Another sequel to Sonic Dash, kind of. This takes the autorunning gameplay and put it onto specially designed courses, where the object is to race to be the first to the finish line, avoiding obstacles and using power ups to battle other racers.
For a while, I wasn’t sure if I was racing real people or not. They have names of other people, but I know from other mobile games (like Mario Kart World Tour), that these are often fake and you’re just racing AI using random people’s names. The lack of any ability to play with friends is also usually a sign that there’s no actual online multiplayer, and none of the racers seemed to act like real people, and were really easy (to the point I even did one race while cooking, occasionally swiping and hitting loads of obstacles…and still won).
That was until I got to around 1000 points into the ranking system (1st place gets you around 27ish points), all of a sudden the game got much more challenging, and the opponents moved around more, used similar tactics to what I had been doing, used power ups more and just acted more human. I suspect that initially I was paired with AI disguised as players before it started pairing me with real people. If the racers were balanced and it didn’t have horribly aggressive microtransactions and loot boxes…it could be a pretty fun mobile game.
But it’s not balanced at all. In order to facilitate the many kinds of microtransactions, the game is based around unlocking and upgrading characters, so you’ll just face opponents with outright better (or worse) characters. This is done by collecting “cards”, you need X amount to unlock them and then Y more to upgrade them. It varies between characters and some cards are a lot rarer (with others only available in special time limited events). I did end up getting quite a few characters within a few days: Sonic, Classic Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Silver (I got so, so many Silver cards), Charmy, Omega, Vector, and Tangle (a character from the comics). One interesting omission is Infinite, the character introduced in Sonic Forces.
However, once you’ve got most of the “common” characters, progression is probably extremely slow to get more. Unless you pay for them multiple types of premium currency, loot boxes or (some some characters) deals that unlock a specific character (Shadow was available when I played for £4.49, which is quite a lot).
I think it would be nice if the final patch of the game let you play against AI and choose the level you want to play, but ultimately, I think that the servers will just be shut down at some point and the game will be unplayable.
For a while, I wasn’t sure if I was racing real people or not. They have names of other people, but I know from other mobile games (like Mario Kart World Tour), that these are often fake and you’re just racing AI using random people’s names. The lack of any ability to play with friends is also usually a sign that there’s no actual online multiplayer, and none of the racers seemed to act like real people, and were really easy (to the point I even did one race while cooking, occasionally swiping and hitting loads of obstacles…and still won).
That was until I got to around 1000 points into the ranking system (1st place gets you around 27ish points), all of a sudden the game got much more challenging, and the opponents moved around more, used similar tactics to what I had been doing, used power ups more and just acted more human. I suspect that initially I was paired with AI disguised as players before it started pairing me with real people. If the racers were balanced and it didn’t have horribly aggressive microtransactions and loot boxes…it could be a pretty fun mobile game.
But it’s not balanced at all. In order to facilitate the many kinds of microtransactions, the game is based around unlocking and upgrading characters, so you’ll just face opponents with outright better (or worse) characters. This is done by collecting “cards”, you need X amount to unlock them and then Y more to upgrade them. It varies between characters and some cards are a lot rarer (with others only available in special time limited events). I did end up getting quite a few characters within a few days: Sonic, Classic Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Silver (I got so, so many Silver cards), Charmy, Omega, Vector, and Tangle (a character from the comics). One interesting omission is Infinite, the character introduced in Sonic Forces.
However, once you’ve got most of the “common” characters, progression is probably extremely slow to get more. Unless you pay for them multiple types of premium currency, loot boxes or (some some characters) deals that unlock a specific character (Shadow was available when I played for £4.49, which is quite a lot).
I think it would be nice if the final patch of the game let you play against AI and choose the level you want to play, but ultimately, I think that the servers will just be shut down at some point and the game will be unplayable.