This game sucks. Sorry, but it does.
One of my earliest memories of being on the Internet outside of Roblox and this one other niche game-making website was finding out that Sonic Generations wasn't the grand finale to the franchise that ten-year-old RJ could only picture it as.
I think I speak for the entire fandom when I say that just about everyone who still cared about Sonic by this point was on the edge of their seat, deep in anticipation of what the next big, mainline Sonic game could possibly be. (We don't talk about Sonic """"4"""")
Then, the reveal trailer dropped. I think my brain went on autopilot when I was watching it. I was just so confused, and too young to process what I was witnessing - but I understood one thing: This was not Sonic Generations 2. This was not Sonic Colours 2. This wasn't even Sonic Unleashed 2. This was something else entirely.
And hey, who knows, y'know? "Something else entirely" wasn't the worst thing this game could've been, hot off the trail of an incredibly fun, well-made game with next to no originality factor whatsoever. Unfortunately, however, this game turned out to be a slimy example of "too different."
There is a genuine element of appeal here, let me get that out of the way now; I found legitimate enjoyment in a lot of aspects of this game. It's creative and conscious of its predecessors in more ways than people let on. For example, I didn't know it even had a bounce until I played it myself, and you'd think the Internet would've been screaming over that, considering how infatuated everyone is with Sonic Adventure 2. There's a fairly creative story premise at play here, and even the antagonists aren't inherently bad ideas. The art-style, while I and many others personally find it unpleasant and mundane, never evokes the feeling of "they weren't trying." There's some clever ideas, gimmicks, more effort to cross over with other franchises than ever before, and until the updated Sonic Frontiers, the best post-game content we've ever had, by far. That's not a high bar, but it's still an achievement nonetheless.
Sonic Lost World can be summed up in one sentence:
"This game had already aged poorly when it first came out."
- Me, circa 2023
To elaborate, this game clings so tightly onto design philosophies and concepts that are either dragged - kicking and screaming - out of their appropriate time periods, or simply deeply flawed to begin with. All-in-all, this is an insanely frustrating experience.
My first time playing Sonic Lost World was the 3DS version, which I found myself rather apathetic towards, it was an inoffensive, weird game that felt more like a discarded, high-ish-effort spin-off than a big mainline follow-up to Sonic Generations, but despite my poor memory of the experience, I must've enjoyed it, because once I beat it, I even started a hard mode playthrough (very cool idea on the developers' part, by the way). It took me about nine years before I actually had the opportunity to play the official version, with-which I downloaded a few mods to get closer to the proper Wii U experience, as well as the community code that added a retry button, because I did NOT have the patience to put up with this game's rubbish without one - still, the broken resolution and janky controls were more than enough to break me even without the PC port's numerous other ridiculous problems.
Playing this game is like being Sisyphus, pushing that boulder endlessly up the mountain. I don't mean in the sense that it feels never-ending, but rather, every time you get a good flow going, or feel anything other than animosity towards the experience, you'll receive a swift slap to the face from yet another inconsistency or piece of game design so questionable, it makes you wonder if this was an early testing ground for AI Game Development.
I know this review has been scathing up until this point, but I will give credit where credit is due, and say that this game did evoke many thoughts within me of how much potential it has, and how it's completely understandable to find enjoyment within the spaces between its flaws. It's by no means broken, or anything like that, it's just... a mess.
Though, to be honest, most of my personal enjoyment of the game came out of repeatedly thinking about how miserable I was with Sonic Adventure 2, and finding it difficult to believe that this could possibly get any worse, which it didn't, surprisingly.
I don't know what else to say about this game, really, it's just a weird specimen of a product that had the ingredients of greatness tossed into it, but they were all mouldy, and were thrown against the wall repeatedly, in hopes of at least some of them sticking. Did some of it stick? Well, maybe, but the ingredients aren't any less rotten because of it. God only knows what they were trying to cook with that mission/achievement system.
At the end of the day, this is an incredibly stupid, low-mediocre game that I can't really explain nor justify the fun I had within, but hey, at least it wasn't so torturous that it took me nearly a year to beat, right?
...How did my life wind up at this point?
One of my earliest memories of being on the Internet outside of Roblox and this one other niche game-making website was finding out that Sonic Generations wasn't the grand finale to the franchise that ten-year-old RJ could only picture it as.
I think I speak for the entire fandom when I say that just about everyone who still cared about Sonic by this point was on the edge of their seat, deep in anticipation of what the next big, mainline Sonic game could possibly be. (We don't talk about Sonic """"4"""")
Then, the reveal trailer dropped. I think my brain went on autopilot when I was watching it. I was just so confused, and too young to process what I was witnessing - but I understood one thing: This was not Sonic Generations 2. This was not Sonic Colours 2. This wasn't even Sonic Unleashed 2. This was something else entirely.
And hey, who knows, y'know? "Something else entirely" wasn't the worst thing this game could've been, hot off the trail of an incredibly fun, well-made game with next to no originality factor whatsoever. Unfortunately, however, this game turned out to be a slimy example of "too different."
There is a genuine element of appeal here, let me get that out of the way now; I found legitimate enjoyment in a lot of aspects of this game. It's creative and conscious of its predecessors in more ways than people let on. For example, I didn't know it even had a bounce until I played it myself, and you'd think the Internet would've been screaming over that, considering how infatuated everyone is with Sonic Adventure 2. There's a fairly creative story premise at play here, and even the antagonists aren't inherently bad ideas. The art-style, while I and many others personally find it unpleasant and mundane, never evokes the feeling of "they weren't trying." There's some clever ideas, gimmicks, more effort to cross over with other franchises than ever before, and until the updated Sonic Frontiers, the best post-game content we've ever had, by far. That's not a high bar, but it's still an achievement nonetheless.
Sonic Lost World can be summed up in one sentence:
"This game had already aged poorly when it first came out."
- Me, circa 2023
To elaborate, this game clings so tightly onto design philosophies and concepts that are either dragged - kicking and screaming - out of their appropriate time periods, or simply deeply flawed to begin with. All-in-all, this is an insanely frustrating experience.
My first time playing Sonic Lost World was the 3DS version, which I found myself rather apathetic towards, it was an inoffensive, weird game that felt more like a discarded, high-ish-effort spin-off than a big mainline follow-up to Sonic Generations, but despite my poor memory of the experience, I must've enjoyed it, because once I beat it, I even started a hard mode playthrough (very cool idea on the developers' part, by the way). It took me about nine years before I actually had the opportunity to play the official version, with-which I downloaded a few mods to get closer to the proper Wii U experience, as well as the community code that added a retry button, because I did NOT have the patience to put up with this game's rubbish without one - still, the broken resolution and janky controls were more than enough to break me even without the PC port's numerous other ridiculous problems.
Playing this game is like being Sisyphus, pushing that boulder endlessly up the mountain. I don't mean in the sense that it feels never-ending, but rather, every time you get a good flow going, or feel anything other than animosity towards the experience, you'll receive a swift slap to the face from yet another inconsistency or piece of game design so questionable, it makes you wonder if this was an early testing ground for AI Game Development.
I know this review has been scathing up until this point, but I will give credit where credit is due, and say that this game did evoke many thoughts within me of how much potential it has, and how it's completely understandable to find enjoyment within the spaces between its flaws. It's by no means broken, or anything like that, it's just... a mess.
Though, to be honest, most of my personal enjoyment of the game came out of repeatedly thinking about how miserable I was with Sonic Adventure 2, and finding it difficult to believe that this could possibly get any worse, which it didn't, surprisingly.
I don't know what else to say about this game, really, it's just a weird specimen of a product that had the ingredients of greatness tossed into it, but they were all mouldy, and were thrown against the wall repeatedly, in hopes of at least some of them sticking. Did some of it stick? Well, maybe, but the ingredients aren't any less rotten because of it. God only knows what they were trying to cook with that mission/achievement system.
At the end of the day, this is an incredibly stupid, low-mediocre game that I can't really explain nor justify the fun I had within, but hey, at least it wasn't so torturous that it took me nearly a year to beat, right?
...How did my life wind up at this point?