I'm almost impressed. Every old development habit they've had is back in full force. Dropping Sonic into a lazy premise that just riffs on whatever's hot at the time instead of building out from his characters and world. Platforming getting interrupted by dull, repetitive beat em up/RPG combat that just drags the pacing of the game down to a slog. Poorly paced, poorly written, unfinished storyline where characters with larger than life personalites and designs that YEARN for interesting motion stand perfectly still, sedated, and talk about their feelings regarding past games instead of doing anything to move the story forward so the team won't have to do too many of those pesky new designs.
What platforming is here is more rigid and automated than ever thanks to a focus on grind rails that fire Sonic along a fixed track, toward a simplistic set of obstacles. It's the Sonic Colors formula again, large focus on simplistic obstacles that can only be focused one way and functional, but dull digital movement that carries no momentum, completely missing the standout appeal of the original games.
The cyberspace stages fare a bit better than the main map, but that's mostly because they're made from the skeletons of levels from better games. The final set on island 4 is all original and honestly the first signs of life this game shows in that entire last half, but the shitty controls mean you can't enjoy it as much as you should. I'm not sure how they've managed to make them worse than they've ever been, and yes, I know about the movement tech. Almost all of these games have it. It doesn't excuse how bad it is on the base level.
I get why this game got higher marks than the others, because one thing Sonic Team is good at is making surface level changes to make it look like they listened. Combat and platforming take place as far apart from eachother as possible with almost no attempt to marry the two concepts in an interesting way aside from a few enemies toward the beginning, but they take place in the same map with no character swapping so you can't REALLY call it an intrusive alternate gameplay style. The tone is darker and the story is addicted to referencing past events, so you can say things have improved and Sega cares more about it's characters and writing now even though the cripplingly dull cutscene direction and shitty narrative design from the last game are still present. You literally cannot parse anything about the ancients from their miles and miles of ruined structures. The fact that they're called "the ancients" instead of giving them an actual name really sums it up. They're a generic ancient society that are a stand in for the ruins and lost civilizations that define other open world action games without any of the effort put into flesh out those cultures. Hell, Sonic Adventure took a much better crack at this in fucking 1999, and that game was in dev for one year instead of 5.
All of this is pretty terrible, but it's nothing new. The biggest shift this game makes is it's structure, dropping Sonic in an open field and giving him a variety of objectives to complete ala a collectathon. Every single interact-able object being a glowing steel gadget directly above the world means that your eyes will be on those instead of parsing the actual environment for details like a normal fucking video game, sucking out the sense of wonder from exploring and leaving you with the busywork.
Some freedom to progress is great, but I think the funniest thing about all of this is how much Sonic Team and the fans hammer home how much you can skip all of it, as if the critique would just become invalid if the game made as much of it's shitty ideas optional. At first I felt a bit cynical about that point, but one of the most highly praised features of this game being the fishing minigame really validated it for me. It's just a braindead QTE that gives you the Power Moons needed to break through certain collectable thresholds enough to move the story along. And people actually PRAISE this feature for making some of the criticism invalid and pushing aside that pesky gameplay so we can focus on the true essence of Sonic: The story.
It's just a mess, and coming off of Lost World, Boom and Forces it's clear I'm the fool for playing along at this point. Sonic's entered a brand new dark age where the goal this time seems to be making the safest bets possible without trying to ruffle any feathers. Take the Colors fundamentals and change the wrapper. Since Sonic team is still pretty shit at designing games this never comes together as the crowdpleaser they clearly WANT so badly,(and before you guys say anything, no, floating around Forspoken's space on metacritic does not mean you made a banger) but it never hits them that they have to actually rethink how they design things if that's what they want. Sonic Colors was a soild game, but it's not rich or flexible enough to keep being used as a baseline.
What platforming is here is more rigid and automated than ever thanks to a focus on grind rails that fire Sonic along a fixed track, toward a simplistic set of obstacles. It's the Sonic Colors formula again, large focus on simplistic obstacles that can only be focused one way and functional, but dull digital movement that carries no momentum, completely missing the standout appeal of the original games.
The cyberspace stages fare a bit better than the main map, but that's mostly because they're made from the skeletons of levels from better games. The final set on island 4 is all original and honestly the first signs of life this game shows in that entire last half, but the shitty controls mean you can't enjoy it as much as you should. I'm not sure how they've managed to make them worse than they've ever been, and yes, I know about the movement tech. Almost all of these games have it. It doesn't excuse how bad it is on the base level.
I get why this game got higher marks than the others, because one thing Sonic Team is good at is making surface level changes to make it look like they listened. Combat and platforming take place as far apart from eachother as possible with almost no attempt to marry the two concepts in an interesting way aside from a few enemies toward the beginning, but they take place in the same map with no character swapping so you can't REALLY call it an intrusive alternate gameplay style. The tone is darker and the story is addicted to referencing past events, so you can say things have improved and Sega cares more about it's characters and writing now even though the cripplingly dull cutscene direction and shitty narrative design from the last game are still present. You literally cannot parse anything about the ancients from their miles and miles of ruined structures. The fact that they're called "the ancients" instead of giving them an actual name really sums it up. They're a generic ancient society that are a stand in for the ruins and lost civilizations that define other open world action games without any of the effort put into flesh out those cultures. Hell, Sonic Adventure took a much better crack at this in fucking 1999, and that game was in dev for one year instead of 5.
All of this is pretty terrible, but it's nothing new. The biggest shift this game makes is it's structure, dropping Sonic in an open field and giving him a variety of objectives to complete ala a collectathon. Every single interact-able object being a glowing steel gadget directly above the world means that your eyes will be on those instead of parsing the actual environment for details like a normal fucking video game, sucking out the sense of wonder from exploring and leaving you with the busywork.
Some freedom to progress is great, but I think the funniest thing about all of this is how much Sonic Team and the fans hammer home how much you can skip all of it, as if the critique would just become invalid if the game made as much of it's shitty ideas optional. At first I felt a bit cynical about that point, but one of the most highly praised features of this game being the fishing minigame really validated it for me. It's just a braindead QTE that gives you the Power Moons needed to break through certain collectable thresholds enough to move the story along. And people actually PRAISE this feature for making some of the criticism invalid and pushing aside that pesky gameplay so we can focus on the true essence of Sonic: The story.
It's just a mess, and coming off of Lost World, Boom and Forces it's clear I'm the fool for playing along at this point. Sonic's entered a brand new dark age where the goal this time seems to be making the safest bets possible without trying to ruffle any feathers. Take the Colors fundamentals and change the wrapper. Since Sonic team is still pretty shit at designing games this never comes together as the crowdpleaser they clearly WANT so badly,(and before you guys say anything, no, floating around Forspoken's space on metacritic does not mean you made a banger) but it never hits them that they have to actually rethink how they design things if that's what they want. Sonic Colors was a soild game, but it's not rich or flexible enough to keep being used as a baseline.