Somehow the most unabashedly bold and petrifyingly safe entry in the Sonic series at the same time. Sonic Team and the fans both think they've finally made a real crowdpleaser.

In truth you have a game that is trying it's best to look on a surface level like Sonic has entered the "open world" BoTW-tier space, when in reality they made it on $3 with Speedtree and Quixels Megascans assets that are literally used to showcase UE5 demos. This is literally the "Sonic in UE5" meme but made by a real studio and not some daydreaming 14 year old. But enough about that; let's talk about the game.

The gameplay tries it's best to marry the boost, Adventure, and Lost World gameplay into a single amalgamation and the results are.. something. Sonic's boost is now nerfed and can no longer damage enemies, which is neat. The stomp returns, but it is also a bounce attack.. sort of, if you hold the button and squint really hard. You can now Drop Dash, which lets you roll for the first time in a 3D Sonic game in over 15 years (!!), and it's physics work (sort of). And the game tries to apply Sonic's somewhat-stilted wall running mechanics from SLW and does it an inch better. The result is a gameplay style that SEEMS like they've made decent results and are finally on the right track, but only in comparison to the past ten years of failure. Sonic's movement is jittery and unreliable; it loses most if not all momentum the frame you stop holding forward, and last but not least you grip WAY too tight to slopes. All terrible things for a Sonic game to do, mind, but that last one being the most deadly (as it will fairly often send you darting off a cliff). Nothing feels quite right, and Sonic Team seems to know this, as they've made it where you can alter the base physics in practically any way via the sliders. The fuckers really did just say "do it yourself if you think you're so smart". Well I am and even with me tweaking it best I can, it still feels pretty bad, so what gives?

The game tries to sell itself on it's new "Open Zone" format but falls flat on it's face the moment you realize there is no level design. You would think the blatant stock asset spam was to spend their apparent shoestring-budget on the parts of the levels that mattered, but it ends up there are no levels. Each of the three (that's right, three, not five) islands are designed like naturalistic mountainsides, with very little Sonicisms to play with. You have your valleys, chasms and peaks, but there is hardly any cool geometry to take advantage of. It's largely empty, massive spaces, with dull color palettes and hazy, overcast skies and moody violin pieces. These shots could've been shown to me without Sonic in them and I wouldn't have assumed it was a Sonic game. Especially since the only things that define it as a Sonic locale are the rings, springs, rails and platforms that spawn in when you're <10 feet away from them (yes, the draw distance is THAT bad). Said springs, rings, rails btw only exist to strap Sonic onto an automated rollercoaster for a solid 20+ seconds and/or a 2D section (you read that right). There is very little interactivity in these areas besides press RT or X at the right time to boost or homing attack through, and they're overwhelmingly frequent. You can run into them on accident at nearly any time, so be prepared for that.

I could chock up these decisions to be pure laziness or lack of interest in making a Sonic game, and to an extent I will. But in truth, these areas are probably the way they are to make room for the game's main gimmick: the Titans. Sonic in this game can fight giant mechas. And yes, "fight", as Sonic now has your favorite thing in a Sonic game: combat. In areas where combat begins (basically any space dedicated to a big enemy), the camera rips control away from you and overlaps your movement mechanics with a really clumsy set of attacks you can do. Amongst these attacks, Sonic can begin a combo with a homing attack, but also start doing a slurry of punches, kicks, spins, stomps and... (sigh), energy balls, laser beams, giant wave blasts of energy, anime light flashy attacks and other bullshit that sucks aaaaaassss. Enemies are often sponges that take forever to take out (unless you upgrade Sonic's strength in a level-up system (groan)) and will almost always require you to do their attack cycles exactly the way they want you to do them. No experimentation, no real easy way to evade or cheese interactions, nothing. The game is just a constant tango of stumbling around these boring environments and ramming head first into a cutscene where the camera forces you to look at SQUID over and over.

To progress the story, you have to start doing collect-a-thon things. Titans carry gears which is why you fight them. With these gears, you unlock "cyberspace stages"; the only places in the game with actual level design. Which sounds great until you realize it's reusing Generations assets and almost all the level layouts are borrowed from past games.. When you beat one of these levels, you can unlock a Chaos Emerald. You also have to collect little bronze gadget thingies strewn mindlessly across the map in order to.. talk to your friends? The game puts your ability to progress the plot behind the equivalent of a maguffin paywall. If you can do both, just do that over and over until you complete their plot thread and get all seven Chaos Emeralds. When you do, you now get to become Super Sonic and fight a giant Titan, where the game blares obnoxious screamo music and has Super Sonic act out every Sonic fan's AMV fantasies with explosions and suplexes and laser beams and other shit that is so embarrassing to witness that you can't help but respect the person who pitched it to the team and got the go-ahead.

And that's really the game. You do that about three or so more times, across two other islands. You're probably wondering how that makes sense; well. They seemed to run out of time and assets, so the last two islands (Rhea and Ouranos) are really just two sections of the first island (Kronos) that they split off and pretended was their own island. Before you ask, yes that DOES mean the game's world tropes are green, desert, volcano, green aaaand green. Isn't that cool?

The game is bad, very poorly thought out, horribly put together and a miserable, uninspired experience that desperately wants you to believe they've unlocked some revolutionary new way to make Sonic games. I've technically beat the game, but in the process I skipped a lot of shit. Because that's right; if you don't like the gameplay loop btw, you can just skip everything. Which as we all know, that's obviously the solution to the game not being very good. Just go find Big (hi Big) and you can go fishing to pull gears and those bronze thingies out of the lake instead of engaging with the maps or fighting the enemies. Cool!

We sure do have a winner here, folks. Sonic Team has finally made another video game. Certainly the game of all time. For sure. Yep.

Sigh.

I remember being much more mixed on this game a long time ago, but over the years I've really softened on Rayman Origins. Being a huge fan of Rayman 2, I really didn't care for how Origins took Rayman 3's whole insistence on not taking anything seriously and just.. ran full field goals with it. Lums now babble like the Rabbids do, Rayman humps the air like a ravenous animal, Polokus (Bubble Dreamer) just kinda lets the plot happen and no real stakes are really afoot. Just really goofy times with Ray and pals. Which I was fussy about for a long time.

But I guess with the clock ticking forward as it does, I grew out of that petty difference and learned to love this game for what it is. It's still not quite what I expect from a Rayman title (I always saw these games as more of puzzle-platformers than the fast-paced runners it, Legends and the mobile games are) but I can't deny the beauty of this game's art style, it's lovable-as-always characters and the excellent soundtrack. The level design flows insanely well (always a plus), combat and basic platforming feels snappy, and the worlds you visit are amazing reinventions of the original first Rayman game's settings.

Rayman and co control really well, and remind me a lot of the Fancy Pants Adventures games if they controlled, erm, better. Rayman's helicopter hair returns as you'd expect, but his projectile fist uh. Doesn't. Which was a huge bummer to me then and still kinda is now. I get why it's not there, since it doesn't suit to the fast pace AND makes his moveset have an advantage over the other three players, but I still miss it anyway.

Speaking of missing things, I still miss the lore and characters of Rayman 2 and wonder why we had to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Ly was cool! So was Clark! And I liked Jano and the spooky tone! Come on guys what the hell.. Well, I guess for all you're missing, you do get the return of many of Rayman 1's characters, like Betilla, the Electoons, Moskito/Bzzt, and many of the enemies. So that's cool? Does make the continuity all the more nonsensical though. Guess that's never been solid..

Anyways, Origins is really fun (especially with friends) and makes me laugh a lot. I wish it was what I was looking for out of Rayman, but I can't deny it's a really good time and it will be for you too. Also the nymphs are hot. You didn't read that last sentence. It was a hallucination. What?

This is a game that I really wish was better.

Rayman 2 is one of the best platformers out there, so Rayman 3 feels like it should be better, right? In a lot of ways it actually kind of is. The visuals are incredible, the music is beautiful, and the environments have a lot of more variance and interesting things going on than the previous game's somewhat samey locales. The new enemies (particularly the Hoodlums) are very creative in design and fun to sock in the face. Rayman's new design is really fresh and he animates exceptionally well, with a lot of fluid movement and funny expressions. The gameplay feels really smooth (even smoother than before), and Rayman's finally got his projectile punch in 3D and it feels great! Curving punches left and right is also incredibly smart as it adds a layer of depth you don't find in most platformers with combat. A lot of great ideas are at play here, and shape potential for a killer sequel.

Unfortunately the game squanders a lot of these things by being really, really, really, really annoying. The enchanting tone the game feels like it wants to carry is talked over loudly by what seems to be the writers team trying to pull a weird French take on Shrek, where we make fun of everything we were just treating genuinely in the previous game. Everyone quips and thinks they're the funniest person ever (besides Ray himself, which the game gracefully excludes from most of that). Almost no characters from 2 return (goodbye forever Ly the Fairy....), leaving only Globox, the Teensies and Murfy (the characters you can laugh at). A lot of the dialogue is mean-spirited in a way that just feels uncomfortable, the game is insistent on breaking the fourth wall, and you hear far too many jokes about burps, farts and getting drunk on plum juice. The lore is, while present, an afterthought and the game is desperate to let you know how little it cares that you got invested. The overall vibe is a very boy's club frat house energy. And it feels kinda.. gross?

Those things have bothered me since I was a kid, but I (child who grew up in the edgy 2000s) was pretty used to it, and learned to ignore it to appreciate the amazing art, catchy music, creative worlds and stellar gameplay. Or at least, what I thought was stellar gameplay back then. Playing it now, it's got a lot of great moments, but the level design is so much less involved than 2 was. 3 cares way more about waves of enemies to fight and alternate gameplay gimmicks (hello 2003 game design, I missed you none!). You have to stop progressing repeatedly to clear out a whole room of it's enemies, which was usually only optional in Rayman 2. The game wants you to try these new powerups ("combat fatigues" as Rayman puts it), which are neat in concept but are used so often (and with such annoying jingles) that it bogs down the flow of the game by a lot. And yeah, like your average 2003 game, there is sudden genre roulette. You will drive vehicles and shoot from turrets at least once or twice.

There is so much less actual platforming than Rayman 2 that when you get to the Teensie hide-away level later in you'll be thrown off by how the game suddenly became a puzzle-platformer again. It's a welcome switch-up to suddenly play a whole world of jumping, sliding and climbing through areas that need your fists to break doors and activate switches, but it'll really throw you through a loop and make you notice how much they changed style between games. Bizarre how this game just kinda shed a lot of what made the previous one so compelling..

That said, I still think it's a pretty decent game. Definitely worth playing for the sake of good controls, art and music. You just may want to temper your expectations. And play it with the voices muted. Believe me, you don't want them.