Sonic Forces

Originally posted on Facebook on 12 June 2022

The recent showcases and announcement of Sonic Frontiers reminded me that I never actually played Sonic Forces... and so I just now spent a week playing Sonic Forces, and... WOW, it is way way way WAY worse a game than I was anticipating. I'm actually so surprised at how awful it is.

The controls are incredibly slippery and imprecise. You accelerate seemingly at random, and there is no sense of momentum, which makes me constantly undershoot the platforms. And when I try to overcompensate by holding forwards for longer to avoid this, the wonky acceleration has already made me overshoot it instead. It is one of the worst-feeling platformers I have ever controlled.

Sonic's moveset is incredibly dumbed-down from how it appeared in the previous games. I was expecting Sonic to control similarly to Sonic Generations, but no, it's nothing like that.

 You can't drift any more, instead all drifted corners in the game are just done automatically, with no player input.

And the air-dash has been replaced by the world's most useless double-jump. The double jump doesn't even gain any height. It just sort of extends your air-time by a half-second. It's worthless. 

And without an air-dash move, the homing attack is now completely mindless. If you just keep spamming the jump button, Sonic will never miss a homing attack. There's no timing or nuance or anything to it. Just keep mashing the jump button and Sonic will go to where needs to go, perfectly every time. It's not engaging or interesting at all.

The level design is pure garbage. It seems to have been designed to accommodate the awful controls, which means that literally nothing interesting can happen. The vast majority of the game is just automated sequences where you just run forwards and watch Sonic do the level. And then occasionally do some homing-attack chains, or sometimes a bit of lane-switching on grind rails, just to make it feel like you're doing something I guess. And on the occasions where the levels try to demand more than this from the player, the slippery controls make it torturous to actually play. The game constantly alternates between being nothing, and being awful. There are a few slivers of interesting gameplay ideas hidden in here, but the levels always end before the ideas can be fully explored. There really isn't much here at all.

So I guess the game wants to play itself so badly in order to show you some graphical spectacle, but the graphical spectacle isn't even all that good. There are no dynamic camera angles or foreground/background interaction, like what we saw in Sonic Generations back in 2011. 

Sonic's animations are also worse. He only has one pose for landing a homing attack, and he can't do those fun "tricks" any more from ramps, like in Generations and Colours. He doesn't even really have any idle animations or anything else interesting to show his personality. Sonic is very boring in this game.

And there are no interesting setpieces in the stages to look forward to as you play either. I remember how cool Rooftop Run was in Generations, with all the colourful balloons, the giant clock face, and the cool vertigo-inducing grind rail that spirals straight downwards into the town. It was cool. 

City Escape and Speed Highway in Generations had similar moments that catch your eye and look cool, with Sonic running down the side of the building, or escaping from the GUN truck. 

But despite Generations having accomplished it many years ago, Forces doesn't have anything thing like this. It's one bland stage after another, and they even re-use the environments several times to make several different levels out of the same map. Nothing feels distinct. It all blends together into a mishmash of nothingness. 

The game feels like an absolute nothing game. You don't need to do anything to play it, and you don't feel anything while watching it. The levels are over before you know it, and you never really feel like anything actually happened during them. It's just a whole bunch of nothing.

Also the story is bad too. Worse than Sonic 2006's story. Without a doubt, it's  the worst Sonic story I've seen in the whole series.

It is just incoherent, full of contradictions, and it just doesn't go anywhere. It introduces plot points just to never bring them up again, making you wonder why they even mentioned it in the first place. 

"Sonic has been captured and is being tortured by Eggman in the Death Egg!" two scenes later, he's fine, and still wisecracking jokes like nothing happened. 

"Tails has been 'losing it' ever since Sonic has been presumed dead". Next scene, Tails is fine. He hasn't gone crazy at all. He's normal. 

"We're going to banish Sonic to Null Space, an alternate dimension of pure nothingness!" Next scene, Sonic immediately escapes Null Space just by running fast enough. A total of 15 seconds are spent in Null Space. ...why does this exist?

...like, what is the point of introducing these concepts if you're not going to do ANYTHING with them at all?

I also really dislike Sonic's personality in this game. Every line of his is a dumb joke, and it really doesn't suit him. He's not the same cool and earnest Sonic from Adventure / Heroes / 2006. He's the awful new sarcastic version of Sonic from Colours / Lost World, who needs to always be cracking a one-liner every time he speaks. It's so upsetting to see him like this. 🙁

Oh and this game also decided to include "Classic Sonic" from Generations too. Except instead of him being Sonic from when he was younger, he's now just Sonic "from another dimension"? It's like Sonic Team literally just forgot their own story and made a new one up on the spot. Classic Sonic also contributes literally nothing to the plot, and his gameplay has also been downgraded compared to Generations. Might as well not even exist.

Also why is Silver the Hedgehog in this game at all when he's supposed to be from the distant future? He's just here as one of Sonic's friends like there's nothing weird about that. I don't get it. Did Sonic Team forget his story too?

The entire game is a huge mess. Every single element of the game is just poorly done. It feels awful to control, there's no meaningful gameplay, and the story is so muddled and confused and doesn't know what it's doing.

...

Anyways, I'm glad I played it. I even got 100% completion on it, which allowed me to appreciate the game's design to its fullest I guess. I now truly have seen the state that Sonic is currently in. ... and it's not good.

Let's hope Sonic Frontiers does something a little more interesting? I don't have much faith in Sonic Team to be honest.