even then, I still thought it was pretty good. Nothing mindblowing or anything I'm sure the lore implications or whatever carry it, but the lite horror elements are well done and are not super over the top as to avoid them being cringey. Although most of the Horror stuff is actually kept a secret, playing the base game you probably wouldn't even know there's really any horror-type content to begin with. My main gripe with this is that the main plotline just sort of abruptly ends and isn't satisfying at all, this is clearly done on purpose to encourage finding all the secrets and true ending, but by itself, the "ingame" plot is very basic and not that interesting, if you do plan to check this out make sure to go for %100 completion to get your worth from it.
For starters, the most obvious part of the game, the graphical style, is awesome. The Atari / Arcade style graphics are a nicely done inspired tribute to the style, not some shoddy "So retro!" type shit you would perhaps expect from such a title. The implementation of being able to actually see the Arcade cabinet at all times it also stellar, it looks fantastic with so much detail and flourishes. They really did not need to add such great detail to what is essentially a game that "Looks old", but they did and for me, it really paid off. The soundtrack accompanying is also great, and was another opportunity for them to leech of the "Its old so it sounds terrible" crutch, which can especially be applied to these Atari esque titles, but they didn't and made some pretty great sounding tracks while still fitting the style.
The gameplay at first seems like it's going to be realllly bad, but thankfully, it isn't! At the beginning of the game you can do nothing but basically, just sit and spam attack, praying you to win. It's like this for quite a while and is rather boring, I can see how it would immediately put people off, being stuck with such bare-bones gameplay for what feels like half the game. But, by the time you complete the first half, you now have more moves and more challenging opponents, which leads to a quite fun and strategic combat system that at the heart is still incredibly simple, reminiscent of the games its paying tribute to, whilst maintaining an actual sense of playability.
My enjoyment of the story will probably not compare to that of an actual fnaf fan, but even then, I still thought it was pretty good. Nothing mindblowing or anything I'm sure the lore implications or whatever carry it, but the lite horror elements are well done and are not super over the top as to avoid them being cringey. Although most of the Horror stuff is actually kept a secret, playing the base game you probably wouldn't even know there's really any horror-type content to begin with. My main gripe with this is that the main plotline just sort of abruptly ends and isn't satisfying at all, this is clearly done on purpose to encourage finding all the secrets and true ending, but by itself, the "ingame" plot is very basic and not that interesting, if you do plan to check this out make sure to go for %100 completion to get your worth from it.
2021
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.
Unlike previous entries, Redguard is not an RPG, its an action-adventure game inspired by the likes of Tomb Raider, so before you even consider playing this entry in the Elder Scrolls series you need to swallow that pill.
This genre switch up means key aspects of the Elder Scrolls series are gone, in this adventure you play as Cyrus, not a self insert. The story and characters in this game are the best thing this game has to offer. Tons of dialogue and great characters, and a much smaller but now more intimate world that you live in, unlike other Elder Scrolls titles I can actually remember a majority of the NPCs despite only playing this game once, but that is ofcourse because there is so little compared to other titles.
This is also the best looking Elder Scrolls game so far, its fully 3D! Look at those sexy polygons. The soundtrack is also decent, although not much selection and some of the loops and intensity of this adventure styled heroic soundtrack can cause it to get quite annoying when doing dungeons or activities that force you to listen to the same over the top tune for extended periods of time.
Unfortunately, past its charm, Redguard has very little to offer in terms of fun gameplay. Its action/adventure style dungeons are a slog, with tank style control, arch jump platforming segments abound. The combat is a joke, and since this isnt an RPG there is little reason to even engage in it, as this isnt an RPG, you gain no exp or are given any reason to ever fight anything.
And despite this NOT being an RPG, since its an elder scrolls game, it sort of, pretends to be, with a small world for you to explore and a somewhat non linear quest structure. But dear lord, travelling around Stros M'Kai beyond the main city is a nightmare, agonisingly slow walks sometimes interrupted by a guard trying to stab you and nothing else interesting or exciting.
The story itself is entertaining enough, but most of it is told by you just simply standing, talking to an NPC for forever, some key characters you only talk to one time, but theyre still key characters since that one conversation can last longer than an entire dungeon. Infact, I would say talking to people probably takes up the majority of this game, the dungeons are extremely sparce in this game, most of your time will just be spent walking around and talking to folk.
Overall, this game is not good. Thankfully I became quite attached to the characters and enjoyed listening to them blabber on for forever, but if the characters don't grab you, the gameplay certainly won't.
This genre switch up means key aspects of the Elder Scrolls series are gone, in this adventure you play as Cyrus, not a self insert. The story and characters in this game are the best thing this game has to offer. Tons of dialogue and great characters, and a much smaller but now more intimate world that you live in, unlike other Elder Scrolls titles I can actually remember a majority of the NPCs despite only playing this game once, but that is ofcourse because there is so little compared to other titles.
This is also the best looking Elder Scrolls game so far, its fully 3D! Look at those sexy polygons. The soundtrack is also decent, although not much selection and some of the loops and intensity of this adventure styled heroic soundtrack can cause it to get quite annoying when doing dungeons or activities that force you to listen to the same over the top tune for extended periods of time.
Unfortunately, past its charm, Redguard has very little to offer in terms of fun gameplay. Its action/adventure style dungeons are a slog, with tank style control, arch jump platforming segments abound. The combat is a joke, and since this isnt an RPG there is little reason to even engage in it, as this isnt an RPG, you gain no exp or are given any reason to ever fight anything.
And despite this NOT being an RPG, since its an elder scrolls game, it sort of, pretends to be, with a small world for you to explore and a somewhat non linear quest structure. But dear lord, travelling around Stros M'Kai beyond the main city is a nightmare, agonisingly slow walks sometimes interrupted by a guard trying to stab you and nothing else interesting or exciting.
The story itself is entertaining enough, but most of it is told by you just simply standing, talking to an NPC for forever, some key characters you only talk to one time, but theyre still key characters since that one conversation can last longer than an entire dungeon. Infact, I would say talking to people probably takes up the majority of this game, the dungeons are extremely sparce in this game, most of your time will just be spent walking around and talking to folk.
Overall, this game is not good. Thankfully I became quite attached to the characters and enjoyed listening to them blabber on for forever, but if the characters don't grab you, the gameplay certainly won't.
2022
Another game based around "alternate endings" where, in reality, the endings are just fail conditions/deaths.
This game has the grace to allow you to skip previously done segments when retrying, but the progression is pretty painful and uneventful. The first part is a good buildup, but the second half... oh god... FIND THE NUMBERS TO OPEN THE KEYDOOR. Riveting... I honestly thought the keydoor was some kind of gag you could easily skip with an interesting puzzle/solution, especially due to the joke "check" button, but no, you seriously have to scrape as much as you can out of these two, rather baron tiny rooms to get all the numbers. And then thats it, the game ends. "Are you disappointed?" Yes.
PS. Despite this game being about toilets, you cannot shit and you cannot flush the toilet. Practically unplayable.
This game has the grace to allow you to skip previously done segments when retrying, but the progression is pretty painful and uneventful. The first part is a good buildup, but the second half... oh god... FIND THE NUMBERS TO OPEN THE KEYDOOR. Riveting... I honestly thought the keydoor was some kind of gag you could easily skip with an interesting puzzle/solution, especially due to the joke "check" button, but no, you seriously have to scrape as much as you can out of these two, rather baron tiny rooms to get all the numbers. And then thats it, the game ends. "Are you disappointed?" Yes.
PS. Despite this game being about toilets, you cannot shit and you cannot flush the toilet. Practically unplayable.
This game feels like a big step back from Daggerfall. I think perhaps I'm just not a fan of the premise of this game, as much of the things I take issue with are, TECHNICALLY an improvement (?) or at least seem to be what the designers did intend to do. For example, the graphics are "Better" as they use images more often than pixel art, however, the low res images and models look so ugly in my opinion. The music is also much more atmospheric, which I suppose is "better" but to me, it is so much more boring and drab compared to the great soundtracks of Arena and Daggerfall.
The world itself is also not a "World" it is simply a building, a very boring building in my opinion with giant open rooms... that are empty a lot of the time, the plot of this game is different to the previous entries as it is stationary, we aren't trecking Tamriel or exploring Iliac Bay, we are instead stuck in a dark gloomy building. Perhaps to some this is an interesting spice up to the series, a more dark, atmospheric setting, but to me, drab, boring and painful to sit through.
The game just overall feels a lot more aimless than Daggerfall or Arena, which is saying a lot considering Daggerfall was an entirely open-ended non-linear adventure, but here you are just placed in a building with no clue where to go or what's going on, and this is by design, the plot is that your player character is mislead into this building and has no idea what's going on.
The mechanics themselves also take a hit, gone are the vastly superior mapping from Daggerfall, and gone are the bare minimum basics of Elder Scrolls, the rest system. The rest system in Arena is tedious, but viable, which was then greatly improved in Daggerfall, so of course, Battlespire chooses to remove it entirely. It does have the grace of giving gradual regen, which is a good addition, but now instead of simply skipping ahead time, your only option is to not rest at all, or to just, wait. Even the character creation and levelling is somehow worse, as youre now given a ton of "points" rather than simply lowering stat numbers, but you must divy up these "points" between every single part of your character. Once again this is an ""Improvement"" as you can dedicate these points to whatever you want, however it just over complicates things as it is pointless to give these points to certain aspects that you can level manually, whilst other things these points can improve are exclusive to this system. Its just a mess, a mess that did not need to be made as it was better as it was previously.
A good addition to this game is the dialogue options with enemies, you can now talk and interact with almost every enemy with branching options for you to choose. This is far better than the NPCs of Arena and Daggerfall, as they mainly exist to either just give you a quest or tell you a location of something, whereas here you can actually have conversations, and all the dialogue is voice-acted to boot. This is one of the few things that is a direct upgrade and is an evolution of the Elder Scrolls formula, rather than a reduction.
I will note that I did not complete this game, nor even play it for a substantial while, so perhaps the game vastly improves going forward. But for the brief time I did have with it, it was a boring slog, so I quit before I lost all will to live. Perhaps if the premise intrigues you of the switch up to the setting/structure this may be of interest to you, but for me, this game is a miss.
The world itself is also not a "World" it is simply a building, a very boring building in my opinion with giant open rooms... that are empty a lot of the time, the plot of this game is different to the previous entries as it is stationary, we aren't trecking Tamriel or exploring Iliac Bay, we are instead stuck in a dark gloomy building. Perhaps to some this is an interesting spice up to the series, a more dark, atmospheric setting, but to me, drab, boring and painful to sit through.
The game just overall feels a lot more aimless than Daggerfall or Arena, which is saying a lot considering Daggerfall was an entirely open-ended non-linear adventure, but here you are just placed in a building with no clue where to go or what's going on, and this is by design, the plot is that your player character is mislead into this building and has no idea what's going on.
The mechanics themselves also take a hit, gone are the vastly superior mapping from Daggerfall, and gone are the bare minimum basics of Elder Scrolls, the rest system. The rest system in Arena is tedious, but viable, which was then greatly improved in Daggerfall, so of course, Battlespire chooses to remove it entirely. It does have the grace of giving gradual regen, which is a good addition, but now instead of simply skipping ahead time, your only option is to not rest at all, or to just, wait. Even the character creation and levelling is somehow worse, as youre now given a ton of "points" rather than simply lowering stat numbers, but you must divy up these "points" between every single part of your character. Once again this is an ""Improvement"" as you can dedicate these points to whatever you want, however it just over complicates things as it is pointless to give these points to certain aspects that you can level manually, whilst other things these points can improve are exclusive to this system. Its just a mess, a mess that did not need to be made as it was better as it was previously.
A good addition to this game is the dialogue options with enemies, you can now talk and interact with almost every enemy with branching options for you to choose. This is far better than the NPCs of Arena and Daggerfall, as they mainly exist to either just give you a quest or tell you a location of something, whereas here you can actually have conversations, and all the dialogue is voice-acted to boot. This is one of the few things that is a direct upgrade and is an evolution of the Elder Scrolls formula, rather than a reduction.
I will note that I did not complete this game, nor even play it for a substantial while, so perhaps the game vastly improves going forward. But for the brief time I did have with it, it was a boring slog, so I quit before I lost all will to live. Perhaps if the premise intrigues you of the switch up to the setting/structure this may be of interest to you, but for me, this game is a miss.