#it's been underutilized and immobilized for so long

[bri-does-art]

I know it's like the penultimate day of mermay but--

Guess whose wrist is beginning to get better :))

[nuttyrabbit]

Sonic Forces Thoughts

The title may seem a bit strange, given that the game is 3 years old already, and I’ve given my thoughts on the story plenty of times before as well as shared those of others, but I wanted to make this post because I decided to actually sit down and play Sonic Forces front to back for the first time since the game was on sale on the Nintendo Switch Eshop for a stupidly cheap price (10 dollars as of the time of this post)

Now that I’ve actually beaten the game and seen pretty much all the game has to offer (outside of Episode Shadow), I might as well give my thoughts on it.

On the whole, the best way to describe Sonic Forces is “mediocre”, because almost everything about it is just mediocre. The story, the  music (which kills me to say), the level design, everything about the game just reeks of unfiltered mediocrity.   It’s not terrible, but it’s not good either, it’s just kinda....there.

Now I could leave it there but I actually want to go into detail, so I’ll break it down into a couple of sections to get my thoughts out in an organized way under the readmore, starting with 

STORY:  As I said at the start of the post, I’ve said my piece about the story many times over and agreed with the thoughts of others on that matter, so I’ll keep this quick. 

The story feels incredibly undercooked and doesn’t even come close to fulfilling its potential, especially when it comes to Infinite. Holy shit I could spend 2 hours ranting about how much wasted potential this fucking character is on a story and gameplay level but at this point it’s beating a dead horse.  

The characters and their characterization is generally fine (except Tails holy shit what did they do to you) but like Infinite, they feel grossly underutilized and feel like they’re there for the sake of it rather than because they contribute anything of meaning. 

I don’t have much else to say other than that the story shares a common problem with the rest of the game in that it is very short. Like, I got Forces yesterday and I beat it in the span of what? 5 or 6 hours? As such, the story feels incredibly rushed because of that.  This segues into my next topic 

Gameplay:  This is a bit of a broad topic but I’ll break it down into something manageable, going from general to specific

Difficulty: Starting with difficulty, Forces is, for the most part, an incredibly easy game. The game defaults to the “hard” difficulty but it should really be called “normal” because nothing in this game will give you too much trouble (at least for reasons of actual difficulty). The boss fights, especially the final one, are pitifully easy and simplistic, especially if you use the Burst Wisp. Seriously, that thing destroys all the Avatar bosses with no issue. As such, the incredibly low difficulty makes the games’ length that much more noticeable, which speaking of

Length: The game, as I’ve said before, is incredibly short. I beat it in 5-6 hours but you could easily beat it in around 3 or 4. There’s 30 stages plus the Episode Shadow stuff and some bonus stages you unlock with Red Rings, but almost all of them are laughably short, the longest of them clocking in at around 4 or 5 minutes and the shortest being barely a minute and a half (the bonus stages are ~45 seconds long).  The only time I spent more than 5 minutes in a level is if I repeatedly died on a certain part, which happened only once or twice and for reasons I will get into.   It somehow feels shorter than Mania, a game that was sold for half the price initially and has less levels.

Controls: Next up is the controls and holy shit this is where the bulk of my complaints lie.  I don’t know how, but Classic and Modern Sonic control noticeably worse than they did in Generations or pretty much any other Classic or Boost game.  

Classic Sonic feels incredibly heavy, making each platforming section feel less I’m controlling Sonic the Hedgehog and more like I’m controlling an immobile brick.  That’s not even getting into how badly they fucked up his physics. The fact that this came out months after Mania is laughable.

Modern Sonic on the other hand, feels way too loose.  Whether it be in 3D or 2D, I feel like I’m barely in control of him when I start to gain speed, and there’s been multiple times where I careened off a cliff despite steering him away from it. It’s made even worse by the fact that for some fucking reason, they took away the drift, something that’s been in I think every 3D boost game since Unleashed.

They also gave Modern a double jump, but the double jump is so worthless and heavy that it’s gotten me killed more times than it’s actually helped me. It feels so stiff and awkward to use and combined with Modern’s loose controls, most of my deaths in this game came from Modern deciding to just randomly plummet into a pit because  I couldn’t correct a jump or he just slid off the edge of a runway for no good reason. Stage 27 is the best example of what I’m talking about because holy shit.

Finally there’ the Avatar, and he probably controls the best of the three, so I don’t have too many complaints on that end other than the fact that his jumps are incredibly slow and floaty.

Level design:  As I said before, most levels are incredibly short, being over pretty much as soon as they begin.  The design in the levels themselves is at best momentarily interesting (The 2nd Modern level for instance), and at worst is absolutely atrocious and terrible (Whoever decided to put an autoscroller in a Sonic level is just awful). and most of the time it just evens out to being incredibly boring and forgettable. This isn’t helped by the fact that most of the levels themselves are either throwbacks to previous games,  generic cityscapes covered in white or on fire, or that ugly, ugly jungle aesthetic.  There’s no levels in this game that really wowed me aesthetically or on a gameplay level. Hell, I can barely remember the names of most of the levels 

Music: The music in this game ranges from forgettable (most of the Modern tracks) to skullfuckingly awful (Every. Single. Classic. Song). Though that being said, I did like a couple of the Avatar themes, and the vocal tracks (Fist Bump, Infinite’s Theme, Light of Hope) were all pretty decent, though not nearly on the same level as prior games.  This is probably the most forgettable soundtrack in all of 3D Sonic. Even Lost World had more memorable and interesting tracks than this. 

Avatar:  I already talked about my grievances and thoughts on Modern and Classic in the control section, but I wanted to give the Avatar his own section because it’s easily the best part of the game.  Getting new gear for your Avatar and customizing them is admittedly really fun,  and I had a good time making my new OC Kick the Dog (do not steal).  The Wispons give a decent amount of variety and replayability to the levels that the other playstyles don’t have (Red Rings do dick in this game other than unlock clothes and EX levels which are so insignificant they ain’t worth it) and their levels are easily the most fleshed out and interesting of the bunch.    If I ever come back to Forces, it’ll probably be to replay Avatar levels

Content:  This game has barebones content, with the most pressing things outside of the main levels being Episode Shadow (which is 3 stages long), the bonus levels (pitifully short), the SOS missions (replay the levels again), and collecting the red rings/ silver moons/ whatever (Only unlocks more clothes and bad bonus levels).  Compared to something like Generations, which was also pretty short but had a lot of side content and unlockables that made it worth coming back to, and something like Mania which is packed to the brim with content and replayability, Forces is just kind of pathetic.  

Graphics:  One thing I’ll give the game is that the pre-rendered cutscenes and even some of the real time cutscenes look really damn good, at least aesthetically. Character animations still leave a lot to be desired though. The in-game graphics look fine. Nothing great but not terrible.  Keep in mind I played it on Switch so that could easily affect things, but generally the game looked....okay.

FINAL THOUGHTS:  As I said before,  Sonic Forces is the definition of “mediocre”. It’s a completely unremarkable game from start to finish, and most of what it does is done better by just about any other competent 2D or 3D Sonic game.  The  Avatar is fun and interesting and I want the playstyle to make a return, but that isn’t enough to save the game from being incredibly mediocre and just plain forgettable.   

If you really want to try Forces out yourself, I’d recommend getting it at a deep, deep discount. I got it at around 10 dollars and I’d say it’s worth between 10 and 20 dollars. Do not pay full price for this game. 

But otherwise, just skip it.