Sonic Forces on PS4: I'm sick of Sonic and I think the world agrees

Sonic the Hedgehog was absolutely amazing when it was released on Genesis all those years ago. The idea was to make the Genesis appear to be a lightning quick system and that the Super Nintendo was just a kid's machine that had slow paced games. This of course was completely untrue since the SNES actually had better hardware especially in the sound department, but the advertising gimmick actually worked and the perception was changed to exactly that. Genesis seemed "hardcore" while SNES seemed like something little kids would play with.

Sonic lead this charge and everyone loved that game. The fact that it came with the system for free for a time resulted in a massive late push in console purchases too. One could argue that it was one of the most successful launches of a title of all time.... Then the years past and they tried to hang onto the Sonic magic long past its prime. Sonic Forces is a game that encapsulates the "we've had enough of you Sonic" notion pretty accurately.

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The game was released on Nintendo Switch, Xbox 1, and PC as well, but I only played the PS4 version - so I'll just focus on the awfulness of that one.

For starters, the story is just plain dumb. They needed a conflict sure, but the writers seem to be at ends with themselves as they struggle to make a game for both kids and adults, what they have is something that walks a fine line of being dark but mostly the dialogue is just stupid. Eggman has taken over the world and Sonic and his pals need to form a resistance in order to restore goodness to the planet. Fine i guess, but to be fair most people don't play Sonic games for the engaging storyline anyway.

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Rather than just run through and bopping enemies on the head to eliminate them, you now have weapons and while I applaud their attempts to diversify the game a bit and switch things around rather than just making another run and gun game, the variety in attacks seem to have given the developers a real tricky situation and therefore many of the times the attacks simply don't work. The homing mechanics frequently fail and you are left frustrated wondering why you bother to fight at all. Except in certain situations it isn't required that you kill the foot-soldiers anyway, so eventually you just end up bounding over them and ignoring the fact that you have a weapon at all.

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The 2-D portions of the game are actually pretty good and is the highlight of the game, especially for those of us that remember the original games back in the 90's. The problem here is that they are temporary, and eventually you are forced back into the 3-D world, which is just a mess. Jumps in 3-D are plagued with a lack of spatial awareness and you miss your placement frequently. They tried to solve this with shadowing, but as you would expect in Sonic games, you are moving so quickly that it can be very frustrating to fall again and again and again to the point where you turn the game off.

There are certain unannounced turns that arrive at the end of a platform that you can't even determine that there is a ledge coming up until you have already run off of it and there is no way that you could have known it was there unless you had already been to that part of the stage before.

Don't let that trailer fool you, this game is extremely frustrating to play and if it was aimed at kids, it is too difficult. If it was aimed at adults, it's too kiddish to be fun to most. The parts of the game that are the most visually impressive, you aren't actually controlling what is going on anyway so in that regard it is more like quicktime events than something you are actually in charge of. I think that most people will tire of this game very quickly and to be honest, knowing what I know about modern Sonic games I wouldn't have even bothered with this game if it hadn't come for free in my PS Plus membership.