User blog:TyrantRex/TyrantRex's thoughts on Sonic Forces

Note: This isn't a proper review, but rather my thoughts and opinions on the game!

I recommend listening to this while reading this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1wRzlklTQ

Background
A while ago I shared my thoughts on Sonic Adventure 2 and came to the unpopular opinion that I don't like that game. Even though I really liked the speed levels, those only make up 10 out of 30 levels in the game, the other 20 levels were tedious, frustrating, or boring. If only 33% of the game is any good, then the game isn't good in my opinion.

Either way, I got a Nintendo Switch for Chirstmas and one of the two games I got with it was Sonic Forces. Opinions on this game are... polarizing, to say the least. Then again, you could say the same thing about the Sonic franchise as a whole. The interesting thing here is, unlike every other review of the game I've seen, I WON'T compare Forces to the other "Boost" Sonic games for one simple reason, I never played those games so I literally can't compare them.

And yes I did beat the game in a day, like everyone else.

The Game
First of, the plot of this game is the textbook definition of "Good concept, terrible execution". The premise sounds awesome; Eggman won, Sonic is gone, and you must recover the world. Problem, is that almost NOTHING conveys that. The only area where it feels like Eggman did conquer the world is the one where there are giant robots destroying a city in the background, other than that none of the levels feel like that. Characters say that Sonic is dead, literally the next custcene they say he's alive. Classic Sonic appears out a portal for some random unexplained reason then does nothing the rest of the story. Sonic gets sucked into a Death wormhole, he escapes 13 seconds later and it's never mentioned again. I could keep going on and on but the whole story is like that. Cool ideas but none are executed well.

There are three playstyles so again I'll just share my opinions on each.

Sonic is... eh, when it works it's quite good... WHEN it works. Everyone has pointed out that Sonic feels very on-rails and there are times when all you do is hold one button for 15 seconds while the game runs on it's own, and they're right. The main focus of Sonic's levels is the Boost power, the problem I find is that the Boost gets too much focus. It is cool to watch Sonic dash at high speed but you have little control over it. I've been told that other boost games let you have more control over Sonic when boosting but I wouldn't know.

Often the game switches (Ha!) into 2D sections where there's less focus on Boosting and more on some platforming. I kinda liked these 2D sections, for one you have more control, and unlike others I didn't feel much problem with the controls and physics, maybe because I again I can't compare them with previous boost games.

Classic Sonic is decent. I don't have much to say here, controls do feel more sloppy and like EVERYONE pointed out the acceleration is messed up but again that didn't give me much trouble. My only real issue with Classic Sonic, is that besides him having no effect on the story, his levels feel rather pointless with the other two characters having 2D sections. Don't think he's needed, but I didn't go "Ugh..." every time a Classic Sonic appears and he gets the minority of the levels so already a big point over SA2. More on that later.

What really steals the show is the Avatar levels, these were by far my favorite levels in the game. First off, I always liked character customization in games, the one here could use some more depth but it's quite cool. Every time I beat a level I go to the character editor and make up a different custome for the next avatar level. One thing I found dumb though, is that Rings aren't used as currency to buy Avatar parts like in Super Mario Odyssey, instead you randomly get pieces every time you beat a level or clear an objective. Because of that and the fact that you have unlimited lives I never saw any reason to grab anymore than 10 or 20 rings.

Anyways, the Avatar plays almost the same as Sonic except for three main differences. First there's no boost, which I like because that means the game yanks control away form you a little less. Second, you have a grappling hook instead of the Homing Attack, personally I like it more. For one a grappling hook breaks the laws of physics a lot less, and you can use it to swing from grapple points. The annoying thing is that there are many times when the grappling hook activates automatically, most notably when taking sharp turns or when needing to hit a grapple point at high speeds. I'm convinced they did it that way to help guide new players, I'm sure I would've missed a lot of those sharp turns, but they could've easily givent he option to switch it to "manual" or something.

The third difference is the weapons, there are several different weapons you can equip the avatar, each has a main attack and a special power-up you can activate by grabbing the corresponding capsule in levels. The main attack doesn't really matter since every enemy dies in 1 hit, what does matter is the power up, these allow the Avatar to play the levels slightly differently each time and some are needed to grab specific collectibles. As a Mario player, I quite enjoyed the powerups and Sega directly admitted that the whole point of Wisps was to attract Mario players. My only complain is that you can only use power ups when you find the right capsule, I think they should've made it a universal capsule to fuel the weapon, giving the player more freedom to play the levels in different ways, they'd just need better level design to take advantage of it.

There's Tag Team levels where you play as both Sonic and Avatar. These are alright but I ALWAYS used the Avatar in these so I saw them as just more Avatar levels which is good because the Avatar was my favorite part of the game.

Then there's the big thing everyone also pointed out, the levels are too short. About that... I didn't mind that at all for a rather funny reason. I got the Switch version and played the game entirely in Portable mode, turns out the short lenght of the levels doesn't fell out of place in a handheld game.

So to summarize, Sonic is alright but needed less autopilot, Classic Sonic feels pointless but didn't mind it, and Avatar was great though could use more fleshing out to make it awesome. Time for another unpopular opinion, I like Sonic Forces more than Sonic Adventure 2. It boils down to a simple fact, in SA2 I physically groaned and rolled eyes every time a shooting or treasure level showed up which were the vast majority of the game, in Forces the three playstyles all needed more polish but I didn't hate any of them. At no point did I feel like Forces was wasting my time with intrusive filler, Classic Sonic the closest to that but not entirely.

Yeah, I liked Sonic Forces, but I still think it needs to stay in Neutral Games Wiki. The game needs A LOT of polish, most of its good ideas were not executed all that well, and it's still too short if not played as a handheld game. Ultimately, Forces didn't make me want to check the other Boost Sonic games, instead it made me want a spin-off focusing entirely on the Avatar. Any chance of that happening? No? Ok then.

Still there's a third Sonic game I want to check out... Sonic Mania! We'll see how someone with ZERO nostalgia towards Sonic reacts to that one.