When you think of a fast-paced action platformer with a protagonist solely focused on speed, flashy visuals and quippy one-liners, one name should come to mind before any others. Sonic.

The blue blur has been at the front of gamers’ minds for decades, boasting quick action, bright colors and an ever-growing cast of characters that are guaranteed to quench your hyper-fixated little minds. Racing at the speed of sound to collect S-ranks and high scores, collect the chaos emeralds and save the world from the clutches of the nefarious Dr. Eggman at any cost.

A staple of the franchise in recent years has been its new “Boost” style gameplay. Rush forward at top speeds, devastating any enemies in your path while also figuring out the perfect timing to your jumps and homing attacks. It feels like a little puzzle that is so satisfying when you master it. Dodging left to right, hopping between grind-rails, finding the perfect path through the chaos to find red rings and higher scores. This gameplay formula can feel so good under the right circumstances, but really hinges on engaging level design to hit just right. You don’t want to just be running down a hallway with nothing to do except hold your boost button, because that’s not gameplay. You might as well be watching a cutscene.

Another thing Sonic games have started doing in recent years is blending 3D boost gameplay with 2D platforming. Taking parts of the level and feeding you into a side-scrolling camera angle to change up your perspective and slow down the experience to that of the classic Genesis style from Sonic’s past. These levels can be fun when the paths are interesting to go through and can lend to more interesting platforming puzzles to hide collectibles within.

Now I suppose you’re thinking, well… Sonic Forces contains all of these things that you claim are enjoyable and fun in modern Sonic games, so what could possibly go wrong?

Jesus Christ okay let’s get into it.

The level design team behind this game came over from the mobile game. And it FEELS like it.

Boost gameplay is straight hallways with no variation. You’ll press the boost button and then watch the game play itself for minutes at a time, and that’s in between slow side scrolling sections that completely cut the pace of the game in half, leaving you jolted into floaty jumping controls where you can’t adjust your direction or momentum in any sort of compelling way, often times just tossing yourself into chasms because you couldn’t move anywhere near the direction you’re aiming for.

The rail grinding, which is a core mechanic of the last 20+ years of Sonic’s gameplay is neutered here, often being dumbed down to just hopping between three straight rails like a shitty Temple Run clone. Which rail has rings? Which one has hazards? Tap your bumpers to bounce between them.

And that’s just Sonic himself. There’s 2 other playable characters, each with their own flaws.

This game marks the return of Classic Sonic, as he was in Sonic Generations, though canonically he follows directly after the story in Sonic Mania, coming in through a portal like he belongs here or something. As you can guess, Classic Sonic’s gameplay is, well… Trying to emulate the classic Sonic gameplay.

Something that is already being done in Modern Sonic’s side-scrolling sections. Just now it’s the whole level, and is significantly slower. Classic Sonic’s platforming is a lot tighter than Modern Sonic’s, and his physics lend to the style a lot better, but he also has a much slower speed and the sections that require tighter platforming still feel clunky and disjointed. He does have his drop dash carried over from Sonic Mania, which is a peak mechanic, but you’ll rarely get chances to utilize it that actually feel worthwhile.

The third character is your Avatar, a custom fursona that uses a grapple tool and your choice of weapon with a wisp mechanic. Each animal species has a different special mechanic, like faster run speed, a double jump, stuff that doesn’t change the formula too much so that the levels don’t have to be altered to accommodate each type. Basically, this choice doesn’t actually matter whatsoever.

The Avatar’s gameplay is like Sonic, but with a much lower run speed, and no boosting. You kinda jog ahead and hope for the best. There’s also a lot more focus on combat thanks to the weapons you get to choose from. There’s gun-type weapons or melee-types. The electric whip was my go-to just cause it was so easy to just spam the attack at things and take down waves of enemies in seconds. It doesn’t feel very good, and it rockets you in whatever direction you’re pointing, which can throw you into obstacles unexpectedly and make you lose your chance at a higher score really suddenly.

The Avatar also has side-scrolling gameplay. So that’s 3 characters with side scrolling now. And you’ll never guess… This one feels bad too. A bunch of puzzle-based sections where you have to sequentially choose which enemies to grapple, fight waves of enemies to unlock springs and ziplines, move on.

Sometimes!! You have to combine multiple characters!!! Into one!!! So it’ll just act like Sonic’s gameplay style, but now you can also grapple and use your weapon sometimes!! Because there’s 2 of them!!!

Like, correct me if I’m wrong but could we not have just… Given Sonic these mechanics???? And just have him be the only playable character???????

Story-wise, Classic Sonic does nothing for anyone. He’s just there. And Story-wise, the Avatar is just a guy. He comes in off the street and starts fighting in the war. You could have just… Given Sonic an electric whip or something and the grapple works exactly like a homing attack anyway. Nothing would have changed at all.

For a self-insert character, the avatar feels like suuuuch a waste. You spend the whole game collecting all of these cosmetics to change their look and make them your own, but basically all of the clothing options look like dog shit and they take the whole game’s length to get any collection of things that actually look good together, so the character never really feels like your own anyway. Like, there’s something there but it’s so poorly thought out, it feels so worthless.

The rest of the Resistance feel so worthless too. Knuckles is the team’s strategist, which feels rather out of character for him. He’s not that clever normally, and he just talks… So… Much. The other cast are all just there without doing much for the story themselves either. Amy makes one-liners about how dreamy it is having two Sonics, Rouge adds nothing, Team Chaotix just… Tells you to do things every now and then? Like, I’m glad these characters are here just for the sake of seeing some of my favorites, but I wish they actually did anything.

For villains, we’ve got a few options from across the Sonic series all coming together to take down the hedgehog and his friends. Except not really, because they aren’t even actually the villains themselves. The game really has just two antagonists. Dr. Eggman and the newcomer, Infinite. Eggman’s motives are the usual at this point; find some secondary character to help aid him in his task of taking over the world and deploying the Eggman Empire across the planet, being its supreme ruler. Infinite, on the other hand, is one of the coolest new villains in YEARS in this series. Sadly the game does nothing to actually make him super interesting.

With the power of “Phantom Rubies”, Infinite can create replicas of other living beings, mimicking their powers and abilities. Using this power, he can create an army of enemies from Sonic’s past to all work together and overtake the world in record time. Replicas of Zavok, Metal Sonic and Shadow all team up and kick the ever-loving shit out of Sonic and capture him. He ends up imprisoned for 6 months, getting tortured every day as the world goes to hell. Green Hill is looking a lot more like Sand Hill right now.

This idea could have been used so much better, allowing for replicas of tons of different enemies and characters from across the Sonic canon to all rise up into this ever-growing army, but instead it’s just a few little guys, which you only ever fight two of, and then you fight Infinite 3 separate times and call it good. You’d think with the power to clone life-like doppelgangers of any of Sonic’s most powerful foes at will, you’d really lean into the chaos and havoc that would create. Perhaps even creating versions of Sonic’s friends that you have to fight as well, thus turning the world on the heroes of the resistance to further push Sonic’s team down and make Eggman’s brutal takeover seem even more ruthless.

Instead, Sonic just kinda breaks out of prison and does a thing and goes about his day and the world looks kinda normal still, just with some robots running around which like… Eggman always kinda has robots running around? So that’s not even that interesting.

The Replicas you do fight are Zavok (gross) and Metal Sonic, who… Let’s be honest. Suck. Zavok is such a stupid character, it’s hard to even consider him as one of Sonic’s rivals, and Metal Sonic is… A robot. Like he’s cool as hell and I love him but we’re gonna waste a “life-like recreation of one of Sonic’s greatest rivals” on a robot. Not someone like… Mephiles? or Silver? or Blaze? or Black Doom? or the Biolizard?

Oh and let’s not forget that Infinite DID create a fourth replica, which was Chaos from Sonic Adventure, one of the biggest and coolest bosses in the series, who has multiple forms and fights and could have been so cool to revisit in the modern era of Sonic, but no that would have taken more development time, and we’re more interested in crunching our teams to make a mediocre barely 4 hour long experience that pretty much entirely plays itself than we are in actually making a compelling game with interesting characters, stories or set pieces.

Infinite himself is a really cool character with a sick design, a killer theme song and a backstory that links him directly to Shadow in a way that is super interesting! We get to really dive deep into that story over the Episode Shadow DLC that lasts… all of 3 stages… and about 15 minutes of gameplay. What the fuck. Oh and all of that story is presented with dialogue boxes over the map screen. There’s like 1 total cutscene in the whole DLC, and zero boss fights. And the stages are just reskins of Sonic stages from the main campaign.

And boy, I really hope you like Green Hill zone. Because you’ll be spending so much time there, over and over and over. 8 stages of it. Because we couldn’t possible create anything new looking in our game all about traveling across the planet to save it from the clutches of an evil empire. That’d be crazy. Let’s travel the whole world but only have 4 total visual settings. A burning city, a generic jungle, a space station and Green Fucking Hill.

In closing, because I don’t want to continue being angry at this game that I was genuinely so excited for when it was revealed, Sonic Forces is just disappointing. I spent 4 hours watching the game play itself, and another 3 hours collecting every S-rank, and it didn’t even give me an achievement for doing so. The most I can say is, I guess, thanks for the hot jackal boy that I get to stare at on the internet every now and then.

Luckily the Sonic series has been in an upswing since 2017, having released actual bangers like Sonic Frontiers, Sonic Racing Crossworlds and Shadow Generations, that genuinely are the most refreshing takes on the series in so long, I find myself going back to them quite often. (Currently replaying Frontiers because it just hits so good)

I can only hope that this positive side of the franchise continues and that Sega has truly learned their lesson from the release of Sonic Forces and the backlash that came with it. We simply can NOT do this again.

Sonic Forces
3/10