Megaman X7, from what I could gather from the general perception, seems to be constantly locked in a perpetual battle with Megaman X6 as “the worst X game ever”, it’s either X6 or X7 that people seem to despise, though most would still classify X6 as worse overall. X7 was the X franchise’s first attempt at a 3D game and…well to say that the results “could’ve been better” would be a massive understatement to put it lightly. Even for PS2 standards this game looks so ugly and unimpressive as a 3D title, it actually reminds me a lot of PS1 era games, but whereas I look upon those titles with fondness and nostalgia, the fact that X7 would somewhat fit right at home with those types of games visually despite coming out a generation later is absurd. Environments are bleak, character models are stiffly animated and rough around the edges, but to be frankly honest, the lackluster visuals are the least of this game’s issues.

Usually when I talk about games, whether it be good or bad, I want to go more in depth with why I like or dislike particular aspects of them. You can see this extensively throughout my Backloggd reviews. The problem with X7 is that not only are pretty much all the changes it makes for the worse, but it’s just so uninteresting to talk about to begin with. The movement is completely gutted, dash jumping repeatedly still works but its effectiveness has been severely lessened. Your default movement speed is horrendous and having the levels you traverse through be so big wide and empty ESPECIALLY in 3D only further accentuates this problem. You also get this combat roll maneuver that’s so tacked on and is practically worthless in terms of effectiveness. Axl is the new character introduced, he has a rapid fire shot that pumps out ok damage and a hover ability to get across certain gaps. He also has this copy ability which is so clunky to utilize and so incredibly situational that I barely used it at all. So, for starters, he can only copy enemies that are the same size as him so that alone limits the possibilities it can be used on, but even attempting to copy them is so awkward because you need to finish the kill with Axl’s copy shot so that you can utilize the DNA the enemy drops. The problem with this is enemies don’t have health bars in X7 so it’s next to impossible to tell how many shots you need to fire before you kill them with the copy shot, so what ends up happening is that you deal some damage and spam the copy shot over and over again to try and kill them with it which takes forever. And even with all that said, there’s not really any point to the copy ability. The most you’re gonna use this ability for is for upgrade fodder and nothing else. Other than trying to get upgrades using this ability I must’ve used it a grand total of once, and that was to copy a flying guy to make the beginning of Wind Crowrang’s stage a total cakewalk. Zero…good god what did they do to him. His combo game is nonsensical and clunky and he has almost no range on his sword swings, he felt so awkward to play, only compounded with the general speed issue I have. In the end I only ended up using X and Axl throughout my entire playthrough. X especially was a great option for a solid damage output.

The levels themselves are unfathomably dull. The 2D sections are a far cry from X 1 2 and 4, and the 3D sections are unnecessarily spacious and empty. Combine this with your move speed and movement options being agonizingly slow as I stated previously and levels in general take way too long to finish. Maverick bosses are somehow even worse, they take an absolute eternity to take down even with the proper special weapon, and sometimes the special weapon isn’t even really good against the boss at all. And oh yes, they LOVE to talk. A LOT. Look, Flame Hyenard’s constant “BURN TO THE GROUND BURN BURN BURN TO THE GROUND TRI FORMATION WOO WOO” talk is legendarily bad, worthy of meme status, I understand it I really do, but the others are almost as bad in this department. If I have to hear another utterance of “TRIANGLE KICK!!!” ever again I’m gonna burst a blood vessel. The camera control is a…disaster to put it lightly. Not because it’s on the shoulder buttons, I played many 3D games with a shoulder button camera, but the main problem is the angle given. Oftentimes it’s at an awkward angle, is far too close to the camera, or in many instances, both. I think by far the lowest part of the game was the Red boss fight, you have to fight a frequently invincible to damage, constantly teleporting, high health target on tiny platforms with an incredibly awkward angled slow-moving camera. And what’s more, remember that combat roll maneuver I mentioned earlier? You perform it by performing a dash immediately after a previous dash. Wanna know what’s another input for dash? Double tapping the stick forward. So oftentimes when I tried to slowly tip toe around tiny platforms, tapping the stick lightly a bunch to prepare for the inevitable next jump, the game would register this as a dash input, and when I tried to use dash afterwards unaware the game already input a dash beforehand, I would combat roll off the edge like a complete tool. Keep in mind that combat roll completely locks your controls so once you roll of the edge, it’s instant death! All that effort you put into trying to kill the boss all for nothing! It was infuriating, but to be fair that’s basically the only time I actively felt anything while playing this game other than complete boredom. Immediately after this fight is a final gauntlet followed up by probably the easiest Sigma boss fight in the entire series next to X6. The voice acting is pretty terrible too, not necessarily X4 bad but still pretty bad overall.

Overall this is an incredibly forgettable game. Despite glimpses of memeworthy elements here and there, this game largely goes in one ear and out the other. It’s not the “why is this game still going on please someone put me out of my misery” kind of boring, it’s more so the “I’m gonna forget everything about this game within the span of a week” kind of boring. I don’t really want to play either one of these extremes either way.

From what I remember, I had 2 different experiences with this game back then. As a little kid, I personally loved it because it’s Sonic and I love Sonic and it’s on the Wii and the Wii is cool and awesome. As a disgruntled cynical 18-year-old however, I ended up hating it predictably, not caring about the story and just often being frustrated by the controls. Fast forward 5 years and I haven’t replayed Secret Rings SINCE then, I opted to try this game out on Dolphin with the resolution and framerate increased with the original Wiimote controls intact. To my surprise the game actually ended up being a LOT better than I remember it, though still not without its fair share of problems.

I will say though this game makes a pretty abysmal first impression in more ways than one. Not least of which because you’re just assaulted with a barrage of pace breaking tutorials, and since Secret Rings’ stages are split up into multiple missions, that means that EVERY SINGLE ACTION has its own tutorial mission. This could’ve been handled way better. Second, when you actually get to the first proper stage, things feel somewhat…off. If anything, this is by far the most unique and interesting idea for a platformer I’ve ever seen. Sonic is constantly on rails the entire time, moving forward automatically while you tilt the Wii remote to steer him left and right to avoid incoming hazards. Funny enough I don’t have a problem with this system, at least up to that point the game is designed around this control style, tilting the remote to steer actually felt responsive and there were plenty of hazards to dodge along the way. The problem mainly stemmed from how SLOW Sonic was, he takes off at a snail’s pace and even when he reaches top speed…well I don’t want to say it’s like super slow, but it’s not terribly thrilling either. And every time you need to do a charge jump it just kills your speed when you land. It’s not the absolute worst controls I’ve experienced but it’s very sluggish, if this was what Secret Rings was gonna be like throughout the entire game, then I thought the game was in trouble.

However, from what I’ve discovered, Secret Rings is a game that actually gets a lot better the more you play it. Just by completing stages, you start to level up and gain access to brand new abilities RPG styled. The fact that you need to actively unlock things like better speed and new/improved abilities is monumentally stupid, idk why the game just couldn’t have given us satisfying handling right out the gate, but to give credit where credit’s due, once you start equipping these abilities, I’ll be damned but Secret Rings is actually kinda enjoyable. Your base speed is ridiculously quick, homing attacks are much faster, airdash goes further, you get a sizable speed boost at the countdown and whenever you land from a jump keeping the pace going, acceleration becomes quicker, charging your jump becomes sort of a semi attack as you slide into enemies, you even get an assortment of brand new effects to different preexisting abilities that you can choose to better fit your playstyle. Runs through Secret Rings stages with tons of abilities equipped can be fairly exhilarating at times. And of course, once you start to play the game more, you start to notice more nuances with how the game handles, like how you can use the brake button in midair to jump cancel and immediately make a precision landing which makes platforming a non-issue (could also potentially a precursor for the stomp later seen in Sonic Unleashed), how if you’re already at a high speed you can hold the jump button and slide, and you can use sliding to completely bypass tedious sidestepping sections where you need to shimmy left and right to progress, the way charging a jump also sort of keeps you moving while preparing yourself for a jump and can also act as a sort of brake function, it makes engaging with Secret Rings’ mechanics that much more interesting.

Someways through the game you unlock 2 abilities with the soul gauge: Speed Break and Time Break. Speed Break allows you to essentially “boost”, killing any enemies in your path and dramatically plow through the stage at incredible speeds. It’s basically near impossible to control effectively so this mechanic mainly comes down to when and where you use it, where you can get away with it and all that. It’s also fairly handy for skipping though the more automated “spectacle” scenes. Time Break is the even more situational power, it allows Sonic to temporarily slow down time to pass by hazards that are too quick to avoid normally. Back then I never saw the point of this ability, mainly along the lines of “grrr why does it slow down Sonic too this ability is USELESS”, but one thing I never caught on is that, while yes it does slow your forward movement down alongside the hazards, your left to right steering is just as responsive as before, allowing you to effortlessly weave in and out of obstacles that would’ve been annoying otherwise (and against the final boss it’s near essential to use). You can also use this ability in otherwise slower paced and hazardous sections to effortlessly speed through them no problem. Both of these abilities aren’t anything spectacular but they add onto Secret Rings’ railroaded gameplay style in a nice satisfying way.

Not every ability you have works well though, there are 2 control aspects that never ONCE worked well for me no matter what I did. The first one is moving backwards. You move backwards by tilting the Wii remote towards you and this feels insanely clunky and unintuitive to utilize, especially considering the camera doesn’t even give you a view of what’s behind you. You can somewhat make this ordeal slightly better with the upgrade system – allowing you leap back quicker with a button combination and further upgrading this into an attack, but it never stops becoming an annoyance to deal with. It’s never really something that’s REQUIRED (unless you’re dealing with the combat arenas in Pirate’s Storm) but say you screwed up a jump and want to try again it will be something you have to contend with in one form or another. The second control aspect that doesn’t work well is grinding. Well to be more specific the main issue is switching rails. Grinding itself works fine enough but to switch rails you need to fling the wiimote in that corresponding direction and Sonic just absolutely REFUSES to snap to the adjacent rail and overshoots it 9 times out of 10. Again not something you really HAVE to do but it’s still incredibly unreliable. The 2D sections also just straight up kinda suck (funny how this was Kishimoto’s first foray into the series and even THEN he introduced 2D sections in a 3D game. I’m telling y’all HE WAS PLANTING THE SEEDS). You would think that tilting left or right would effect if Sonic would go to the left or right in these sections like how it works with the ledge shimmying sections, but no, those only affect Sonic’s Z axis within these stages, often causing you to overshoot elements that are in the dead center of the track like springs and whatnot.

The mission structure is also what I would consider a downside. For one you need to complete specific missions in order to advance the plot and collect the 7 world rings but the game doesn’t really make clear what missions you’re supposed to complete in order to progress through the narrative and unlock new worlds. You really just have to brute force your way through the missions in order to progress, and while I personally didn’t mind this at all as I felt the missions never really wasted your time due to them always rewarding you in XP to level up and acquire new skills, the missions themselves are very generic. It’s like they took the challenge gates of Generations, stripped anything that made them unique and basically made that the entire game’s structure. You have the stage acts themselves which are pretty fun, and you do have one or 2 one off unique missions with unique level design but a lot of them are typical missions that are just “collect rings!” “Break all the pots!” “Kill all the enemies!” “DON’T break any pots!” “DON’T kill any enemies!” “Don’t die!” It gets somewhat repetitive after a while

Speaking of the stages themselves I gotta say I actually can’t really point out any of them I actively disliked, I think they’re all generally fairly enjoyable. Maybe Levitated Ruin could be very annoying if you don’t have your speed upgraded but that’s about it. I also personally love the stage themes and aesthetics, there’s so much variety and creativity packed into each level theme (Night Palace being my favorite), and it’s all accompanied by an absolutely BANGING soundtrack. I even appreciate how a game as railroaded as this even ATTEMPTS multiple paths and shortcuts to begin with. I don’t really have anything very nice to say about the plot but I will say that Secret Rings manages to pull off subtle foreshadowing WAY better than Black Knight does, which…in hindsight kinda makes Black Knight’s story even more frustrating than it should be because they already got this element right with the first game so why did they screw it up now?

All in all while collectively Secret Rings is a mixed bag and has a lot of major structural and even some control related issues, I’d say at the end of the day the core gameplay is super unique and interesting enough for me to be invested in what it had to offer, and thankfully the more I stuck with it, the better it got. It’s not really what I would consider a “good” game per say, but I honestly wouldn’t mind going back to this one at any point.

Question all that’s known. Legends blurred and torn.

This is a game only meant for perfect and the strongest reploids

Even before I started playing the Megaman X games for the first time, I’ve heard horror stories of Megaman X6. Of course despite this, I tried my best to keep an open mind going in. Maybe I wouldn’t find it as bad as everyone says it is. Or maybe I would end up finding it even worse. Either way, my curiosity had peaked when the time approached.

Megaman X6 is a travesty of basic game design, let’s not get things twisted. This game is so poorly made and incomprehensibly stupid in almost every way imaginable. And yet…it’s not a game that I can get particularly angry at. Let’s not misunderstand things, however, I definitely DID manage to get frustrated at many points during my playthrough. Metal Shark Player’s stage for instance is a ginormous slog, the pace of this stage is a game of stop and go, filled with crushing platforms that are always rising and lowering and one mistake yoinks you all the way back to the beginning of that particular section (it also reoccurs in Gate’s Fortress 2 as well, fun!!!). Blizzard Wolfang’s stage has near unavoidable damage raining down on a constant basis, and Blaze Heatnix’s stage is in a constant fierce battle with Metal Shark Player for having the absolute worst stage in the game. His stage you basically need to fight a giant donut miniboss 5 times in a row, it’s kind of ridiculous and an enormous chore if you don’t have the proper screen nuke weapons available. And for god’s sake, this game has a blatant fetish for placing spikes all over the place, possibly more than any Megaman X game I’ve seen up to this point (gotta bring up Gate’s Fortress again because I don’t think I’ve seen a single wall in that stage that DIDN’T have a row of spikes on them). However throughout a majority of my playthrough I was less frustrated and more so…baffled at what I was witnessing on screen.

The main gimmick Megaman X6 introduces is the Nightmare system, essentially random stage hazards that impede your progress in every stage. They can range from placing indestructible blocks everywhere, having rubble constantly bombard you, having indestructible…bees follow and damage you, some of the worst nightmare effects are when only a small portion of the screen is visible making it a slog to progress forward without running into anything, ESPECIALLY in Rainy Turtloid’s stage with acid rain and needing to find a bunch of switches and blow them up to progress. Some Nightmare effects also only trigger once you’ve defeated a specific Mavrick, kinda like the stage gimmick from X1, but wheras those were helpful and allowed you to access other hidden routes you couldn’t have done otherwise, these just make an already bad stage even more irritating to play. What’s even more head scratching is that even though the game SAYS that Maverick icons highlighted in red have the Nightmare effects, even stage icons without the red highlight contain Nightmare effects as well so the game just straight up lies to you.

I straight up don’t think any of these stages are fun. Not least of which because of the Nightmare system, the instant kill spikes and pits everywhere, the enemies spammed all over the place almost to the same degree as X3 (even the ones that take forever to kill, the mantis enemies in Commander Yammark’s stage are super beefy and if you kill them they still manage to regenerate), and some stages are just plain awkward in design. I mentioned Blaze Heatnix and Metal Shark Player, but stages like Shield Sheldon are pathetically short if you’re going straight for the boss, and stages like Commander Yammark/Rainy Turtloid are just uninspired chores to play through. Ground Scaravich’s levels are nothing but straight hallways until you get to the virtual totem pole that transports you to a few different level layouts at complete random (which btw, they lock behind specific items and hostages in each of these randomized rooms so you’re forced to replay the same stage potentially multiple times in order to get everything) and have you fight the totem pole as an annoying miniboss like 4 times.

Speaking of boss fights, they’re terrible. They’re either pathetically easy (Commander Yammark and Ground Scaravich) or they’re the definition of irritating. There’s no in between. Nightmare Mother can scroll itself into a ditch for all I care, and High Max (should you run into him) is genuinely impossible to kill unless you have specific Maverick weapons. Gate gets the worst of it, he can only be damaged by the projectiles he himself fires (of which he doesn’t do very frequently AND they can miss). Infinity Mijinion’s boss seems purely nonsensical and frustrating in how you’re supposed to deal with it, more so with X. I guess because the game felt sorry for us though, the Sigma battles have to be the easiest and the most pathetic final boss fights in the entire series.

In general though this game is just badly designed all around. Much how the previous game was more geared towards X than Zero, this game absolutely DESPISES X in comparison. His default charge attack with the Falcon Armor feels bad to use, his special weapons aren’t good either, his Zsaber is passable as a close range option but it feels extremely clunky and slow compared to Zero, and there are many points (both the optional paths you find throughout the game and in one of the layouts in Ground Scaravich’s stage) where if you pick normal X you literally cannot cross pits that require an airdash, something the Falcon armor and Zero have by default, and in general it’s not really fun to play as him. His armor upgrades are just not really worth it either, the Blade armor is just a slightly better Falcon Armor all things considered so it’s decent to go out of your way to get, but the Shadow Armor sucks. The idea of a robot Ninja is fun, but the weapon sucks, you can’t use special weapons, your airdash is gone, and only your Zsaber gets some slight, honestly inconsequential buffs. The only use you could get out of him is to get past Gate’s Fortress because of your immunity to spikes but at that point it’s far too situational. Zero is as fun to use as previously but one of his special techniques he learns (a downwards diagonal slash) is stupidly easy to input by accident and makes platforming above pits a nightmare considering you can’t cancel out of it.

I will give X6 credit though, the parts system actually got a fairly decent upgrade from X5. When you rescue Reploid hostages scattered around the levels, they have the chance to give you specific parts, ways to improve your general attributes, character specific upgrades, etc. I don’t like that you need to grind for nightmare souls to start equipping multiple parts though, since improving your rank by doing so is how you equip more parts. I managed to rescue every single hostage that the game had to offer and idk why I bothered considering you don’t even get any acknowledgment for doing so, so that was a waste. Some of the parts upgrades though I stg it feels like they put in because even they knew how stupidly this game was designed (there’s a part system that literally doubles your invincibility frames lol). The music is also really surprisingly good too, a lot of it is very soothing, Commander Yammark’s stage theme being a personal highlight of mine.

In general though, while a lot of this frustrated me, I was more so…intrigued if anything. For a large chunk of the game, I wasn’t necessarily screaming my head off or pulling my hair out in frustration, I was mainly just baffled witnessing these design decisions progress on screen. Looking at how it all plays out as a collective package, this game is a trainwreck, but it’s a trainwreck that for the life of me I kept looking at in pure fascination. The glitches you can pull off to make yourself invincible, the exploits you can do to nuke the health bars of the main Maverick bosses, the shockingly bad Nightmare obstacle placement and how the game just flat out lies about how the Nightmare system works in general, the incompetently designed bosses and bad stage design, the hilariously awful dialogue that reads as if it was directly google translated from Japanese at times, I was positively bewildered witnessing the game unfold piece by piece. By the time the game ended I must’ve had the dumbest grin on my face. In a way it’s like bemusedly watching a toddler stumble into the living room as it constantly trips over itself with its trousers around its ankles and two popsicle sticks shoved up its nose going “I’M A REAL GAME NOW!!!”

Yes, Megaman X6, you certainly are.

Theoretically speaking, this could potentially be the shortest X game of all time depending on what the game itself feels like doing today.

X5 is a game I like overall but have some issues with because it actually manages to do some things better than X4, yet also manages to do most things worse. It’s like, 1 step forward 2 steps backward: the game. The new mechanics the game thrusts on you immediately (the part system, the cannon system, leveling up, etc) are pretty poorly explained. You’re supposed to only fight 4 specific Mavericks if you want the parts to improve the Cannon’s chances of blasting the space colony, the rest of these mavericks are just there for weapons I guess? But the general gist is that the more parts you collect, the better the chances of the cannon are. Here’s the thing though, uh, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing the first time I played. I scrolled to see the cannon and accidentally hit the “fire” button by mistake, no parts were equipped to the cannon prior.

…I somehow managed to blow up the colony first go.

Apparently from what I could gather the RNG on whether the cannon will succeed or not is kinda heavily stacked against you even with all the parts equipped, so the fact that I managed to get the cannon to work without any parts by COMPLETE ACCIDENT on my first ever playthrough was the biggest stroke of dumb luck I think I have ever seen in my life. I might as well stop buying lottery tickets at this point, it’s all downhill from there. This is what I was getting at earlier though with the game potentially being the shortest X game out there: if you do somehow manage to blow up the colony immediately, you instantly get access to the final stages in the game without needing to beat any Maverick bosses, which is crazy. Of course I ended up doing the Maverick bosses anyway because I wanted to see all of the content this game has to offer without doing another playthrough (and for another reason which…we’ll get to later).

If I can compliment something X5 does better than X4 it’s easily the boss fights. They’re a ton of fun to fight, their attacks are fun to avoid and honestly I feel it’s more engaging to take them on with just your default buster or Zsaber instead of using weaknesses to break them in half. Depending on what “level” the boss is at, their health corresponds accordingly (the boss rush at the end has every boss at a stupidly high level so their health bars jut into the stratosphere). I don’t really have any clue about what determines a boss’s level in the slightest, but their level is also crucial into what parts you can equip for Zero or X…I think? Again these mechanics are pretty clumsily implemented and could’ve been explained way better, but if you’re playing casually, it’s best to just get what you get and equip these perks regardless.

The levels themselves are a mixed bag to say the least. They implement more platforming than X4 which is something I’ve personally been missing in Megaman X level design since like, X1, but there’s also a lot of stages that just have nothing going on. Tidal Whale’s stage for instance (and yes I’m going off the names shown to me from the Legacy Collection. Stop messaging me about Duff McWhalen) is just nothing but slow autoscrollers and 3 tedious miniboss encounters. Volt Kraken’s stage is full of switch pushing and chunky enemies blocking your path, all while it starts off sucker punching you with a surprise pit with the ride bike section. It’s nice that you can pick between Zero and X on the fly à la Sonic Rush Adventure, but it generally feels like levels were more so designed for X than Zero (Volt Kraken is especially bad with this with all the switch pushing). I ended up using X more than Zero which sucks because of how much fun I had with Zero in X4.

Then we get to the final boss, Sigma W. Holy crap, this might actually be the worst final boss I have ever played in this series thus far, and from what I could gather I don’t seem to be alone on this either. His first phase? Actually kinda fun. Harkens back to the very first final encounter in X1 and has some new attacks thrown in. The second phase though? Genuinely abysmal. His attacks do so much damage and feel almost impossible (or at the very least EXTREMELY awkward) to avoid, both giant hands coming together without warning and the obnoxious purple boxes jumping around. He also has an attack he does multiple times (!!!!) where you’re trapped between moving electric walls and you’re just sort of forced to tip toe back and forth to avoid taking damage. Fun! It took me multiple attempts and this is with 2 full energy tanks + utilizing the boss weakness. This is mainly why I played the rest of these stages: mainly for the extra weapons and health tanks just so I could stand a CHANCE against this thing. It’s such a ridiculously sour point to end the game on.

But other than that, yeah uh…gameplay is pretty much identical to X4. Running, jumping, shooting, dashing, all that still feels just as good and as refined as before. The special weapons feel pretty good to use too. I’m a bit disappointed they nerfed armor upgrades, or rather they force you to get every single individual piece of the armor before you get any benefits, instead of getting benefits immediately just with one armor part. Maybe it was for balance reasons due to how broken the Falcon Armor is? Idk it just feels like a step down in that regard, even if it does drive me more to find every armor piece now. X5 is a bit of a hodgepodge mess, but is a mess I still managed to have fun with regardless.

This game is a prime example about why I don’t listen to Metacritic scores anymore

The Callisto Protocol is a game I’ve been looking forward to ever since it was unveiled. It had pretty much everything going for it: the clear Dead Space inspiration on top of being directed by the co creator of Dead Space himself, the stunning visuals, combine that with the remake of the first game coming out soon and I was able and willing to play more Dead Space esc action no matter what. When the game came out however, decent to mixed reviews descended and the game was overall labeled a disappointment. Of course, I was waiting to get the game in my hands proper to experience myself before saying anything, because to be honest my opinions are…rather unique for the most part when it comes to the general “metacritic consensus”. There are games out there with good scores that I absolutely despised, and there are games out there with only decent to mixed scores that I absolutely loved and still hold in high regard to this day. While Callisto Protocol has issues and could be vastly improved, I still had a really good time with it.

I’m not gonna say much on the story, it’s very simple and somewhat cliched but it does get propped up by some decent writing and great acting, has a good underlying message of recognizing one’s mistakes and learning from them to better yourself. It’s fine enough for what it is.

The combat is the main draw for most people. It’s more akin to a boxing game more or less, you dodge and weave to avoid enemy attacks and counterattack with strikes of your own. This combat system is admittedly rather unorthodox but I feel it does work and is fairly satisfying. There are a lot of different elements going on here but I think the game is fair by only allowing like, one dude to attack you at a time if you’re in a group so you don’t get overwhelmed, and attacks are well telegraphed so avoiding them is no issue. There’s a lot of different moves you unlock later down the line too: a slow heavy attack that deals crowd control damage, the ability to break the arm of an attacker if they try and block your attacks, the ability to target and auto snap to weak points at the end of a combo for critical damage, there’s a lot of mixture with the gunplay and you can even sprinkle your GRP kinesis mid combo for some arguably pretty flashy takedowns. It’s also always nice having a system to fall back on when it comes to dealing with enemies if you run out of ammunition. There’s a healthy amount of enemy variety, attacks are super impactful and crunchy, and the upgrade system gives you legitimate extra abilities to acquire that are fun to experiment with. There isn’t a huge amount of variety with the melee combat however and the gunplay, while decent, doesn’t really feel as impactful in comparison, so I think there are still elements to be improved on. The enemy variety is decent as well, a good chunk through the game (I think it’s like, chapter 3) the game introduces enemies that regenerate into even stronger versions should you fail to kill them, telegraphed by tentacles in their chest. This adds even more tension to combat and makes it even more frantic and actually pretty fun trying to juggle multiple things at once. The stealth sections are greatly downplayed at the start, you can sneak attack enemies but most of the time the game ambushes you so you’re not really able to use this feature. There are also giant killer robots that show up briefly and then disappear for the rest of the game which also sucks because these enemies are actually pretty tense. The second half of the game however basically overcorrects on this aspect and introduces nothing BUT stealth sections, with enemies who are completely blind and can only detect you through sound. I feel like this could’ve been handled better.

This combat system also allows for some surprisingly decent boss fights, albeit there’s very few of them, but I think they’re fairly fun and unique with how you approach them.

The GRP kinesis works a bit differently from how it does in Dead Space. Where in that game, you had unlimited usage but could only pick up and interact with certain objects and could only pick up parts of enemies if they were dead, Callisto’s kinesis allows you to just pick up any enemy in front of you and throw them wherever you want. There are plenty of environmental hazards you can use to your advantage to deliver an instant kill. It’s arguably more OP in comparison, but it runs on a limited charge system to compensate and must be refilled using batteries or by waiting for it to charge back up again. Frustratingly though, the minimalist hud makes it kinda difficult to tell what charge level the GRP is at so oftentimes I would pick up an enemy after throwing a couple beforehand only for the GRP to stop working and drop the enemy in front of me. The GRP overall is satisfying to use but is a bit samey in how you’re supposed to use it against enemies.

The level design is decent enough. It’s super linear with additional one off beaten paths for extra goodies or hidden collectables, which I don’t mind, but the annoying thing about it is that this game does not make clear which route is the optional collectable filled one and which one continues the story, because oftentimes I’d go down a route THINKING it’s the optional one, but it turns out it isn’t, and then a cutscene is played and I’m completely locked out of going back unless I reload my save. With Dead Space you had an objective marker on you that you could access at any time, so it was easy to tell which path was optional and which wasn’t. I feel Callisto really could’ve used something like this. The game also unfortunately has this really annoying habit of putting surprise jumpscare monsters in crates you search for items or areas to explore. It was almost startling the first time, but by the 15th time I start to roll my eyes a bit as my health gets unavoidably sapped away.

This game looks absolutely incredible too. I had the Series X version and even when I played on performance mode (I don’t really care that much about Raytracing) the game still frequently delivered spectacular visuals. There’s quite a lot of variety too, you have the typical prison settings, a laboratory and the sewers, but then you have stuff like the gorgeous outdoor frozen wasteland of Callisto itself, with imposing silhouettes of corpses stuck in place, an underground mining facility complete with an old western rustic aesthetic, even the warden’s office is this incredibly fancy pristine high tech living space, all with the occasional blood splatter or human corpse strung up in a cocoon. It’s all great stuff. I’m somewhat disappointed that there isn’t a new game + option, as getting enough credits to upgrade every weapon right now is pretty much impossible at this point. Hopefully there will be something down the future.

I can only assume the major issues I missed out on were already patched out (the incredibly slow weapon swap system and healing animation + inability to skip death animations), or were on a different platform entirely (I heard the PC version was notorious at launch so if that’s why people on that platform didn’t like it, I 100% understand that). Real talk though, as much as I enjoyed this game, I think a sequel has way more potential to make this format something special. Improve the melee combat by giving you more weapons with unique properties and abilities, more combat abilities in general, more unique firearms, improve how the GRP can work, have more puzzles in the world, improve the level design, the potential is there and this game does end on a cliffhanger so I only hope they’ll pick this story back up later down the line. Overall though I did end up liking what I experienced. Like I said before it’s rather unorthodox, but if you get the hang of it you’ll have a good time.

There’s an old saying that I think is perfectly apt to apply to this game: “bigger” does not always equal “better”

I did enjoy my time with the original Banjo Kazooie; nothing outstanding or amazing or anything, but as I said before, not all games NEED to be spectacular mindblowing experiences. Some games can just be simple pick up and play games that you can have fun and vibe with and nothing more, like a decent 7/10. I definitely had issues with it but for the most part I did have fun, though I was very curious about what the sequel held in store, whatever that might be. I didn’t really know what to expect going in

I will say though right off the bat the game is definitely funnier than the original. The writing is a bit snappier and more self aware than the previous game, there’s a lot of gags present throughout that honestly caught me off guard (the poor ice cube folk). The story picks up directly where the last game left off, and the opening act is surprisingly kind of dismal for a Banjo game, traversing through a now destroyed Spiral Mountain. After you entire the Isle o Hags, the game’s tone changes back to where it usually is.

The basic gist of Banjo Tooie is to…basically do exactly what the 1st game did, but expand and make literally EVERYTHING so unnecessarily bigger. The worlds you travel through are enormous compared to Banjo 1, and not just that, but they’re all interconnected via not only a train station, but also secret areas in specific worlds that lead into other worlds. And that’s not it either, all of the hubs worlds that hold these levels are ALSO super massive and interconnected and can be traversed through quickly by several different portals. If nothing else, I can commend Tooie on the sheer ambition alone, especially on a system as limited as the N64. Thankfully I don’t have to play this game on original hardware as I’ve heard the framerate issues were, quite frankly, abhorrent. I’ll also give credit for just giving all of the moves that Banjo & Kazooie learned in the first game right from the get go. There are very VERY subtle control improvements (specifically in regards to swimming and flying) but it’s not really noticeable at all, the game overall feels the same as 1, which leads into my main problem:

Simply put these worlds are far too expansive and empty and generally aren’t fun to traverse around. The first Banjo built these different worlds with Banjo’s limited speed and movement in mind and it worked. The worlds in Banjo 1 were full of stuff to do, but they were also tight and focused, they didn’t really feel like you were just sorta meandering around doing nothing of substance (the later levels got slightly worse with this I find but in general this wasn’t much of a problem). With Tooie, every single world feels tedious to traverse through with how big they all are, and a lot of the time spent in these worlds are spent wandering around figuring out what to do next. I guess to help alleviate this issue, every level comes packed with portal pads to warp to different parts of the map where other portals are at, which does help but I don’t feel it’s enough. There’s just so much back and forth across these portals and across the level itself, at one point you gain the ability to split Banjo & Kazooie to solve specific puzzles, access different areas and collect different Jiggies, but ultimately this compounds the back and forth issue even MORE. Needing to go to one area, do something with one character, and switching back to the other to either play catch up or to do something else, I’m sorry but this is just multiple extra steps that never needed to be added in the first place. On top of all of this you also gain new additional abilities to take advantage of courtesy of Jamjars. Rather than using notes to unlock other areas of the hub worlds, you use them primarily to obtain new moves and I’m…mixed on a lot of them. There are some neat additions, you get different eggs to solve puzzles and provide different combat options, a drill dive attack, and different powerups that have different perks. However I’d say a vast majority of moves you require are gimmicky and are too situational to be fun. Going back to the issues I have with splitting Banjo & Kazooie up, there are also brand new moves you can give to either Banjo or Kazooie individually, and a lot of these are pretty mundane and are purely contextual (Kazooie gets a move where she sits down and hatches eggs and nothing else, Banjo can put stuff inside his backpack where he can carry around and solve puzzles with, and he can go inside his backpack to enter specific areas and nothing else). Even worse, oftentimes when you discover a Jamjars bunker as Banjo & Kazooie together, the game goes “OOPS, too bad this move is only for Banjo, try again!” and you need to backtrack allllll the way to a separation pad, separate the 2, come back to that spot with the single required character, learn the move, and then leave that area. All of this further accentuates and adds onto the back and forth tedium that Tooie displays front and center. Some new abilities just flat out suck, there’s one that allows you to shoot eggs in first person mode, which sounds fine but the aiming on control sticks is so finicky and jittery that it’s actively unpleasant to use. The game will sometimes mimic a first person shooter where Banjo cocks Kazooie like a gun which is admittedly a very funny tribute visually but these sections just aren’t that fun to play because of this issue. Even the final boss requires aiming at specific areas in first person mode WHILE avoiding projectiles, it’s a mess, doubly so for the nauseating challenges and bosses involving shooting in first person mode while flying.

And I’m STILL not done here, you can once again gain help from Mumbo Jumbo but now it involves 2 different processes. The traditional transformation gimmick is back but this time you need the assistance of Humba Wumba, a completely different character often in a completely different location from Mumbo himself. By visiting Mumbo you gain the ability to temporarily play as him in the select stage in order to go to (once again) contextual Mumbo pads and make something happen within the level to help with puzzle solving. Mumbo himself isn’t very fun to play with seeing as how his attack halts him in place and he has no movement abilities at all. Both of these characters require 1 Glowbo each in order to access, yet another pair of collectables per stage in a game already filled to the brim with collectibles. Granted they aren’t hard to locate at all but again, it feels like pure filler in an already filler-filled game.

Unfortunately Tooie quickly became a game I started playing out of curiosity, to a game I only finished out of pure obligation. I was exhausted by the end, while the first Banjo game took me around 12 hours or so to finish, Tooie took me over 27 HOURS to finish, not even 100% (though I did nearly get all of the achievements). I can tell you right now, most of that 27 hours wasn’t enjoyment. Tooie is an ambitious game overall that I can commend for what they tried to do, but it simply isn’t fun to play. A form of sincere simplicity from the first game is completely lost as the sequel is utterly bloated with all this empty space, backtracking, and extra “stuff” to do, most of which isn’t even fun. I would like to see another crack at the typical Banjo formula some day in the style of what Crash 4 did, but Tooie is frankly too expansive for its own good.

Mega Man X4 is a game I had some trouble coming up with an arbitrary review for, mainly because what I had to say about the game wasn't exactly unique compared to what nearly everyone else says about this game. The visuals are spectacular, the action was even more frantic and fast paced than the previous 3 X games (especially helped by the fact that if you hold the dash button down while jumping, you can now continuously do long dash jumps which adds a huge amount of flow to moment to moment gameplay), the weapons in this game are back to being fun to use compared to the nothingburger assortment of weapons X3 gave us, I still wouldn't say all of them are winners but a vast majority definitely are. The level design still isn't as platforming centric as X1 but it gets the job done well enough I suppose, Magma Dragoon's stage being one of my personal favorites, and the upgrades X can get to his armor are pretty crazy.

Then we have Zero. Zero takes what would already be a solid X game and cranks it up to 11. We've gone from X3 giving us a Zero that's a carbon copy of X but with more health, no special weapons, and a charge attack that at stage 3 had an admittedly pretty op sword attack, to a Zero that specializes only in close ranged sword based combat. Zero is so much fun to use it should be illegal, he's just as fast and acrobatic as X, but his sword dealing with small fry and even tearing though chunky enemies with ease, trying to simultaneously maintain your speed while doing so is amazing. You do have to essentially play the same game twice (though Zero does have some unique boss encounters and unique cutscenes) but Zero is so much fun to play as that this becomes a non issue. He doesn't get X's armor upgrades but his special weapons come in the form of extra techniques he can input, like a double jump, rising flame strike attack, downward ice stab, a dash attack, etc. Admittedly Zero struggles with a lot of boss fights in ways that X doesn't, so he's not strictly "superior" to X or anything, though admittedly some boss fights I actually found easier to deal with as Zero compared to X, mainly the final Sigma fight.

Don't really have much to say on the story though it's admittedly pretty stupid. The game has fully animated cutscenes which all look great, but the voice acting is genuinely horrendous and memed into oblivion at this point so I won't really add onto the dogpile much (though I am very disappointed in you colonel). I liked that the game showcased Zero's origin and his original creator though, was a nice touch.

It's a fun super fast paced game. I like fun super fast paced games. It was inevitable that I would really enjoy myself with this one I suppose.

This game is such an immense degrade in quality in almost every area possible from the previous 2 X games that I don't really understand what went wrong. I'm being serious, nearly every element is just flat out worse. The special weapons feel awful to use with a couple exceptions, only getting use as boss weakness fodder for me and nothing more. The level design makes watching paint dry more exciting in comparison, a barrage of bland hallways and copy pasted spikes everywhere with almost no platforming to speak of (remember the moving narrow platforms over pits that put your jumping skills to work in X1? Me neither). Enemies have barely any variety at all and are repeatedly spammed throughout every stage, most of which are bullet sponges that take forever to kill, deal ridiculous damage to you on contact and overall just disrupt flow of a game that already lacks flow to begin with. X3 also has an obsession with forcibly pitting you against some of the worst minibosses I've seen in this franchise thus far, these things take forever to kill, have attack patterns they keep using on loop repeatedly, one miniboss only takes damage in one specific area and constantly goes off screen a lot which drags on the fight even more. Bosses are uninteresting even without taking their weaknesses into consideration, and some bosses block off access to heart tanks in other stages without any intuitive rhyme or reason.

The game also introduces Bit, Byte and the returning Vile as minibosses to take down. Well I mean, for Bit and Byte's case their encounters seem almost entirely random, the first miniboss room you enter can sometimes have them appear in certain stages, but sometimes not. Bit's ok, Byte is a complete joke, nothing much to add from there. Vile you can easily track him down by entering secret areas. There's not really any incentive to beating them to be honest, if you don't fight them, you fight them again later on only harder. If you beat them, you still need to fight a different boss later on entirely, they're even less consequential than the X hunters in 2 somehow. You can also play as Zero for the first time! The game doesn't really tell you how to do this and unfortunately he's not very fun to use. He's stronger and has more health yes, and he can charge his weapon 4 times for a sword attack that deals a disgusting amount of damage, but he can't use special weapons, the game forcibly swaps you back to X when you enter a miniboss room and you can't use him again for the rest of the stage, and to top that off if you end up dying as Zero, you lose him PERMANENTLY and can't use him again at all, pretty underwhelming of an idea. You'll mostly end up never using him until that one doppler stage where you switch to him to kill a miniboss (only time you're able to do so) and grant X that same super strong sword attack.

On top of armor upgrades you also get enhancement chips if you're able to find them, essentially boosted versions of upgrades you already have. What sucks though is that you're only allowed to pick one and once you pick it, you're stuck with that upgrade for good, you can't really try out any of the other upgrades afterwards. What's even more confusing is that by stumbling upon these upgrades and obtaining them, doing so actually locks you OUT of getting the Hyper Chip later on, the upgrade that has all 4 attached from the get go, it's like you're getting punished for...basic exploration, I don't understand it.

The music though, dear GOD. I know I said before I wasn't a fan of the instrumentation of X1 even though the composition was pretty catchy, most of X3's music sounds so samey in comparison and a lot of it is pretty repetitive. Not all of it is bad but it kinda wore me out after a bit of listening to it, not really a fan at all. I haven't heard the PS1 version of the soundtrack though I have heard that it's apparently entirely different.

This game overall was equal parts boring, frustrating, and baffling all in the same experience. Can't say I played many games that offered all 3 at once.

Decided to make an updated review of SA1 after doing yet another playthrough and gaining more insight on how I view things and how I view what I want out of Sonic games for me specifically (and honestly being able to better articulate my thoughts on something I experienced in an interesting way). With that said, this is still the same PC version I played last time, just with the DC conversion mod enabled, so we get the funny DC models, lighting and whatnot. Though to tell you the truth I don't think this would've changed my opinion on this game if it were still the regular DX models and visuals and…you get the picture. Get ready cos this is gonna be a looooong one.

Sonic Adventure is a game I've tried my best to like. Multiple times. There's a lot of charming elements to it and its overall pretty alright for being the series' first full transition to a mainline 3D playstyle that Sonic Team would eventually build off of and expand. But no matter how many chances I've given Sonic Adventure at this state the overall end result leaves me either underwhelmed at BEST, and annoyed at worst. It's an experience I overall can't get too angry at but it's also something I likely can never truly get into. It leaves me with an overall lingering sense of apathy and numbness.

Starting with the story, I'm gonna be honest Sonic stories are not really something I tend to discuss in reviews like this unless I have something interesting to say about them, whether it's because they're really REALLY good (Frontiers), or because they're so bad they turn all the way back around and be ironic levels of enjoyable (Lost World, Shadow). SA1 was the series' first attempt for more serious and expansive storytelling, branching off of the stories the Classic games set up beforehand. I appreciate the effort but I'm sorry, this story just does not work well at all, for multiple reasons. The biggest overall focus of SA1 is the story of the echidna tribe and how their downfall is brought upon them due to their overall greed and desire for power/messing with things even they don't quite understand. That on its own is decent enough, but the problem is that SA1 attempts to tell individual plots that don't exactly relate to this overarching narrative and yet decides to clumsily tie every story together in a jumbled way that works about as well as putting mayonnaise on an ice cream sandwich. Individually really only Knuckles relates to this as he's the last echidna and reflects on why he was given this duty and whatnot, it's nice and it also showcases the events that kickstart this entire story to begin with. The rest aren't really connected to the echidna storyline at all and honestly individually they almost all fall flat. Sonic's is a very generic "stop Eggman" plot that at points was borderline cartoonishly formulaic with how Eggman keeps swiping emeralds away from Sonic and Tails, via tricking Knuckles to fight him or...knock out gas (it's just as dumb as it sounds too). Tails' isn't too bad at all and showcases a story about independence from Sonic and being able to do things on his own. Amy just wants to help a bird find his family and...that's about it. Gamma after being given emotions via witnessing Amy conflict with his computer robotic esc logic about friendship and what have you, and after previously seeing his own brethren be experimented upon and taken apart and rebuilt piece by piece, decides to kill all his siblings that Eggman had built in order to "free" them, subsequently freeing the birds inside both themselves and him, which hey that’s actually pretty solid as a standalone story. And Big? My mans just wants to fish and find his frog friend for God's sakes. These stories don't really intertwine very well at all and when bringing up the previous topic of relating to the overarching echidna narrative it makes even LESS sense. Tikal just casually talks with Gamma and Big who likely have no clue what's going on, doesn’t react or say anything of worth to what’s unfolding on screen and who's contribution towards the end of the story means absolutely nothing. I guess these segments are meant for the player to have bits and pieces of the narrative shoveled in our brains but this could've been handled so much better than it's handled here. Not helping things is the pretty abysmal story presentation. Oftentimes cutscenes will drag on for an eternity when they have absolutely no reason to whatsoever (which is another reason why the PC version is goated seeing as how you can actually skip cutscenes), but there are many times where cutscenes that feature interacting characters in one story will play out again in an almost IDENTICAL fashion in another. For example, if you have a cutscene in Sonic's story where he's having a scene with Knuckles and Tails in it, guess what? That scene is likely to occur in almost identical fashion when you play Knuckles' story AND Tails' story. I think the most offensive example is that one cutscene (technically 2 because with Gamma and Sonic's story you have to fight the opposing character as a boss before the other cutscene starts), where Eggman orders Gamma to fight Sonic, and afterwards where Amy convinces Sonic not to attack Gamma. Sonic, Gamma, Tails and Amy are all present, so you have to watch this long overly drawn out scene not once, not twice, not thrice, but 4 FREAKING TIMES. ONCE FOR EACH STORY. Like, did they not think that was enough??? I won't speak ill of the bizarre overly stiff animation as it was a product of its time (though Crash Bandicoot arguably had better animation years before this game came out but I digress), and heck the FMVs that play are actually pretty well done even looking at them today, but the voice acting is genuinely horrendous. Everyone sounds like they're reading directly from the script without any care being given whatsoever, it's so amateur and stilted, the one exception being Deem Bristow as Eggman who absolutely hams up every scene he's in and genuinely steals the show. The characterization is something I don't feel is fully realized in part because of laughably inept dialogue and the aforementioned voice acting. All in all, the story, while ambitious, is nothing more than a disorganized threadbare attempt at telling a more interconnected story that ends up making me ask more questions the more I poke holes into it.

"But G/7!!!" I hear the hypothetical audience member shout, "People mostly love SA1 for the GAMEPLAY, not the silly narrative!!", so I think it's about time I started tackling the main gameplay of Sonic Adventure. And...boy howdy there's a lot to discuss.

I'll start with Sonic first. He's easily the best part about this game and the main thing saving this game from being in the gutter (and being the main focus, he'd have to be). This is where 3D Sonic gameplay at it’s inception truly shines, Sonic’s 3D movement is fairly fluid and the level design can often be quite expansive, there are times where levels truly open up and actually reward you for thinking outside the box and reaching areas you would normally think are just decorative set dressing (like the big buildings in the beginning of Speed Highway) The level themes you go through are varied as Sonic travels through the 10 of the 11 stages offered (The only stage he doesn’t go through is Hot Shelter). Not all of his stages are amazing though, I don’t really care for ring grinding and needing to enter the sewer section in Casinopolis, the drawn-out snowboarding section in Ice Cap with barely anything happening, the overly long Kart racing section in Twinkle Park, the water snake in Lost World, nearly…everything in Sky Deck. I get that they wanted to inject this game with all sorts of variety but a lot of this supposed variety just doesn’t sit well with me at all, and some of them drag down what would be otherwise decent stages. The main element of enjoyment people get from Sonic’s gameplay besides the tight control semi expansive level design is the Spindash and how bonkers busted it is. Just by using Spindash jumping you can basically screw over huge chunks of level design and I’m gonna be honest, I’m mixed about this. A part of me unsurprisingly finds it fun to yeet upwards and skip large portions of a level, it’s fun to do no matter what, but a part of me also feels like this completely undermines SA1’s level design as a whole. There’s entire intricately designed platforming sections and huge entire sections of levels that get screwed over and ignored because you pressed X and A slightly. It feels so weird to do so because in the end I SHOULD be satisfied that I can take massive shortcuts like this but it also makes me feel as if SA1’s level design doesn’t really have a point to it when you can just ignore it any time you want. Still though on a surface level it is still fun to rocket and leap around the terrain like a madman and using ramps to get even more height and distance than normal so at the end of the day I can’t be too mad at it I suppose. The homing attack makes its official debut (unless you count like, that one shield powerup from 3D Blast) and it’s…ok. Like it works well and is fairly quick in execution but a lot of time SA1 places homing attack chains that lead downwards like a staircase and you basically have to take these slow or else risk overshooting and it makes the homing attack so much more awkward as a result. It doesn’t help that defeating enemies in SA1 is so unsatisfying because your attacks have no crunch or impact to them whatsoever, every enemy dies with…what I can only describe as the Nickelodeon splat sound effect being played, it’s so weird. I know that I’ve been sounding extremely pessimistic towards Sonic’s gameplay, and while I do have a lot of gripes, in the end it’s still fun and it’s overall the best part of the entire package so I can’t really take too much away from it, it’s just that I’d honestly rather play any other 3D Sonic playstyle like Heroes, SA2 speed stages, the Boost games, Frontiers, etc. because I feel they’re not only more fun and better designed but they offer more substance as a whole. As a template for future 3D games afterwards though, I’d say they really did a good job in this department on their first try so kudos.

Unfortunately, literally every playstyle afterwards is something I consider either underwhelming at best or agonizing at worst. Tails is up next; his whole deal is that he needs to beat Sonic (or Eggman in Speed Highway) to the goal. Right off the bat, I don’t get this goal design. I guess they just wanted Tails’ gameplay to stand out from Sonic’s start to finish stage structure for “variety” (there’s that word again), but like, for one this goal design doesn’t even make sense in context to the story. I get why he’s racing against Eggman to the bomb in Speed Highway as it’s a race for him to deactivate it before it destroys Station Square, but Sonic? Why does he need to win against him? What’s the correlation? Why does he instantly fail if Sonic gets the emerald instead of Tails, aren’t they best friends on the same team? But whatever, I’m arguing semantics over funny cartoon hedgehog video game, doesn’t matter, but on another point this goal structure doesn’t even work as it’s presented here gameplay wise. Tails essentially travels through recycled Sonic stages as Sonic races against him, and the problem is that Tails’ flight absolutely snaps these stages in half like a twig. You can, no joke, clear the first level in a single jump by just following the path downwards to avoid kill planes and beat the stage in like 15 seconds. Remember when I said how SA1’s expansive level design is sort of undermined by Sonic’s ability to spindash jump and basically skip huge chunks of it? This exemplifies this issue tenfold. None of these already repeated stages have anything going for them because they’re over and done with in mere seconds and there’s not much to them gameplay wise because you can win by tapping jump slightly a bunch due to these stages not being designed for Tails at all. He just ends up being Sonic but worse in this regard. Sometimes the game introduces stages like Sand Hill, a pointless snowboarding minigame that you play that has like zero context to the story and just exists because Sonic Team decided that there simply weren’t enough minigames in this game already (because you know, again, variety). The final stage is the only one that does feel like it was designed for Tails and, as such, it’s the best stage for him by far and actually pretty fun to play. The thing is, this gameplay style isn’t actually bad on a surface level and I genuinely think it can be improved with future titles. Make the stages point A to point B goals to go through instead of racing against someone, make the stages themselves original and super expansive and alternate between vertical high and low level design to accommodate for Tails’ flight and I think that this gameplay can potentially be really fun. Tails himself has great handling like Sonic and his flight is fun to use so I do think they at least have a template to work off of, even today it’s something I think they should reconsider looking into. As it is here though, it’s woefully unexplored and half baked.

Then we have Knuckles. His gameplay is treasure hunting, looking for scattered pieces of the Master Emerald around confined yet still somewhat open ended boxed in areas. And by that, I mean they basically just recycled sections of Sonic’s stages and made you play through them in a slightly different manner all over again (now where have I seen this before…). Much like Tails and Sonic Knuckles handles very well overall and they got rid of the horrific endlag from 3&K when he landed from a glide which makes him way more fluid to play and move around. I think my main issue with this playstyle is that there’s like…no interesting mechanics or depth to it whatsoever, it basically kinda plays itself. Some might call the 1 emerald radar system of SA2 limiting but it actually encouraged you to use the hint system well and use context clues from the environment to find the emerald shards, encouraging using as few hints as possible to find them for max score. Yknow…actually hunting for treasure, crazy concept I know. In SA1, the radar tracks all 3 shards at once, and considering that these recycled areas aren’t very big it’s very easy to just bumble around and get all 3 in one fell swoop with little effort. It’s not so much that you’re hunting for these things and more so that you’re like…stumbling into them because you’re doing nothing but following radar beeps, there’s not really any actual gameplay in that department. Tikal works here as a hint system equivalent…oh sorry wait, did I say equivalent? To the hint system? Silly me, I meant to say that she literally points you in the direction that the emerald is in. If you weren’t satisfied with aimless wandering to collect the trinkets to finish the stage, then that’s ok! You can just have Tikal show where they are for you! Like…where’s the actual gameplay here? The game is mostly playing itself at that point. These stages end so abruptly that there’s no sense of satisfaction for collecting them, there’s just nothing here to offer at all. I guess I can see why some people prefer SA1 treasure hunting over SA2 ‘s version due to more inexperienced folk taking forever in the bigger more expansive stages. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not a HUGE fan of treasure hunting in SA2 by any means, I can write entire paragraphs over why Mad Space and Death Chamber can blow me, but when it boiled down to it, these did a better job at offering a gameplay style you actually had to engage with instead of a gameplay style playing itself. I guess I can prefer these stages specifically over Mad Space or Death Chamber due to the fact that they only take like 30 seconds to finish, but in the end this playstyle just feels like a whole lot of nothing.

So far if we just look at these 3 gameplay styles of the main trio, they aren’t amazing and could be improved further but they aren’t…bad I guess. They’re serviceable if not a bit mundane but for their first attempt at bringing Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails into a 3D space, it’s not bad at all. It’s mainly with the OTHER 3 playstyles where my main super big problems arise, emphasis on big.

Gamma sucks. He’s essentially a precursor to the terrible mech stages in SA2 which just goes to show how bad this playstyle was from the very start if they couldn’t make any significant improvements with a sequel, but I digress. The main element that makes up Gamma’s stages is the ability to lock on to multiple enemies by holding the shoot button, and releasing to shoot everything you locked onto at once. In SA2 you mainly did this for points and to clear enemies that were in your way. In SA1 you kill enemies to add more time to the clock, as the timer in Gamma’s stages counts down instead of up. An interesting idea if the game actually, you know, gave you an extremely low amount of time, would actually make these sections frantic and fast paced with how much you need to chain whilst speeding on by at the same time. But no, Gamma’s stages give you an ABSURD amount of time on the clock. Combine this with his levels being, once again (shocker) recycled Sonic stages (minus Hot Shelter) cut in half and this makes killing enemies not really do anything but make the stupidly easy stage even easier. Here’s the thing, the main gameplay loop of SA2 mechs is boring as all get out, and it’s just as boring here. Fundamentally I don’t think this gameplay style has ever worked and is ever GOING to work without some insane amount of retooling, the gameplay is too simplistic and lacking in challenge to sustain my attention and patience for more than 30 seconds before I get bored and desperately want to move on to something else. In terms of which one is worse, I’d still have to give that distinction to SA2 mechs. Sure, the levels are original design wise (even though they aren’t good) and the point system adds an element to mechs that Gamma doesn’t have, but mechs also have far more clunkier sluggish handling in comparison, they’re somehow even slower, and some stages last for an eternity. Gamma for all his faults at least controls ok enough, it’s not great, but like…it’s serviceable at least and it isn’t as slow as molasses. He also benefits from his stages ending in like 30 seconds so I can’t get THAT bored with something that ends super quickly. All in all, though, not a very good playstyle, certainly not one I actively want to replay no matter how good his main theme is.

Amy has her own campaign here too, one of the few times she’s actually playable in this entire series (I can only ever think of like, Heroes, the Advance games, SA2 multiplayer, 06 and…the Sonic Boom games as exceptions. Sheesh). It’s a shame this is the case though because this is arguably the worst playstyle in this entire game, next to another playstyle which I’ll get into afterwards. Amy is another point A to B playstyle which is appreciated, with the main gimmick being that she’s constantly being chased by Zero, this robot that I can only describe as looking like a green woodchipper with arms. I…guess the intent was to create a constant sense of tension and danger with always being chased by a killer robot but it falls flat in every area. The first area being that Zero is not threatening at all. You can easily outpace him and you can even attack him which stuns him for a set period of time and you can even do this repeatedly so there’s no threat with this omnipresent pursuer at all. On TOP of that if Zero manages to catch you, rather than losing a life and thus adding some semblance of tension to this robo chaser, he just damages you. It’s one of the most pointless additions to this game I think I’ve ever seen, but that’s not even why I hate Amy’s playstyle in SA1, nonono. I hate it personally because she’s so SLOOOOOOOOOW. Her run speed is awful, she takes a while to GET to her slow max speed, and the platforming (whenever her stages decide to have any there’s almost nothing but hallways and ladder climbing lmao) is so basic and uninteresting that these other issues are nothing but exacerbated. She has this ability to vault jump with her hammer while moving and keep her speed continuously while going airborne, but like…her speed is already awful so using this isn’t gratifying at all. You also get an upgrade where you can spin her hammer in a 360-degree attack (which you only get by getting a high score in…whack-a-mole, it’s literally whack-a-mole) and it’s so pointless that I wonder why it’s even in here at all (you can’t even move while using it). Her stages just drag to absurd degrees, nothing interesting ever happens, you can’t do anything fun with her horribly slow and limited movement, this entire playstyle is just a waste.

And speaking of waste, this brings us to our final playstyle: Big. Big likes fishing. Thus, you must fish. I don’t mind Big as a character and I’m not one of those people who are all like, “Um…fishing??? In MY Sonic game???? What does this have to do with Sonic!!!”. I don’t mind a good healthy spice of variety if it’s done well, but that’s the thing: it has to be done WELL. You can put in as many outlandish goofy minigames as you want, but if they aren’t fun to play then I’m sorry but I’m gonna end up hating it. Big’s fishing unfortunately falls into this category. Big’s fishing suffers from several major problems that all add up to an overall awful playstyle. The first being the camera, once you throw the lure into the pond of water it legitimately WILL NOT stay on either the fish you’re looking for or the rod itself, it chooses THE most awkward angle it can possibly find and doesn’t allow you to move it either. You can move the rod around once you cast it but it’s so sluggish and it just jolts in an almost random feeling binary direction, it feels so unintuitive to control. You primarily use this to lure fish to bite your rod, more specifically Froggy. There are other fish to catch but they’re just there for point fodder and are only there to waste your time unless you’re playing the extra missions. Once you catch Froggy the stage immediately ends. In theory this can make stages either the longest in the entire game or the shortest, depending on whether or not the stupid frog or even the game itself decides to cooperate with you. When you get a bite, you need to hold A to reel it in, or you can hold a different button to reel in slower, but you can’t reel in too fast otherwise you risk breaking the rod and losing a life, so it ends up being this prolonged tug of war where sometimes you can advance the fish quite a way towards you, and sometimes you can’t and the fish just leaps forward a bunch. What’s even MORE confusing and head scratching is when you get the fish you hooked to the surface and the game just…decides that you didn’t actually bring it up and cuts the line off. Like there are SO many times where I hooked Froggy and got him up to the surface but the game just decided “nah” and broke the line off and now I had to fish for him all over again. I don’t lose a life when this happens but it’s annoying and there’s no good reason as to why this happens at all. This playstyle is simply too jank and too poorly designed for any semblance of fun to be had at all. The nicest thing you can say about Big is that his playstyle is rather quick if and ONLY if you know what you’re doing, and even then, sometimes not.

So that’s it. That’s basically all the playstyles Sonic Adventure has to offer. As you can see I’ve been…pretty negative towards most of them, but I do think that Sonic alone props this entire experience up a lot. He is still very fun as is, but the rest feel like a mixed grab bag of half baked ideas that don’t even work conceptually, and others that have potential but are never fully realized at all. However this is of course, me just talking about the core playstyles of Sonic Adventure, there’s a lot more this game has to offer outside of these elements, like hub worlds! Sonic Adventure sports, I think it’s like, 3 hub worlds (Station Square, Mystic Ruins, Egg Carrier) separated into sections via loading screens and whatnot.

I don’t get the point of these

Like yeah, sure, they’re good ways to get a feel for the movement and abilities of the characters before you enter a stage, in that way they do a good job, and they aren’t SUPER big to where going through them is a hassle but like…I don’t really get the point to be honest. The most you’re gonna be doing in these areas is carrying stone blocks back and forth to other points of these hubs and inserting them into holes to open up stage entrances. Boring time-wasting puzzle busywork, great. There’s literally nothing else to do in these empty voids besides…run around I guess? Do jack all? They somewhat work as world building with what SA1’s locales have to offer and how you access the stages through them, but I also think that in and of itself doesn’t work well either because of how little interactivity these deserted wastelands have to offer and because the npcs you talk to are by far one of the worst in the entire series. I’d argue they’re almost as bad as the npcs in 06, they have no character at all, they’re shamelessly copy pasted throughout, the things they have to say to Sonic and gang are unmemorable and feel like they’re tacked on last minute because “we gotta meet a quota, gotta fill these things up with SOMETHING to talk to, ANYTHING.” Remember how Unleashed’s hubs had so many different people to talk with, remember how each had their own little unique stories to watch play out and arcs to go through? They weren’t all good sure but the depth was there and it was fun to uncover. I kinda miss that here ngl. I kinda get what people see in these hubs when you run through them as Sonic or Tails. Not so much the condensed Station Square hub or the cramped Jungle hub that kills your speed whenever you run into the river water, but more so the main Mystic Ruins hub and the area in Angel Island with the Master Emerald shrine, that stuff is fun to run around and not really do much of anything in because these characters are fun to control, same deal with Knuckles. The other 3 characters do not get this benefit, so any nice things I’ve said about these hub areas with the other characters can’t really apply here. The drawn-out stone puzzle commutes become even more noticeable than before and it’s not fun to move around these hubs because subsequently these characters ALSO aren’t fun to move around. The only other things to find in these hub worlds are upgrades for whatever character you’re playing as or emblems, neither are a good source of satisfaction for discovery or exploration in the slightest, emblems ESPECIALLY.

The boss fights in this game have to be the easiest in ANY Sonic game out there, and I’m talking easier than the bosses in Sonic CD and that’s just kinda sad. The character battles are a complete joke and take no effort to beat, and the other bosses aren’t much better, just instances of not being able to be hit, attacking, and landing in a “HEY I’M VULNERABLE PLEASE HIT ME NOW” kind of way, lather rinse repeat. The Chaos 3 boss is extremely egregious, first off you not only need to fight this thing 3 times (Once as Sonic, once as Tails, and once as Knuckles), but it’s also just a giant waiting game, waiting for him to surface and bop him on the head one time so he can go under, do extremely telegraphed attacks for as long as he wants, and pop back up for you to hit him again. The only “””intricate””” boss is Gamma’s final boss but even that is still pretty mindless. Perfect Chaos has an interesting design philosophy, needing to keep your speed high enough in order to spiral up inside him and reach his weak spot, but it’s so easy to pick up speed as Super Sonic and the obstacles are incredibly easy to avoid so it overall still feels kinda pointless.

SA1 also features a bunch of missions to tackle for each character. It works similar to the extra missions in SA2, though instead of 5 for each character in each stage they have, there’s only 3 A B and C missions for each character in each stage they’re in, each having a different goal (and this is also different from mission mode that the DX version introduces, which just amounts to even more pointless busywork to do around hubs and sometimes challenges to complete in action stages). I managed to nab every emblem for Sonic’s A B C missions, simply because he’s that enjoyable to play. I cannot say the same for every other character in this game, I genuinely cannot be bothered to do their missions because I either think their playstyle sucks or is just uninteresting. This goes double for the missions. There’s also the Chao Garden which I will never interact with in my life. I hated the Chao Garden in SA2, I’m not even remotely gonna bother with it here, I can’t even fathom doing all the grinding and awful non-interactive minigames. Count me out, thanks. Between this and the tedious missions, I genuinely don’t think I’m ever gonna 100% SA1 any time soon. This is probably an extremely weird thing to say coming from someone who 100% the entirety of SA2 and even Unleashed for as much as I hated that game, and especially considering this game is apparently far easier to 100% than either one of these, but considering how much of a chore BOTH games were to 100%, I just don’t think I’m willing to stomach the same repetitive requirements for this game. I know I know, I’ve been wrong and have repeatedly gone back on my word numerous times for things I knew I said I wouldn’t do and ended up doing anyway so maybe I will end up doing it at some point just because I’m that much of a masochist, but what’s the point? Why do it at all? Just to get a tacky Metal Sonic skin? SA2 at least gave you a cute playable 3D recreation of classic Green Hill Zone, this feels like even lesser of a reward for an already lesser game in my eyes.

The soundtrack is pretty good all around though. I’ve especially grown fonder of the character themes, Final Egg, Sky Deck, and even some of the hub world themes are a jam, particularly Station Square and Mystic Ruins (Egg Carrier’s theme is too repetitive for me to really get into it). I can’t really vibe with Sonic’s main theme though, the opening riff is iconic but afterwards it just degrades into a generic rock ballad, SA2 managed to turn this theme into something truly jammin’. Visually it looks good for a Dreamcast title despite the horrible animation and the pre-rendered FMVs are again, pretty well made. Still Sonic Adventure at the end of the day is a game that at it’s best, just exists. And why on earth would I want to play something like that? There are so many games out there I’d rather play again, heck, there are so many better SONIC games I’d rather play again. Sonic Adventure isn’t one of them. No amount of “THE VIBES BROO” can save this one for me, I can’t vibe with hardly anything shown here to begin with.

So nah man. This ain’t happenin’.

This feels like more of the same from X1, some aspects better, some worse overall. I liked it about the same just for different reasons, though I honestly would rather play this one more due to being better to start right out the gate. The dash is on by default, most bosses are less of a pain to deal with with some exceptions, wall jump dashing is overall way easier to pull off, a lot of the stages can be pretty fun on their own too. I liked most of the weapons but some like the grabby arm are mainly used to get upgrades and whatnot and not much else. On the topic of upgrades I genuinely wish that upgrades could be less cryptically hidden, it took a while for me to even find most of these eventually. You also face off against X hunters, optional minibosses sprinkled in certain stages you actively need to hunt down and fight, if you beat them you get Zero's parts and if you get all of Zero's parts you won't need to fight him as a boss later on. I didn't end up doing this mainly because once you defeat a certain number of maverick bosses you've basically reached the point of no return and have to fight Zero anyway, I didn't really mind this seeing as how Zero's boss is pretty fun and short so it isn't really a big deal all around. I do wish that you could air dash from a dash jump but you can only do it from a normal jump which kinda sucks. Overall still a pretty solid title.

First foray into the Mega Man X franchise via recommendations from friends didn’t exactly start off on a positive note. Towards the beginning of the game it was MISERABLE. It was standard run and gun Mega Man gameplay and the ability to cling and continuously jump up walls was awesome, but X’s health pool was puny and he took way too much damage, combined with your sluggish initial movement speed made early game levels a slog, slowly tiptoeing around levels desperately trying not to get blown up in an instant, I was NOT having a good time in the slightest. However, once you start to collect upgrades I feel like the game becomes substantially better overall. You get a super fun dash that’s fun to pull off and can even keep your speed in the air, general damage reduction, an upgrade to your blaster that gives the additional weapons you acquire additional effects like a shield, huge AOE damage and invincibility, overall health upgrades and even the ability to store additional health drops to save for later use is a really cool idea. Mega Man X eventually becomes a pretty enjoyable fast paced shooty shooty bang bang platformer, speed being something my friends would know I definitely admire in a platformer overall. The game is generous with checkpoints, there are pretty cool interactions with how you attack and take down bosses depending on what weapon you use against them, I like how defeating a certain boss alters the stage of another boss and changes how you can traverse it, the game doesn’t even force you to fight certain minibosses again if you managed to kill them and respawn from a checkpoint or if you’ve already killed them and reentered a stage which is nice.

I don’t think it’s all perfect though, performing dash wall jumps kills my thumbs as you need to like, press dash and jump at the same time like some sort of button combination on walls, it’s very awkward to pull off. The game also has the old school “enemies immediately respawn because they went off screen” mentality, combine that with narrow platforms and long bottomless pits or spikes and you have pure annoyance at its finest. Some of the bosses and mini bosses also kinda suck (I’m looking at you Spider and Submarine), the game lags like crazy on Legacy Collection (idk why I guess they wanted it to be…truly faithful to original hardware or something?) and I’m overall not a fan of the music (it’s composed well but I can’t really jive with the SNES instrumentation at all), but still, what started out rough ended up being a fairly solid game all around. Curious to see how the other X games play out.

Man...what a journey this game has been, huh?

Going into the initial reveal from both the May 2021 Sonic Central to the official reveal at the 2021 Game Awards, I was very cautious about this game after being previously burnt out by Sonic Forces and how hollow and uninspired that game was.

...sorry, did I say cautious? I meant outright skeptical.

"The same director and team who made a game as narrow and as linear as Forces are gonna now attempt an open world esc Sonic game? Yeah, sure, THIS looks like it's gonna go well."

But in the end, I still hoped that this game would be good. I always want to hope that, I love this character and this franchise, and I want him to succeed after all. I never really want to wish doom and gloom upon a game before it's already come out, but man did things already start out ROUGH. The initial IGN reveal during the summer of 2022 absolutely crushed me. The gameplay didn't look AWFUL per say, but it looked very aimless and boring, not helping things were the rough framerate and atrocious pop in (They basically revealed an early alpha or beta without even telling us that it was an earlier build), and my heart sunk. After all that waiting, THIS was what they were gonna reveal to us? THIS??? My hopes were rock bottom at that point, but as time passed something peculiar happened: the more they showed off the game, the better it looked. The more they showcased, the more my interest grew and before long, I was actually getting excited for this game. Well, maybe not excited, cautiously optimistic at best. Again, Forces REALLY burnt me out here, I didn’t want to get my hopes up. There was some stuff that bummed me out before release regardless, like the technical aspects and Cyberspace (I’ll discuss both of these later on don’t worry), but when my copy arrived a couple of days after launch, I legit couldn’t wait to play it. I tried my best to go in blind, as I often have a bad habit of spoiling myself on things I haven’t seen before release (it’s how I basically knew most of the major surprises Sonic Movie 2 had to offer before I saw the movie myself), and with how much they were playing up the mystery element with this game, and the fact that they got none other than Ian Flynn HIMSELF to write the story? I knew we were in for something special at the very least. So, did it end up being good in the end?

Oh man, you’d better believe it.

It’s not perfect of course, no game is, it’s not without its fair share of blemishes and annoyances, but man, this is bar none the most fun I’ve had with 3D Sonic in a long LONG while.

Starting off with the story, I think this may just be single handedly the best story in a Sonic game to DATE. Keep in mind that I’m someone who hasn’t really considered a majority of the game’s stories to be good at all (I honestly only really think SA2’s story was pretty decent and even that had issues), but the fact that Ian Flynn just casually made a story leaps and bounds over anything I’d ever seen from the games is amazing. I already knew the comics had it good for a while, specifically IDW, but I was so surprised at how invested and how engaged I was with what was happening the whole way through. If there’s any takeaway from Sonic Frontiers, it’s that it should be mandatory that Ian Flynn must write for every mainline Sonic game from now on. The characterization of every character in this game is top notch, Sonic himself is FINALLY back to being legitimately cool again, Tails’ messy characterization since Unleashed finally gets addressed, even Eggman gets some surprising development to how he views his relationship with Sage, the semi-main antagonist (Though admittedly most of that was relegated to the optional Egg memos). At first, I wasn’t a big fan of Sage with how cold and sterile her mannerisms were, and how she only spoke cryptically and how she would only talk about nothing but data and percentages and whatnot, I’ve seen this stuff before when it comes to mysterious villain characters. However, the more you watch her develop her relationships with Eggman and how she views Sonic and his relationships with his friends throughout the course of the game, the more and more compelling she becomes. The plot and general writing overall can be a bit too fan-servicey at times and rely a bit TOO much on referencing past games and events for no reason, but I’m fine with it honestly, and it generally feels like there’s a lot of effort placed into making Sonic’s universe feel more connected for future titles. Some of the references definitely put me off guard and got me excited for what’s to come. And man, the dialogue too is top notch, not every line hit of course, but on the whole, it was just so well written. I was a bit put off by Roger Craig Smith’s deeper toned Sonic, but I warmed up to it quite a bit, he sounds super natural and most of the time he doesn’t sound SUPER deep I don’t think. The rest of the cast put in solid performances as well. Overall if these kinds of stories are what we have to look forward to in the future, sign me up immediately, I loved this.


But that’s just the story of course, how does the gameplay of Sonic Frontiers hold up?

In a major change for the franchise, Sonic Frontiers opts to put Sonic in a vast open area and uh…basically just do whatever he wants. It’s not fully open world, which I think was smart, it’s more akin to like, Mario Odyssey or Bowser’s Fury on a MUCH larger scale to accommodate for Sonic’s high speed. A vast open area consisting of small linear platforming challenges in order to nab collectables. In Frontiers’ case, these collectables are the memory tokens you use to save your friends and progress the story. These aren’t the only important collectables of course, you also get portal gears, red and blue seeds of attack and defense respectively, purple coins around the overworld, but for all intents and purposes the memory tokens are the main thing you’re going to be collecting. Frontiers has an almost Zen like flow to its gameplay, leaping from one obstacle course in the sky or ground, getting launched from it and trying to land on another without stopping, it’s great stuff. But in general, the game is designed for you to take it at your own pace, exploring at your leisure, fighting whatever enemies you want to fight, tackling cyberspace stages, etc. The puzzles are rather simplistic but I wouldn’t call them braindead or anything. If anything, they’re a step above the typical “pick up stone and put it into corresponding hole” which makes up like, 99% of the puzzles of previous Sonic games, and there are some legitimately interesting puzzles in this game (like the laser light puzzle) the more you go on. Even the starting puzzles you mess around with (walking on light panels, hitting balls into hoops, etc) do get expanded upon on later islands, albeit not by much, again the puzzles in this game are REALLY not brain taxing in the slightest. They’re just simple non-time-wasting tasks to do, so the fact that I willingly go out and seek these puzzles speaks a lot for just how much simple fun they offer. It also helps that whenever you complete a puzzle you not only get a reward with either one of the seeds, but it also expands the map in a grid-like fashion, helping you better see where to go but also potentially uncovering extra tokens to find, cyberspace portals, and even more puzzles to even further expand the map, there’s always a sense of genuine discovery and a sense of “oh nice I almost missed that” to it. Completing these puzzles also opens up ancient rails to spawn which acts as a semi fast travel system around the island, and this is a genuine brilliant feature but I’ll get into why that is later on.

However, the puzzles have never really been the selling point to Sonic Frontiers, it’s the feeling of tearing through vast open landscapes at incredibly high speeds. It certainly helps that this is by far one of the best controlling 3D Sonics I have ever played. In terms of sheer ground movement, it’s EASILY better than anything I’ve experienced from this franchise. Even with the default settings active Sonic’s speed is good when boosting and his turning is ultra-sharp and precise, it feels absolutely incredible. I haven’t felt 3D Sonic movement this good since the Adventure games, but even the Adventure games were very finnicky and unreliable at incredibly high speeds, in Frontiers even when power boosting (which makes you go even faster) you can do ultra-tight donuts repeatedly, there’s nothing like this handling at all (and considering the main mechanic of Frontiers is running literal circles around enemies, it’d have to be smooth). This makes weaving in and out of enemies and obstacles a non-issue, platforming becomes incredibly second nature, and just the feeling of blasting away through open deserts or grassy fields feels so gratifying, it’s great stuff all around. The jump however feels less good. It doesn’t keep your boost speed at all which feels slightly unnatural and a bit limiting, but the weirdest thing about it is that it has this, what I can only describe as a Mario 64 esc turning syndrome, where you can’t just instantly turn your jump around on a dime but Sonic instead needs to swing alllllll the way around to turn the other direction, it makes things like, say, trying to reverse directions in mid air near impossible without resorting to airboosting (which is noticeably gimped from previous games until you max out your speed stat), and it makes situations like trying to nab collectables on the very edge of tiny platforms very awkward to do because of this. Between this and the fact that your jump doesn’t keep your speed, I wouldn’t be against the short hop returning as a way to keep your speed and to clear small gaps that you otherwise wouldn’t need a full jump to do so. But overall besides the jump his movement is top notch. His reaction to the terrain is a bit weird. There are times where he just sticks like glue to his surroundings and it can be kinda useful to have Sonic scale certain near vertical hills with ease (though it’s inconsistent and I wish you could just run up any wall you wanted, recreate that one part of the Sonic X intro where he just zips across mountains and whatnot with ease), makes traversal that much more free form, but if you wanna launch off a cliff and get some big air oftentimes he just sticks to the floor and careens straight down and it can be pretty annoying. There are quirks but overall his movement is great.

The platforming challenges floating above the world are a bit simple and odd in structure but they’re also incredibly bite sized and short so they never overstay their welcome. And again, it can be quite fun maintaining a sense of flow launching from one platforming challenge and landing on another without touching the ground. You even get Lost World style wall running and parkour (while not fully realized due to many instances of automation, I do think it’s actually way more fun to pull off than in Lost World). A part of me wished that these challenges got way more difficult and complex as they went on and that they were more naturally ingrained into the world, and while they get…slightly more complex I don’t feel it’s enough. It’s still fun on like, a simple base level but it never goes beyond that I feel. Some portions of these challenges are also in 2D and I genuinely wish there were more clear indications of where these transitions were going to occur because it’s really painful how much your flow is broken when you’re trying to go somewhere and you get sprung or dash pad boosted into a 2D section that you need to actively FIGHT to get out of, it’s incredibly annoying and could’ve been handled way better (Chaos Island is especially guilty of this). These obstacle courses and item collecting admittedly can get a bit repetitive after a while, there were a couple of points where I felt burnt out and needed to take a break, which is why I personally feel Frontiers is best enjoyed in sessions and not by marathoning the entire game. Still, equally there were plenty of times where I just could not put the controller down and always wanted to keep playing so I guess it depends. There is also proper momentum usage you can use to fling yourself around the island in funny ways, particularly with the rails. Remember the ancient rails I mentioned earlier that allows for sort of a fast travel system? Well you can also boost and jump off the rail while holding boost to keep all the speed you have to shoot off into the sky (amplified even further with the Power Boost), it’s very satisfying to pull off and can even be used to reach higher areas for extra collectables or puzzles (like the canyon walls in Ares Island for instance). You can also do this with geometry too but it’s inconsistent, Sonic has the glue tendency like I mentioned earlier but other times you trip over a tiny pebble and launch into the sky. I would find it frustrating but I overall don’t to be honest, it’s both fun and admittedly pretty funny.

Combat is very simple but overall satisfying. It’s not DMC or Bayonetta level depth or anywhere close (I don’t think Sonic combat has ever been), it’s very segmented and has some nice quirks like dodge canceling and the ability to actually juggle enemies, but taken on its own it gets pretty repetitive if not supplemented with interesting enemy design, and thankfully I think Frontiers manages great variety. Stuff like the Ninja variants actually, yknow, fight back against you so they’re engaging at the start, and the rest of the guardians have very unique ways of defeating them extremely quickly and it’s actually quite fun to discover. Wall running up Tower variants and quick cylooping the top to instantly destroy the other stacks, attacking and quick cylooping the feet of Spider instead of waiting for him to attack and cyloop each individual one, quick cylooping Sumo to instantly rattle off a ton of hits, it reminds me a lot of Sonic Heroes combat in a way, a relatively simple combat flow but the joy comes from optimizing the fastest way to take enemies down, and thankfully Frontiers offers a good amount of enemy variety so things don’t get too stale too quickly. The sound design is extremely gratifying as well, attacks, parries, and special moves hit with so much crunch and oomph that it’s always extremely fun to just wail on something on a surface level. My main gripes come from the parry, there’s no timing involved whatsoever so it ends up being so unsatisfying to use, you just hold the button down and instantly counter any attack thrown your way. It would’ve made more sense to RELEASE the button to initiate the parry if you still wanted to keep the “hold the button down to parry” system. The normal soldier enemies became tiring and something I actively ignored as the game progressed as I didn’t get much joy taking these variants down at all. I also don’t really appreciate enemies that yoink camera control away from the player every time you pass by them (I’m looking at you, you homing attack bubble spawning jerk). Combat also kinda falls flat in terms of moves completely replacing actions you would normally do in the overworld. For example, if you wanted to airboost to get extra distance across a platform and immediately homing attack an enemy, OOPS, you’ll use the homing shot instead. Or say, if you wanted to airboost and jump or stomp to reposition, OOPS, you’ll cross slash or loop kick instead, idk why these actions couldn’t have just been simple button combinations instead of one button pressed after the other. I’m also extremely disappointed in the skill tree, it’s very small and it doesn’t take a long time to unlock everything at all. (shoot once you get the trick system upgrade you can pretty much max out the entire thing by the second island, it’s super deflating). It was one worry I had going in when I saw the skill tree and unfortunately, my fear turned out to be true.

The major boss encounters on each island are easily the best boss fights I have ever experienced in any Sonic game ever and I’m not even exaggerating. Yeah yeah, they’re more spectacle than substance but like…that’s literally how it’s been in every Super Sonic final boss, a gimmicky oftentimes terrible minigame esc control scheme that’s supposed to make you feel powerful but often never does. I genuinely can’t think of a single one I’ve played that left me satisfied or left me feeling anything other than pure apathy. With these boss fights, the main combat mechanics you use in the main game are carried over, just given a Super Sonic boost, and the sheer spectacle and over the top action are increased to degrees so monumentally high that I was absolutely blown away when I first experienced them. I’m gonna be honest, I have no clue how they’re ever gonna top the first 3 Titan fights in the future, they were just that amazing. Unfortunately, the final 2 boss fights were pretty lame, the final titan fight was just a reskinned Giganto but with worse spectacle and a confusing unintuitive strategy to fight him, and while I won’t spoil the true final boss it’s even MORE underwhelming than the final titan, especially compared to all the insane fights we’ve took part in throughout the course of the game.

Finally, and rather unceremoniously, we come to Cyberspace. Sonic Team’s answer to traditional Sonic levels. These are where you use portal gears on and where you primarily get vault keys from. This is easily the weakest area of the game, for multiple reasons. The first being control, Sonic’s handling in Cyberspace is so much worse than the Open Zone controls it’s not even funny. His steering is extremely stiff, he’s even slower than before ESPECIALLY in 2D, his momentum-killing awkward turning jump is still a problem, he just doesn’t feel good. I wouldn’t say it’s as bad as like, Forces, because his acceleration isn’t jank and the overall handling is better, but it’s still nowhere near as good as Generations or Colors. What’s even worse are the levels themselves. For one, there’s only 4 level aesthetics for Cyberspace: Green Hill, Chemical Plant, Sky Sanctuary, and the new City theme (which I am hereby dubbing either “Cyber City”, or the “Information Superhighway” and nobody can tell me otherwise). Visually they look fine enough, but I think I can attest for many when I say that I am tired, absolutely EXHAUSTED of seeing Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and even Sky Sanctuary again. Did they just not learn anything from Forces and didn’t hear about the thousands of people complaining about them reusing Green Hill for the umpteenth time? The cyberspace aesthetics are really neat though, with how neon trails of light often zoom across the terrain, the terrain itself is broken and distorted and endlessly warping in the distance like a corrupt program. I think it hits the hardest with the Cyber City, I really love this stage aesthetic. The sprawling twisting highways with supposed traffic warping at incredible speeds up and down and all around, Skyscrapers turned upside down and sideways, abandoned cars as obstacles, tanks and helicopters (apparently from GUN) as enemies, and stop signs, road signs and lights displayed in a glitchy unnatural state throughout these twisting turning highways, I really enjoy this. The level design itself however is ripped unapologetically from other games in the franchise, mainly Sonic Generations, Unleashed, and even Adventure 2. Idk what makes the game think I would want to play through a Generations level but chopped up into bits and pieces and with worse controls but bold move I suppose. Some level design set pieces from these different games are also there but ring hollow, like you have the rocket section in Metal Harbor but without the impending timer ticking down or a rocket of any kind because it’s draped in the chemical plant skin, or the bridge in Gens Modern Green Hill where you can stomp down to a hidden passage way, in the original it was merely a shortcut, in Frontiers they could’ve provided an opportunity to place like, a red ring or something there but they just…didn’t. There’s a story reason for this as Cyberspace pulls from Sonic’s memories, and because he’s zoomed through these stages before that’s why he can easily get in and out. It makes sense I guess but like, for one he hasn’t been to places like Sky Rail before so where did he get that memory from? Second, why does he only remember these 3 level aesthetics and why is 1 brand new if these are all from his memories? Third, there’s brand new completely original level design towards the final part of the game’s Cyberspace levels, and while I genuinely think these levels are actually pretty well designed and are fun to play, it not only undermines the whole “these levels are from his memory” thing, but it also pulls into question that the developers were more than capable of making fun, original level design but just…chose not to for whatever reason? I blame time constraints. Still while being unremarkable, Cyberspace still at least has some quirks that make it kinda fun. It was fun to recognize what level was being referenced in a sorta mindless “I MEMBER DAT!!!” kind of way, you can homing attack after an airboost and use stomp to completely reset your actions which adds a fun flow to 3D platforming sections, especially in the Unleashed acts. I honestly think the Cyberspace version of that one Dragon road act is more fun to play than the Unleashed version. Homing attack cancel (where you airboost after using a homing attack but before it hits the target) sends Sonic flying and it’s great fun to break these stages with, especially seeing as how Cyberspace barely has any invisible walls of any kind, though much like Unleashed if I can only get some semblance of enjoyment from these stages by flat out breaking through them, I think that’s a problem. Regardless, I don’t think these levels were godawful, I didn’t DREAD going to a Cyberspace level, it’s just something I kinda tolerate at the end of the day.

Another type of Cyberspace portal is Big’s fishing hole. You only find like one or 2 of these around the islands, but when you find it you can use the purple coins you collected to go fishing with Big and get rewards. The fishing minigame itself is extremely simple but I feel like that’s to the game’s benefit, especially considering how atrocious Big’s gameplay was in SA1. It’s just super relaxing to catch fish, get rewarded for doing so, and filling up your fishpedia as you go along. You even get some funny easter eggs in the form of fishing classic badniks like choppers, or fishing classic Sonic items like a spring or goal post. It’s also a fantastic way to get stuff you need, if you truly didn’t want to play any cyberspace level, or interact with any combat, you can just earn rewards like portal gears, vault keys and skill points just by fishing. One could argue the economy system isn’t well balanced, but idk, towards end game when I’ve already 100% each island anyway it was nice to DRAMATICALLY speed up getting my stats to max without insane amounts of grinding. I appreciate that the game wants you to play the game however you want to play it. Big’s alright in my book 😊

Graphically Sonic Frontiers looks excellent all around. I’ll always prefer more fantasy oriented fantastical colorful aesthetics compared to realistic looking stuff, but Frontiers still manages to make these environments look really top quality, there’s even a full day and night cycle. The textures are surprisingly very high detail for the most part, models are on point (haha get it cos he’s a hedgehog), the lighting and bloom are very well done, it runs as smooth as butter (I played on Series X and the game actually runs at a pretty high resolution in 60fps mode so there’s like no benefits to the 4K 30fps mode at all), I think this is easily the best looking Sonic game on a technical level…but it does have some problems. The most glaring is the pop in, it’s SUPER distracting, borderline immersion breaking. I genuinely tried to get used to it, I really did, but it was still an extremely distracting problem. This unfortunately isn’t a new problem for Sonic, the 3D games have all suffered from pop in in one form or another (yes even the precious Sonic Unleashed has pretty atrocious very noticeable pop in, even with objects that are close to Sonic), but in an open world setting it’s even more noticeable than ever before. I can excuse pop in to SOME degree, especially with a character that goes really really fast across a vast open landscape, but stuff will literally pop into view when you’re right in front of it, it can often be hard to tell where to enter an obstacle course because the entrance hasn’t blipped into view yet. It never got me killed or anything, and there’s no pop in whatsoever in the cyberspace levels, but it’s something I’m really hoping can be ironed out in a patch if they ever decide to address it at all. But man the music, oh my god the MUSIC dude, this is easily one of the best Sonic soundtracks ever put out, it’s top 5 for me no question. There’s so much variety and it’s all so GOOD. The absolutely beautiful open zone themes (Kronos and Rhea being my personal favorites), the absolutely bangin Cyberspace music, the screamo metal tracks of the Super Sonic fights that make these crazy encounters even more bonkers insane, it’s all fantastic. Tomoya Othani really outdid himself, no question.

There are some other issues I have as well, some of the minigames can be pretty poorly made (I beat the pinball one on my first try with one ball but I still didn’t like it), the Starfall event clutters your screen with a giant slot machine that makes it hard to see where you’re going, I encountered a few weird bugs and even managed to clip through the world once, and the final 2 islands are a bit of a disappointment (the 4th is just a story related tower climb filled island and the 5th is very similar to Kronos), but what we have here is an EXTREMELY solid foundation for the future of Sonic games. If they take what works here and expand upon it, make the open zones more interesting with more places to explore and secrets to uncover, make the levels original traditional Sonic levels, expand combat and skill tree, heck even throw more playable characters if you’re able to make them fun too, we could have a true gem on our hands. Sonic Frontiers is merely the stepping stone to something truly amazing, but if I had this much fun playing what’s essentially a first draft of an idea, I have a good feeling about what’s in store. I just hope and pray that Sonic Team doesn’t ditch this idea and start from scratch again like they usually do.

This is why Kishimoto >>>> Yuji Naka. I don’t make the rules.

In truth, it would be very easy to slap a .5 star rating on this game, type "Blizzard bad" in the description and then call it a day, but that's not exactly how I feel here and I don't think it would be an adequate way about showcasing my full thoughts.

As someone who has played Overwatch for a good almost 2 full years now (or rather since Overwatch 1 was still Overwatch 1), I think I'm relatively experienced enough to better detail how I think 2 stacks up against the first game in many different areas.

I mean plain and simple, if we're talking gameplay then this is just a straight upgrade across the board full stop. The switch to a 5v5 format with only one tank did wonders for Overwatch 2: the game is so much faster paced now, there's less slowly sludging your way through chokepoints and having to deal with 17 barriers in the way, the stuns are pretty much only relegated to the tanks allowing them to have a huge impact on how fights are dictated, it genuinely feels like you are able to contribute more to a match and help out your team in Overwatch 2 as opposed to sitting there and let the tanks and support basically hard carry everyone. All of this also applies to the hero reworks (Orisa and Bastion goated), new heroes and new maps. Granted one could argue that this feels more like a huge glorified update than a true sequel and...truth be told it pretty much is lol. We're gonna have to wait for the PVE stuff in order for this claim to truly take hold.

As for the swap to Free to Play it's...a mixed bag. I mean for one the initial launch was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster but when is that factor ever not occurring for any live service game's launch nowadays. There's already been an approximate 25 million players joining which is kind of amazing compared to the dreary sea of 18+ minute long queue times and dozens upon dozens of alt accounts that the first game contained. However the monetization is...well to call it stingy would be underselling it a little bit. They got rid of loot boxes (good), replaced it with a battle pass system (subjective but I think this is a good battle pass overall for $10), and made basically everything infinitely more expensive and made getting coins to buy skins, highlight intros, emotes, etc an absolute grind only to get basically pocket change instead of anything substantial (BAAAAAD). Look I get it, it's a free game now, they can't give stuff away for free anymore, but this is just straight overkill. You literally can't get anything without a crap ton of grinding for weekly challenges, and even then at that point just save up to get the battle pass. Also I'm just gonna say it, heroes should absolutely NOT be locked behind the battle pass, at least not to THIS degree. I do like that at the very least there's not really a fomo element to heroes as you can obtain them in different ways after a season ends, but not only would I rather them be free, but 55 tiers in the battle pass is just way way WAY too much. I've been playing quite a bit since launch, roughly about a few days every week, and I can only manage to get to like tier 20 or so. I would hope these aspects gets addressed later on in the game's lifespan, but I was already burned by Halo Infinite's nonsense so I'm not particularly holding my breath.

I do think Overwatch 2 has the chance to crawl out of the grave dug specifically for Overwatch 1's rotten carcass but in the end, we just have to wait and see if it ends up being something truly amazing.

Banjo is fun, and that's honestly not something I expected going into this game. After my experiences with super old early 3D games of this era ended up being mostly on the negative end, I was surprised at what a relaxing fun game this was. I ended up really enjoying my first experience with Banjo Kazooie, but it got me pondering: why did I have fun with this but didn't have fun at all with Mario 64? By design I prefer platformers where you can really mess around with their movement and experiment and Mario 64 has that on display ten fold while Banjo is super limited in this regard. So why did I end up not only hating that game but having fun with this one? After thinking it over I came up with a couple of explanations.

For one, the overall handling and ground control is LEAGUES better than 64's overly sluggish almost tank like base movement. Moving around was no problem at all and the levels were all small and compactly built around Banjo's overall relaxed easy going pace and speed, it felt great from the get go. It's simply fun to explore the stages and find collectibles without getting booted out of the stage the moment you collected them. There's overall a lot of fun silly charm the game has that definitely bolstered my enjoyment. Yeah the swimming controls aren't super ideal, it's often hard to tell what object is breakable (specifically windows and doors that lead to different rooms but most of them look like any flat uninteractive texture already in the game) and the final boss sucks, but I overall had a good time. It's not super amazing and didn't blow me away or anything, but it didn't need to. I feel not every game needs to be an 8-9/10 or bust, some games can just be simple and fun to play through and not much more than that, I can vibe with it.