2020
This review contains spoilers
I don't think I've ever been less engaged in a story. The game starts with giving you a goal of getting your eye-worm taken care of, making it seem like a very time sensitive goal. I was immediately hooked, but just as quickly the game goes out of its way to assure you actually this isn't something you can fix, and there's no threat should you take your time. You then spend the entirety of act 1 getting into situations where an NPC offers to help you cure your eye. But I've already been told by my godly protector gnome it's impossible to fix by any traditional means. Further compounded by meeting a very powerful witch who couldn't help at all. Following those scenes up by some random guy I found offering to stab my eye out with a needle to fix me would be comical - If not for how exhausting it is for every single story beat to just end in the guaranteed failure I already knew it would end up as before I even started the quest. At NO point in act 1 did I feel like anything I did was going anywhere, and every major "quest" ends with me standing in an empty room wondering why I did any of that and how it connects in any way to anything. Ironically despite Act 1 having the most work put into it, I found it to be the most unbearable part of the game. I honestly don't see where all the years of early access went into here. The game as a whole feels very small to me, genuinely no clue how people are spending 80+ hours in each act.
The ambition comes from stuff like the game being entirely ok with you locking yourself out of major content. It doesn't strictly railroad you through pre-written quests. Which is cool to see from a mainsream RPG after modern Bethesda stamped everything remotely interesting out of the genre over a decade ago. And this approach obviously balloons the scale of production up tremendously just because of how many alternative voice lines and routes they have to record and code and the routes that branch off that, etc.. But it feels like misplaced effort in this case. Yeah cool there's 40 hours of alternative dialogue in act 1 alone but is any of it in service of an engaging narrative? And a lot of quests end up feeling pretty railroaded despite this effort anyway. And furthermore it doesn't even feel immersive in its presentation. For as much of a wonder as this game apparently is from an ambition level, dialogue is still very Fallout 3. Changing a character's mind is as easy as picking change their mind (Persuasion) and getting a lucky roll. The person you're talking to will go from swearing on their god they've followed with every waking moment of their life that they're going to do something, only for you to hit them with a short, unvoiced, one sentence You stop that and their next dialogue will have them do a full 180. I feel like the extra effort to have your player character fully voiced, with alternate takes depending on your roll, could have gone a long way.
As a DND experience this feels like the worlds most hands off DM. No fun flourishes or extra detail. No rolling a 1 on a charisma check and getting an embarassing character interaction where you try to lean against a wall and smooth talk someone only to voice crack, stumble your words, and trip over your own legs. Anything DND related is presented extremely dry, mechanical, and bare bones. Clashing with the detailed graphics they went for that feel at odds with how NOT detailed anything else is. Not much here we haven't seen countless times already by (imo) much worse gaming companies.
The group you're travelling with feels very robotic and are rarely truly present as characters in what's currently going on. Talking to them at almost any point will bring up complete non-sequitur discussions. Going deeper into the relationships angle is functionally just stopping the game to engage with the worlds simplest visual novel dating sim. At most you'll occasionally have popups saying "X character approves" if they like a decision you made. Otherwise BG3 is a weirdly roundabout way to launch a mediocre porn game. Oog oog you can customize your benis oog oog why don't the devs customize an actual video game instead? Speaking of, the character creator is shockingly bare bones just like the rest of the game. I appreciate some of the progressive options but ultimately the creator is too limited to create anything either fun or immersive. Frankly had more fun seeing all the different hairstyles and faces for each body type in even something like Pikmin 4's small scale custom character. But I digress.
It's hard to feel like you're anything but a band of high school drama club jerks who feel absolutely nothing when ending the lives of people for no reason whatsoever 'cuz they've all got main character syndrome. Extending to practically every NPC from every corner of the map who has any kind of event going on. Every story I've personally experienced or heard told to me has just been people murdering or attempting to murder someone or getting themselves killed. The whole game you're just meeting one-off characters and they say and do nothing of any consequence and they may or may not die but you have no motivation or attachment to any of them at any point either way anyway. At no point do I feel like I'm deep in the web of a gripping narrative who's story beats I control. I'm not on the edge of my seat feeling the NEED to come back and play more to see how things unfold. There's nothing to unfold, every questline is unbelievably small scale and even heading into act 3 I still don't know what my motivation as the main character is supposed to even be. I'm going through the motions for no reason other than everyone else seems to love this game and it's so big technically speaking so I MUST be missing something. But the more I dig the more baffled I am. The more quests I do the more unsure of why I'm playing. Not just in a "This is boring why am I playing" way... But inserting myself into the world and trying to roleplay, I constantly find myself asking "WHAT AM I DOING AND FOR WHAT REASON??"! And it's not because I'm roaming around an empty world with nothing to do. I just think the writing wants you to meet it 80% of the way there. It wants you to be so inherently invested that it can just present major character moments or world-shattering events with almost no natural buildup or motivation and get away with it. As soon as it became clear the eye worm wasn't a driving force narratively I fell off and was never presented with another narrative to even follow. I feel like I'm watching a mediocre road trip movie and wacky, disjointed hijinx ensue at points and for some reason they wanted to force an R rating by throwing in some awkward swearing and sex scenes out of nowhere? No connective tissue or cohesion between any aspect when it comes to the storytelling.
The most coherent scenes with your party is when they introduce their totally devious secrets, or have some occasional in-fighting. In every scenario I just respond how I naturally would, which is to say, "stop trying to kill each other!". So much of the writing following the main party feels like they need you to be either inherently interested, or needlessly argumentative to get anything out of it. But like I said responding with what's for me, rational and normal, leads to them going "oh cool thanks crisis averted" and that's that....idk you could say I'm playing wrong and not exploring dialogue but their stories imo are not as interesting as they want you to think they are. And roleplaying as someone besides a hyper-aggressive brute leads to you being a fence sitter who has no real input beyond saying "For the love of God stop killing each other" And that's not all too immersive anyway considering you'll spend tens of hours slaughtering people for any minute reason anyway even if you're trying your best to talk your way out of conflict. Any remotely important event you'll always have the option to talk to every party member one at a time about it, but none of the events were anything I cared about enough to hear everyone's thoughts. So here I am 25 hours into the game still being given the option of seeing what everyone thinks of having a vampire in the team while I'm literally standing in some mystical magic end of the world godlike realm. Everything you can grill people on feels so small and meaningless and not relevant to anything so I just...don't. And I don't know why I would...? And I'm usually the kind of person who sits there for 3 minutes really psychoanalyzing a character or situation stressing over what's the best dialogue choice in games where it probably doesn't even matter that much. Here though outcomes are all too predictable, and practically demands you save scum if you don't want to just murder everyone anyway. Never felt like digging into dialogue and really thinking about what I say gave me more valuable info or anything. I was just engaging with it for the sake of trying to meet the game halfway but that can only take you so far. And that's not to say the dialogue doesn't effect much, dialogue is basically where all the work was put in. I convinced this guy to slay like 10 of his followers so the fight with him becomes a 4v1 instead of a 4v11. Went from a 10 minute long endeavor that I ended up losing anyway, to an effortless 3 minute stomp. All just because my dice roll on dialogue was lucky the second time. So yeah dialogue is important but it struggles to manifest into immersive storytelling instead of just "Do you fight this person or not".
Speaking of fights, holding it all together together, is a combat system so slow it makes Final Fantasy 1 look like Kingdom Hearts 2. Some of the most grueling and unengaging battles I've ever seen. Not that there isn't any difficulty, personally I've struggled quite a lot not gonna lie. But I genuinely have a hard time finding room for much strategy. I know for a fact someone who's really into it could prove me wrong and say Oh using this big brain strat I can effortlessly win any encounter in 3 turns or less on the hardest difficulty But from my experience, waiting a full minute and a half for it to be my turn again...Then my moveset is attack once for 7 damage and maybe move 10 feet...There's not a whole lot to experiment with. The fighter class feels like the only one that's growing. By level 6 I'm doing heavy damage with each attack, and getting 4-6 attacks in every turn. With the ability to give myself a better heal than even my dedicated healer who's the same level. Meanwhile my Rogue of the same level gets to do either 4 damage...Or if I go through the extra effort to put him in a sneaky spot, he'll do a crit strike that'll do at BEST RNG, 80% of what ONE of my average mindless fighter attacks are doing. And that's his entire turn. Just feels like everyone but the fighters are so half baked, literally the more fighters I put in the team the less I struggle. They do the most damage, have the most health, have the most actions, can wear the most effective armor... I can't talk for all the classes of course but the ones presented to me through the main roster make me feel obnoxiously underleveled even though it's not that kind of RPG at all. And as I mentioned, it's dreadfully slow. Especially when it's struggling to function properly and someone attacks, and it takes the game like 10 seconds to calculate how much damage it needs to do, that happens occasionally. I swear the only reason this game is so long is because they've devized the slowest battle system known to man.
I thought maybe act 2 would pick up for me as I was getting more of a personal mission. Like I was given a setup and a clear goal to reach. I then walked for 40 seconds, did a boring dungeon and an annoying boss fight, and that's kind of it. Best part of the game so far. The only time a logical series of events occurred. I understand there's apparently another 50 hours of content I missed but I can't pretend like I care. This is the closest to engaged I ever got and I don't think roaming around desperately trying to find something that speaks to me will do anything but make me resent the game even more. I haven't gotten into act 3 at all yet and maybe I will. I just figured now's a good time to get my thoughts out while the game's still remotely relevant. Given what others have said I doubt act 3 is gonna change my mind on anything, and I already wasn't having the most polished glitch free experience to begin with.
Small anecdote, but I really tried to come at act 1 from different angles to see if making different choices would make me feel better about my impressions of the world and how much control I really had. For example came up on 2 guys harassing an old lady who apparently took their sister. I told them to put their weapons down and be reasonable (they weren't even holding weapons but whatever) They then decided to fight me to the death and then the old lady reveals she was actually lying to them and DOES have their sister, and it was just an overall downer. I wanted to try and save her brothers. Long story short after exhausting every route this quest can go on I find there's no way to actually change anything. If you side with the brothers the old lady disappears and they die to forest traps even if you went ahead and disabled them all ahead of time. If you initially side with the old lady but then slay her in the battle that ensues, well the 2 brothers will still want to fight you to the death because words speak louder than actions in this game. Found one person on Reddit who managed to find some incredibly specific esoteric way to get to the next part of the quest without them dying, but the brothers are merely in a bugged out state where they want to fight you on sight but still think they're talking to a (now not there) old lady. And their survival is of course never mentioned because the game expects to strictly railroad everything to one outcome. Apparently in Early Access there was a way to prevent them from getting themselves killed but despite how long Act 1 was worked on seems they had to scale back so hard that the entire point of the game had to be gutted. I know this doesn't represent the ENTIRETY game necessarily, there is routes so drastically different that you can even miss out on major party members joining you. But I can't say I found most quests to have much meaningfully different outcomes narratively depending on my actions. Closest thing is that you can trigger a war in the druid camp, or get around causing that in a large variety of ways. Outside of that I was consistently just left disappointed with how little my input really mattered. If I liked the railroaded story that would be one thing but I was so tired with how repetitive every encounter was I was desperate to take control.
So yeah tldr story goes nowhere, roleplay appeal ends as soon as you don't want to just murder people at every corner, most content lacks cohesion or motivation, party members are sloppily integrated, the soundtrack is incredibly generic, fairly buggy and at times has major performance hickups for seemingly no reason, dialogue options are bethesda-esque, combat system's the most boring combat in the history of video games, classes feel poorly balanced, the romance options feel out of place, I don't really like any of the characters, the animation is often too stiff and lifeless to allow the voice performances to really flourish, the Ui is clunky, the controls can be janky.... I honestly hated this so much it made me go back and try Baldur's Gate 1 for the first time ever. 4 hours in I'm having a blast with it, total opposite experience. This is a completely overproduced butchering of the original game. You can't just spend 4 years recording dialogue and have it come out to a good game. In the effort to faithfully deliver an adaptation of a freeform tabletop game based on spontaneous alterations to the script and/or player freedom...They met the limitations of Video games as a medium and didn't really do anything to get around that fact. Even with taking what in my eyes is a very simplistic approach to alternate routes (Mostly just do you murder someone or not, with a boatload of the illusion of choice) it took 6 years to put together. Modern demands for a major triple A game make it incredibly unrealistic to expect anything I actually value from games like this to make it in. BG3 is more respectable than a lot of its contemporaries but still falls to the exact same traps. Modern Western RPGs absolutely LOVE wasting years of dev time on the wrong things.
The ambition comes from stuff like the game being entirely ok with you locking yourself out of major content. It doesn't strictly railroad you through pre-written quests. Which is cool to see from a mainsream RPG after modern Bethesda stamped everything remotely interesting out of the genre over a decade ago. And this approach obviously balloons the scale of production up tremendously just because of how many alternative voice lines and routes they have to record and code and the routes that branch off that, etc.. But it feels like misplaced effort in this case. Yeah cool there's 40 hours of alternative dialogue in act 1 alone but is any of it in service of an engaging narrative? And a lot of quests end up feeling pretty railroaded despite this effort anyway. And furthermore it doesn't even feel immersive in its presentation. For as much of a wonder as this game apparently is from an ambition level, dialogue is still very Fallout 3. Changing a character's mind is as easy as picking change their mind (Persuasion) and getting a lucky roll. The person you're talking to will go from swearing on their god they've followed with every waking moment of their life that they're going to do something, only for you to hit them with a short, unvoiced, one sentence You stop that and their next dialogue will have them do a full 180. I feel like the extra effort to have your player character fully voiced, with alternate takes depending on your roll, could have gone a long way.
As a DND experience this feels like the worlds most hands off DM. No fun flourishes or extra detail. No rolling a 1 on a charisma check and getting an embarassing character interaction where you try to lean against a wall and smooth talk someone only to voice crack, stumble your words, and trip over your own legs. Anything DND related is presented extremely dry, mechanical, and bare bones. Clashing with the detailed graphics they went for that feel at odds with how NOT detailed anything else is. Not much here we haven't seen countless times already by (imo) much worse gaming companies.
The group you're travelling with feels very robotic and are rarely truly present as characters in what's currently going on. Talking to them at almost any point will bring up complete non-sequitur discussions. Going deeper into the relationships angle is functionally just stopping the game to engage with the worlds simplest visual novel dating sim. At most you'll occasionally have popups saying "X character approves" if they like a decision you made. Otherwise BG3 is a weirdly roundabout way to launch a mediocre porn game. Oog oog you can customize your benis oog oog why don't the devs customize an actual video game instead? Speaking of, the character creator is shockingly bare bones just like the rest of the game. I appreciate some of the progressive options but ultimately the creator is too limited to create anything either fun or immersive. Frankly had more fun seeing all the different hairstyles and faces for each body type in even something like Pikmin 4's small scale custom character. But I digress.
It's hard to feel like you're anything but a band of high school drama club jerks who feel absolutely nothing when ending the lives of people for no reason whatsoever 'cuz they've all got main character syndrome. Extending to practically every NPC from every corner of the map who has any kind of event going on. Every story I've personally experienced or heard told to me has just been people murdering or attempting to murder someone or getting themselves killed. The whole game you're just meeting one-off characters and they say and do nothing of any consequence and they may or may not die but you have no motivation or attachment to any of them at any point either way anyway. At no point do I feel like I'm deep in the web of a gripping narrative who's story beats I control. I'm not on the edge of my seat feeling the NEED to come back and play more to see how things unfold. There's nothing to unfold, every questline is unbelievably small scale and even heading into act 3 I still don't know what my motivation as the main character is supposed to even be. I'm going through the motions for no reason other than everyone else seems to love this game and it's so big technically speaking so I MUST be missing something. But the more I dig the more baffled I am. The more quests I do the more unsure of why I'm playing. Not just in a "This is boring why am I playing" way... But inserting myself into the world and trying to roleplay, I constantly find myself asking "WHAT AM I DOING AND FOR WHAT REASON??"! And it's not because I'm roaming around an empty world with nothing to do. I just think the writing wants you to meet it 80% of the way there. It wants you to be so inherently invested that it can just present major character moments or world-shattering events with almost no natural buildup or motivation and get away with it. As soon as it became clear the eye worm wasn't a driving force narratively I fell off and was never presented with another narrative to even follow. I feel like I'm watching a mediocre road trip movie and wacky, disjointed hijinx ensue at points and for some reason they wanted to force an R rating by throwing in some awkward swearing and sex scenes out of nowhere? No connective tissue or cohesion between any aspect when it comes to the storytelling.
The most coherent scenes with your party is when they introduce their totally devious secrets, or have some occasional in-fighting. In every scenario I just respond how I naturally would, which is to say, "stop trying to kill each other!". So much of the writing following the main party feels like they need you to be either inherently interested, or needlessly argumentative to get anything out of it. But like I said responding with what's for me, rational and normal, leads to them going "oh cool thanks crisis averted" and that's that....idk you could say I'm playing wrong and not exploring dialogue but their stories imo are not as interesting as they want you to think they are. And roleplaying as someone besides a hyper-aggressive brute leads to you being a fence sitter who has no real input beyond saying "For the love of God stop killing each other" And that's not all too immersive anyway considering you'll spend tens of hours slaughtering people for any minute reason anyway even if you're trying your best to talk your way out of conflict. Any remotely important event you'll always have the option to talk to every party member one at a time about it, but none of the events were anything I cared about enough to hear everyone's thoughts. So here I am 25 hours into the game still being given the option of seeing what everyone thinks of having a vampire in the team while I'm literally standing in some mystical magic end of the world godlike realm. Everything you can grill people on feels so small and meaningless and not relevant to anything so I just...don't. And I don't know why I would...? And I'm usually the kind of person who sits there for 3 minutes really psychoanalyzing a character or situation stressing over what's the best dialogue choice in games where it probably doesn't even matter that much. Here though outcomes are all too predictable, and practically demands you save scum if you don't want to just murder everyone anyway. Never felt like digging into dialogue and really thinking about what I say gave me more valuable info or anything. I was just engaging with it for the sake of trying to meet the game halfway but that can only take you so far. And that's not to say the dialogue doesn't effect much, dialogue is basically where all the work was put in. I convinced this guy to slay like 10 of his followers so the fight with him becomes a 4v1 instead of a 4v11. Went from a 10 minute long endeavor that I ended up losing anyway, to an effortless 3 minute stomp. All just because my dice roll on dialogue was lucky the second time. So yeah dialogue is important but it struggles to manifest into immersive storytelling instead of just "Do you fight this person or not".
Speaking of fights, holding it all together together, is a combat system so slow it makes Final Fantasy 1 look like Kingdom Hearts 2. Some of the most grueling and unengaging battles I've ever seen. Not that there isn't any difficulty, personally I've struggled quite a lot not gonna lie. But I genuinely have a hard time finding room for much strategy. I know for a fact someone who's really into it could prove me wrong and say Oh using this big brain strat I can effortlessly win any encounter in 3 turns or less on the hardest difficulty But from my experience, waiting a full minute and a half for it to be my turn again...Then my moveset is attack once for 7 damage and maybe move 10 feet...There's not a whole lot to experiment with. The fighter class feels like the only one that's growing. By level 6 I'm doing heavy damage with each attack, and getting 4-6 attacks in every turn. With the ability to give myself a better heal than even my dedicated healer who's the same level. Meanwhile my Rogue of the same level gets to do either 4 damage...Or if I go through the extra effort to put him in a sneaky spot, he'll do a crit strike that'll do at BEST RNG, 80% of what ONE of my average mindless fighter attacks are doing. And that's his entire turn. Just feels like everyone but the fighters are so half baked, literally the more fighters I put in the team the less I struggle. They do the most damage, have the most health, have the most actions, can wear the most effective armor... I can't talk for all the classes of course but the ones presented to me through the main roster make me feel obnoxiously underleveled even though it's not that kind of RPG at all. And as I mentioned, it's dreadfully slow. Especially when it's struggling to function properly and someone attacks, and it takes the game like 10 seconds to calculate how much damage it needs to do, that happens occasionally. I swear the only reason this game is so long is because they've devized the slowest battle system known to man.
I thought maybe act 2 would pick up for me as I was getting more of a personal mission. Like I was given a setup and a clear goal to reach. I then walked for 40 seconds, did a boring dungeon and an annoying boss fight, and that's kind of it. Best part of the game so far. The only time a logical series of events occurred. I understand there's apparently another 50 hours of content I missed but I can't pretend like I care. This is the closest to engaged I ever got and I don't think roaming around desperately trying to find something that speaks to me will do anything but make me resent the game even more. I haven't gotten into act 3 at all yet and maybe I will. I just figured now's a good time to get my thoughts out while the game's still remotely relevant. Given what others have said I doubt act 3 is gonna change my mind on anything, and I already wasn't having the most polished glitch free experience to begin with.
Small anecdote, but I really tried to come at act 1 from different angles to see if making different choices would make me feel better about my impressions of the world and how much control I really had. For example came up on 2 guys harassing an old lady who apparently took their sister. I told them to put their weapons down and be reasonable (they weren't even holding weapons but whatever) They then decided to fight me to the death and then the old lady reveals she was actually lying to them and DOES have their sister, and it was just an overall downer. I wanted to try and save her brothers. Long story short after exhausting every route this quest can go on I find there's no way to actually change anything. If you side with the brothers the old lady disappears and they die to forest traps even if you went ahead and disabled them all ahead of time. If you initially side with the old lady but then slay her in the battle that ensues, well the 2 brothers will still want to fight you to the death because words speak louder than actions in this game. Found one person on Reddit who managed to find some incredibly specific esoteric way to get to the next part of the quest without them dying, but the brothers are merely in a bugged out state where they want to fight you on sight but still think they're talking to a (now not there) old lady. And their survival is of course never mentioned because the game expects to strictly railroad everything to one outcome. Apparently in Early Access there was a way to prevent them from getting themselves killed but despite how long Act 1 was worked on seems they had to scale back so hard that the entire point of the game had to be gutted. I know this doesn't represent the ENTIRETY game necessarily, there is routes so drastically different that you can even miss out on major party members joining you. But I can't say I found most quests to have much meaningfully different outcomes narratively depending on my actions. Closest thing is that you can trigger a war in the druid camp, or get around causing that in a large variety of ways. Outside of that I was consistently just left disappointed with how little my input really mattered. If I liked the railroaded story that would be one thing but I was so tired with how repetitive every encounter was I was desperate to take control.
So yeah tldr story goes nowhere, roleplay appeal ends as soon as you don't want to just murder people at every corner, most content lacks cohesion or motivation, party members are sloppily integrated, the soundtrack is incredibly generic, fairly buggy and at times has major performance hickups for seemingly no reason, dialogue options are bethesda-esque, combat system's the most boring combat in the history of video games, classes feel poorly balanced, the romance options feel out of place, I don't really like any of the characters, the animation is often too stiff and lifeless to allow the voice performances to really flourish, the Ui is clunky, the controls can be janky.... I honestly hated this so much it made me go back and try Baldur's Gate 1 for the first time ever. 4 hours in I'm having a blast with it, total opposite experience. This is a completely overproduced butchering of the original game. You can't just spend 4 years recording dialogue and have it come out to a good game. In the effort to faithfully deliver an adaptation of a freeform tabletop game based on spontaneous alterations to the script and/or player freedom...They met the limitations of Video games as a medium and didn't really do anything to get around that fact. Even with taking what in my eyes is a very simplistic approach to alternate routes (Mostly just do you murder someone or not, with a boatload of the illusion of choice) it took 6 years to put together. Modern demands for a major triple A game make it incredibly unrealistic to expect anything I actually value from games like this to make it in. BG3 is more respectable than a lot of its contemporaries but still falls to the exact same traps. Modern Western RPGs absolutely LOVE wasting years of dev time on the wrong things.
2005
Largely enjoyable game. I just wish it leaned more into the horror elements, which it genuinely does quite well. But those sections are few and far between. Especially near the end when it's playing action bongo music and you're gunning down hundreds of dudes. And to be clear the strictly action stuff isn't bad either. I just found myself wishing this game was a bit more than a bunch of linear enemy-packed corridors, because it's almost fantastic. Just feels like it misses some of its opportunities. Even just being a bit more open ended or having more traditional big house locations the series is known for could have done a lot for the game. Especially the castle. You get to this huge castle with doors everywhere but its still just a straight path through with only very minor keys forward to pretend it's not.
And that's to say nothing of how it derailed the story in a very disappointing way, and was overall a really bad influence for the series going forward.
But, what's there is quite good. Visuals aged very well, mechanics feel good, atmosphere is very eerie when it wants to be. I even like the Ashley escort segments, I thought having someone vulnerable with you balanced the game more towards having tension rather than pure action. Could have used more of her - though I know that's unpopular to say. Could have had a lot more risk vs reward in giving her health upgrades but she's really not with you long enough to get TOO in depth with mechanics she introduces.
And personally I really like the "dated" aiming system. I find it to be more grounded and immersive than now-standard dual stick aiming.
And that's to say nothing of how it derailed the story in a very disappointing way, and was overall a really bad influence for the series going forward.
But, what's there is quite good. Visuals aged very well, mechanics feel good, atmosphere is very eerie when it wants to be. I even like the Ashley escort segments, I thought having someone vulnerable with you balanced the game more towards having tension rather than pure action. Could have used more of her - though I know that's unpopular to say. Could have had a lot more risk vs reward in giving her health upgrades but she's really not with you long enough to get TOO in depth with mechanics she introduces.
And personally I really like the "dated" aiming system. I find it to be more grounded and immersive than now-standard dual stick aiming.
1995
A very unique take on Sonic that I think fixes a huge problem the 2D series faces. And that's level design. Many people say the levels in this game are all very samey and lame, and they're right. What chaotix does, is shift player expression and depth off of the level design, and onto the character mechanics themselves.
The tether mechanic has such a high skill ceiling, we'll likely never see it be mastered. By making the gameplay ENTIRELY revolve around this mechanic that's all about getting better at using your momentum to your advantage, this game manages to nail the entire point of Sonic with basically no further steps required. They did it, it doesn't matter that the levels themselves don't offer much at all as far as platforming or obstacles, the act of playing your characters and experimenting with different combinations is enough depth on its own. Would I have liked to see more variety, and get a bit more out of the levels themselves at points? Of course. Weirdly enough some of the training levels have unique mechanics not seen in the main game. But I just think this game is very misunderstood.
Using a strong character like Vector and throwing someone small and fast like Mighty, done right literally lets you fly through the air. Mighty flies ahead, dragging vector with him. If you tighten the tether and release in the right way, vector will launch in front of mighty, using his heavy bod to really drag mighty behind. This is the whole game, trying to endlessly build speed by shifting momentum between the two characters seamlessly. And the levels are all very vertical oriented, you start at the bottom, goal at the top, so it really encourages a lot of the really satisfying flight you're able to accomplish even with characters who can't naturally fly. I also like that rings have a use to instantly call your partner to your side if you get them stuck and don't want to break your momentum to go back for them. And a small wrinkle for the speedrun is that if you finish a level with negative rings it basically doesn't tally up any score at the end of the level.
The special stages are also a lot of fun, glad they went back to the bonus rings being at the end of the level if you've brought 50 rings. Extra cool is any bonus rings you bring into the special stages count for extra time in them. They're fully 3D obstacle courses that increase in complexity well.
Despite my very positive feelings for sonic 1 and 2, I think sonic actually inherently works better in 3D. Making good level design around such a fast character is hard when you can't actually design any interesting obstacles while he's going fast or else it could be unfair. Slowing him down can lead to very uninspired platforming that doesn't really take advantage of Sonic's unique properties if the reason you're slowing him down isn't to play with momentum or speed in a different way. In 3D you can see everything coming so it's just a lot easier from a level design standpoint. Excellent 2D Sonic gameplay CAN be done of course, they've done it multiple times already this early into the series, and it definitely isn't the last but it's very easy to land in a this is just lame, nothing's happening or a This is actively unfair type of category with 2D Sonic. All this to say, the tether mechanic focuses the entire appeal into what's on screen that you're actively interacting with 100% of the time. Your enjoyment of the game is no longer tied to the level, your speed isn't just what the level allows you to reach anymore. You're not mastering and memorizing the levels, you're mastering the crazy tricks you're able to pull with this game's mechanics.
All wrapped up in a beautiful game powered by the 32X with an excellent soundtrack! The only thing I have to complain about is that the bosses don't really leave much of an impression and can be kinda sloppy I guess? And yeah some more level themes would have been nice instead of having 5 acts per zone. But, this game does more to play with the concept of momentum (the entire thing Sonic was built on) than a majority of the series even pretends to attempt to do, and I think that's really neat.
The tether mechanic has such a high skill ceiling, we'll likely never see it be mastered. By making the gameplay ENTIRELY revolve around this mechanic that's all about getting better at using your momentum to your advantage, this game manages to nail the entire point of Sonic with basically no further steps required. They did it, it doesn't matter that the levels themselves don't offer much at all as far as platforming or obstacles, the act of playing your characters and experimenting with different combinations is enough depth on its own. Would I have liked to see more variety, and get a bit more out of the levels themselves at points? Of course. Weirdly enough some of the training levels have unique mechanics not seen in the main game. But I just think this game is very misunderstood.
Using a strong character like Vector and throwing someone small and fast like Mighty, done right literally lets you fly through the air. Mighty flies ahead, dragging vector with him. If you tighten the tether and release in the right way, vector will launch in front of mighty, using his heavy bod to really drag mighty behind. This is the whole game, trying to endlessly build speed by shifting momentum between the two characters seamlessly. And the levels are all very vertical oriented, you start at the bottom, goal at the top, so it really encourages a lot of the really satisfying flight you're able to accomplish even with characters who can't naturally fly. I also like that rings have a use to instantly call your partner to your side if you get them stuck and don't want to break your momentum to go back for them. And a small wrinkle for the speedrun is that if you finish a level with negative rings it basically doesn't tally up any score at the end of the level.
The special stages are also a lot of fun, glad they went back to the bonus rings being at the end of the level if you've brought 50 rings. Extra cool is any bonus rings you bring into the special stages count for extra time in them. They're fully 3D obstacle courses that increase in complexity well.
Despite my very positive feelings for sonic 1 and 2, I think sonic actually inherently works better in 3D. Making good level design around such a fast character is hard when you can't actually design any interesting obstacles while he's going fast or else it could be unfair. Slowing him down can lead to very uninspired platforming that doesn't really take advantage of Sonic's unique properties if the reason you're slowing him down isn't to play with momentum or speed in a different way. In 3D you can see everything coming so it's just a lot easier from a level design standpoint. Excellent 2D Sonic gameplay CAN be done of course, they've done it multiple times already this early into the series, and it definitely isn't the last but it's very easy to land in a this is just lame, nothing's happening or a This is actively unfair type of category with 2D Sonic. All this to say, the tether mechanic focuses the entire appeal into what's on screen that you're actively interacting with 100% of the time. Your enjoyment of the game is no longer tied to the level, your speed isn't just what the level allows you to reach anymore. You're not mastering and memorizing the levels, you're mastering the crazy tricks you're able to pull with this game's mechanics.
All wrapped up in a beautiful game powered by the 32X with an excellent soundtrack! The only thing I have to complain about is that the bosses don't really leave much of an impression and can be kinda sloppy I guess? And yeah some more level themes would have been nice instead of having 5 acts per zone. But, this game does more to play with the concept of momentum (the entire thing Sonic was built on) than a majority of the series even pretends to attempt to do, and I think that's really neat.
2020
Played this Halloween night on the Steam Deck. Initial impressions weren't great, as I was a bit iffy on its slow start in the mall and felt like the camera was weirdly bad for a fixed camera tank control styled game. But as soon as the horror elements began it was very well done.
The killer's presence is very felt in this small, cramped house. The low poly look and many different video filters add a lot to the game's style. And its got enough unique moments to stand out from the games it's inspired from. The voice acting is very goofy with dated audio quality, as per the style the devs were clearly going for. Once the action starts the game maintains a very tense and uncomfortable feel to the very end.
The game is very short. It's like a bite sized version of classic Resident Evil gameplay at its best. Definitely doesn't overstay its welcome, though some may find it too short for its 12$ price tag, and it doesn't seem to go on sale very often. Its 1-2 hour length fits the movie-like pacing the story beats go for. I was definitely left satisfied with it as a quick and memorable horror experience to play on Halloween night after Trick or Treat hours.
Oh and for anyone put off by tank controls, there is an option to play the whole game in first person if you'd prefer.
The killer's presence is very felt in this small, cramped house. The low poly look and many different video filters add a lot to the game's style. And its got enough unique moments to stand out from the games it's inspired from. The voice acting is very goofy with dated audio quality, as per the style the devs were clearly going for. Once the action starts the game maintains a very tense and uncomfortable feel to the very end.
The game is very short. It's like a bite sized version of classic Resident Evil gameplay at its best. Definitely doesn't overstay its welcome, though some may find it too short for its 12$ price tag, and it doesn't seem to go on sale very often. Its 1-2 hour length fits the movie-like pacing the story beats go for. I was definitely left satisfied with it as a quick and memorable horror experience to play on Halloween night after Trick or Treat hours.
Oh and for anyone put off by tank controls, there is an option to play the whole game in first person if you'd prefer.
A pretty OK metroidvania style game. The level design for most of the runtime is pretty dull and the combat requires a lot of stop and go. Gets a bit more interesting near the end at least. Did one playthrough 100% and did one just beating it as fast as I could and definitely enjoyed the second one more. Didn't find it super fun to explore for hidden stuff, the level design just isn't fun enough to make any extra work all too interesting. Especially when all but the health upgrades are just PNG's for your pause menu and nothing more. But as a quick playthrough it doesn't overstay its welcome too bad, it even gives you arrows pointing where to go so you don't get lost. Which sounds lame in a game like this but I think it was for the best, getting lost in this game is kinda miserable.
Some decent boss fights and good sprite work. I like how tall they made Jack, you actually gotta duck under stuff but you can also grab onto ledges that are surprisingly high up from how lanky he is which makes rushing through feel more fun than it would otherwise.
Not great but it's not a horrible time.
Some decent boss fights and good sprite work. I like how tall they made Jack, you actually gotta duck under stuff but you can also grab onto ledges that are surprisingly high up from how lanky he is which makes rushing through feel more fun than it would otherwise.
Not great but it's not a horrible time.
This game was the original backrooms.
I almost feel like I can't give this game a rating. Even as a kid i distinctly remember being actively annoyed by it but yet its liminal nature really connected with me in the same way an oddly pleasant dream would. Having played this game a few years ago as an adult? Somehow the exact same experience. Obscenely slow paced and often obtuse and it leaves me feeling like I forgot something important on a metaphysical level. I know for a fact playing this game is borderline torture but yet my memories are injected with artificially positive feelings. Not nostalgia, I've felt this ever since the game came out. Like bro it's just a point and click adventure game with a pretty young target audience - why can't I beat it and why is it permanently latched onto my soul?
There's something devious here, I'd be careful with this one.
I almost feel like I can't give this game a rating. Even as a kid i distinctly remember being actively annoyed by it but yet its liminal nature really connected with me in the same way an oddly pleasant dream would. Having played this game a few years ago as an adult? Somehow the exact same experience. Obscenely slow paced and often obtuse and it leaves me feeling like I forgot something important on a metaphysical level. I know for a fact playing this game is borderline torture but yet my memories are injected with artificially positive feelings. Not nostalgia, I've felt this ever since the game came out. Like bro it's just a point and click adventure game with a pretty young target audience - why can't I beat it and why is it permanently latched onto my soul?
There's something devious here, I'd be careful with this one.
1993
Played this for the first time recently and was surprised how genuinely cool it was. Must have been wild to see this back in 1993.
I don't have some deeper analysis like I usually like to give - I just never knew the OG starfox slapped this hard. Not usually big on rail shooters but this one makes me ooze. Especially hot on original hardware~
I don't have some deeper analysis like I usually like to give - I just never knew the OG starfox slapped this hard. Not usually big on rail shooters but this one makes me ooze. Especially hot on original hardware~
2021
Completed on Steam Deck
This game stands out pretty well despite being an amalgamation of very common things. It's basically like if one of those RPG Maker horror games was instead made in game maker and features proper combat. I was instantly sold on it from its trailer which is incredibly rare for me while scrolling through steam.
The atmosphere and graphics are very well done, guns all feel good to shoot, tied together with classic Resident Evil game design and puzzles. Great soundtrack and some rad boss fights too. Really cool to see survival horror and RPGMaker horror get mixed. The story and characters are likely not gonna really resonate super hard with most people but they're serviceable. The auto-aim can be a bit finnicky so I usually just kept it off most of the time.
Fell off a tad near the end as the lack of map coupled with how many rooms are in pretty samey hallways got a bit tiring. A lot of I know exactly what I need to use this item on, I saw the object like 10 times already, but I'm about to check 15 other rooms somehow twice each before I find the one I'm looking for I almost wonder if a map was omitted as an intentional form of padding. A map with even vaguely helpful info would have easily cut at LEAST an hour off my 4 1/2 hour run if not more. Hard to say if your mileage may vary on that, I could just be especially bad at keeping a mental image of location layouts.
Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed it. I kind of wish they leaned a bit more into creepy enemy designs. The atmosphere is really good and I think more enemies with unsettling sounds could have gone a long way. But a majority of the enemy roster is wierdly out of place and/or not even trying to be scary. Would have liked more creepy ghost girls with knives and less goofy treasure chests hopping around the room. Either way there's good enemy variety and all your weapons feel useful. Definitely feels worth it to thoroughly explore for more health and ammo too. Managed to get through my first playthrough without dying, glad I went through the effort to conserve ammo early on.
Dunno, nothing too crazy but I just think it feels really good to play, and despite the omission of a map it pulls off the RE formula really well.
This game stands out pretty well despite being an amalgamation of very common things. It's basically like if one of those RPG Maker horror games was instead made in game maker and features proper combat. I was instantly sold on it from its trailer which is incredibly rare for me while scrolling through steam.
The atmosphere and graphics are very well done, guns all feel good to shoot, tied together with classic Resident Evil game design and puzzles. Great soundtrack and some rad boss fights too. Really cool to see survival horror and RPGMaker horror get mixed. The story and characters are likely not gonna really resonate super hard with most people but they're serviceable. The auto-aim can be a bit finnicky so I usually just kept it off most of the time.
Fell off a tad near the end as the lack of map coupled with how many rooms are in pretty samey hallways got a bit tiring. A lot of I know exactly what I need to use this item on, I saw the object like 10 times already, but I'm about to check 15 other rooms somehow twice each before I find the one I'm looking for I almost wonder if a map was omitted as an intentional form of padding. A map with even vaguely helpful info would have easily cut at LEAST an hour off my 4 1/2 hour run if not more. Hard to say if your mileage may vary on that, I could just be especially bad at keeping a mental image of location layouts.
Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed it. I kind of wish they leaned a bit more into creepy enemy designs. The atmosphere is really good and I think more enemies with unsettling sounds could have gone a long way. But a majority of the enemy roster is wierdly out of place and/or not even trying to be scary. Would have liked more creepy ghost girls with knives and less goofy treasure chests hopping around the room. Either way there's good enemy variety and all your weapons feel useful. Definitely feels worth it to thoroughly explore for more health and ammo too. Managed to get through my first playthrough without dying, glad I went through the effort to conserve ammo early on.
Dunno, nothing too crazy but I just think it feels really good to play, and despite the omission of a map it pulls off the RE formula really well.
2017
We're going to be feeling the consequences of this game's success for a long while I think. Which is to say, this game perpetuates EVERY reductive stereotype this series faces. "Sonic inherently works better in 2D, Sonic peaked on the Genesis, Fans make better Sonic games than Sonic Team!" To me this is Sega giving up and caving in to decades of bad faith criticism. Like genuinely the game's fine, I understand why it's popular. It's literally EVERYTHING people have been begging for. Meaning it's just a shallow amalgamation of Green Hill and Chemical Plant type zones.
It's extremely common to hear from the average person that they play Sonic 1 and love Green Hill, only to immediately fall off afterwards. This is a problem for Sega though considering classic Sonic is the golden child many point to as "the only good Sonic". So, to cash in on that positive perception this series has so little of, they have to make a Genesis style game, but they can't make it actually resemble the Genesis games or else people will realize they hate those too. The designers hand is then forced to iron out any friction in the experience, any level design or boss fights that may slow Sonic down at all. Leading to a game that may be one of the few games in the series to achieve mass appeal, but one that had to gut everything I personally enjoyed about these games to begin with to do so.
Mania is missing the solid difficulty curve seen in 1 and 2. Missing the focus on earning your momentum especially Sonic 1 had. The ambition and world building of Sonic 3. The experimentation of CD or Knuckles Chaotix. Its claim to fame is merely "Finally, a Sonic game for people who hate most Sonic games!" Chemical plant is a fan favorite level so let's make almost every level just a chemical plant. Forgetting that level was made for a purpose. To give you a taste of just how fast Sonic can go. Leaves you wanting more. It's a quick level that exists to tease you into wanting to get better at other zones. But when every level is Chemical Plant act 1, you may as well be playing auto mario levels in Mario Maker.
There's a LOT of automated level design. Empty slopes, spring chains, rube goldberg machines that just speed Sonic up and it's just meant to be fun 'cuz Sonic go fast and that's apparently the only valid goal for a Sonic game to aim for. What baffles me is how criticized games like Sonic 4 or Forces were for this very same thing. People have historically been very critical of style over substance automated level design in Sonic games. To the point where I genuinely feel like if this game was called Sonic 4 Episode 3 and had graphics to match that, suddenly a LOT more people would have an issue with the level design present in this game. But because the style is 1 to 1 with what people associate with "good Sonic game" I get looked at like a madman for saying this game suffers from the exact same thing if not worse.
Whether that kind of design bothers you or not is of course personal preference, but I feel I'm being pretty objective in saying levels like Hydrocity act 2 rely on automation to an OBSCENE degree. How many times can you get picked up by a hand, revved up to full speed automatically, and shoved through empty tubes before you realize the game is playing itself? Chemical plant, Flying Battery, Studiopolis, even down to the final level Titanic Monarch heavily feature automated gameplay. And most levels that don't suffer from it quite as bad, are incredibly linear and mindless and get boring on repeat playthroughs anyway. No challenge at any point, very little actual platforming. Levels from sonic 3 generally don't feature interwoven alternate paths, but instead very isolated paths that don't meaningfully change how you play the level...in the rare moments more than 1 path exists. Alternate routes are more common in the automation filled stages, but the design of every path is merely more empty slopes anyway.
2D sonic level gimmicks are at their best when they interact with your momentum in some way. Like the ziplines in Green Hill act 2, or the spider bumper boss fight. But most of the level gimmicks are just shallow attempts to add variety and they don't play with the core gameplay very well. Chemical Plant act 2 for example has goo floors and touching the syringe makes the floors bouncy. Touching the syringe (That's almost always put in your direct path anyway) to reach the next part of the level isn't remotely interesting as a level gimmick. There's no substance there. As is the case with most of the game your first playthrough is going to look a LOT like your 20th no matter which character you're choosing to play even.
Out of the whole level list I only really like Press Garden, act 1 of Oil Ocean, Stardust Speedway act 2, and Act 1 of Metallic Madness. Green Hill's fine, feels more like an emerald hill rather than a Green Hill considering dying was actually possible in Green Hill originally...But as a level 1 it's fine. A Sonic game with a good green hill is the absolute bare minimum one could ask for and not remotely a big selling point for me. (Love those ziplines in act 2 tho)
And yeah there's only 4 totally original zones, the other 8 are nostalgia bait retreads. Because apparently the best we can hope for out of this series now is just being a worse version of something they already made. It's not a novel celebration and total reimagining of classic stages like Generations was. You're not getting some cool walk down the series history showing what iconic levels look like in the modern era in a totally new dimension. It's "Hey, wanna play an even lamer version of Hydrocity? What if we did Sky Chase from Sonic 2 but instead of being a bittersweet, ominous buildup to the final level it's buildup to a literal 10 second long train level instead? Would have loved the entire level to take place on a moving train, sick idea for a 2D sonic act. But that's not on the low effort nostalgia pandering agenda, so we're gonna drop the Final Boss from Sonic 2 on you as just another average boss you can kill by mindlessly jumping at it for 8 seconds instead!"
Speaking of, most bosses in the game all you do is take damage on purpose and use the I-frames to kill it in seconds. Total waste of time, just lame. When they take stuff like Sonic 2's oil ocean boss and expand it to be a more fully realized, objectively better fight I'm a happy camper. But rarely do they give old ideas a glow-up like that. More often there's ones like Studiopolis act 2's that's just a dreadfully long auto scroller who telegraphs its attacks like ten seconds in advance and it's impossible to speed up the fight at all. Also not a fan of how they hide special stages, I much prefer taking 50 rings to the end of the level, just a carryover from Sonic 3 I never cared for. Feels more in place with a mario-ish platformer not Sonic to say the least, already went into this in my Sonic 3 review. I love the 3D special stages in this game though, funnest part of the game imo. If you're going for 100% completion, the stupid amount of blue sphere you have to do combined with getting all the chaos emeralds, the pacing is hurt pretty hard. I like blue sphere well enough but we did not need so much blue sphere.
I understand Whitehead's team is full of long time genuine fans of the series and that's great. And I think they did what they HAD to do to make a Sonic game able to get mass appeal. But in the process to me it just feels like they're parading around Classic Sonic, desecrating all of it with a tinge of malice. Everything brought over done so with the explicit purpose of "fixing" something that was "wrong" with Sonic as a franchise. Not to say the creators have malice towards the series, but like I said their hand was forced. Sonic is MORE than green hill and chemical plant. But now that this game popped off all people are gonna be thinking, is EVERYTHING they've ever thought about this series was right. And as a seemingly rare genuine fan of almost all of it down to the depths of Labyrinth Zone and Eggmanland, it makes me sad. This is a good game but I outgrew its level design before it even came out.
Audiences have been saying this is what we need more of. But REALLY? Is ANOTHER low budget nostalgia bait release reliant almost entirely on decades old content really what this series needs MORE of? They've been doing almost nothing but that for over a decade itself now! I'm begging them to stop making Sonic games like this! The worst part is no other game they do this very same thing with gets an ounce of the praise, because despite this very hot take that Mania's very mid, seemingly almost everyone's on my side about this topic. No one was thrilled about some short, shallow renditions of chemical plant appearing in Forces, or the (Actually better than this game's) sky chase reference level in Sonic 4 Episode 2. This game did one thing that the others failed to do, and that's get the look and controls down. That's it, the level design is generally speaking no better than any other pitiful attempt to recapture the spirit of old Sonic games. If Superstars so much as looked like Mania I guarantee suddenly we'd be seeing way more attention and praise thrown its way. That game's actually decent boss fights and level design that's okay with punishing you might throw some people off, but first kneejerk reactions are everything with this series it seems.
To me this is just Sonic 4 Episode 3 and it's not even the best episode. Nevermind how this was when Sega realized they could nickle and dime fans. Waiting til' they get the digital sales they want to release a physical version, desperately hoping people double dip so they can recoup some money after they blew hundreds of millions on Sonic Boom. Which reminds me the PLUS dlc succ too.
Trust me I've tried a lot with this game. It started out Ok but the more I play it the more its level design bores me to tears. Just going through the motions and nothing more. Even speedrunning it puts me to sleep. It's best for my sanity and this game's endlessly dropping score that I never touch it again. Which isn't something I've said for just about any other Sonic game. I love replaying Sonic, even ones I criticize there's usually stuff I like about them. But I straight up wish this one didn't exist. Perhaps not a bad place to start if other 2D sonic games put you off but for me personally it's not designed for me at all.
It's extremely common to hear from the average person that they play Sonic 1 and love Green Hill, only to immediately fall off afterwards. This is a problem for Sega though considering classic Sonic is the golden child many point to as "the only good Sonic". So, to cash in on that positive perception this series has so little of, they have to make a Genesis style game, but they can't make it actually resemble the Genesis games or else people will realize they hate those too. The designers hand is then forced to iron out any friction in the experience, any level design or boss fights that may slow Sonic down at all. Leading to a game that may be one of the few games in the series to achieve mass appeal, but one that had to gut everything I personally enjoyed about these games to begin with to do so.
Mania is missing the solid difficulty curve seen in 1 and 2. Missing the focus on earning your momentum especially Sonic 1 had. The ambition and world building of Sonic 3. The experimentation of CD or Knuckles Chaotix. Its claim to fame is merely "Finally, a Sonic game for people who hate most Sonic games!" Chemical plant is a fan favorite level so let's make almost every level just a chemical plant. Forgetting that level was made for a purpose. To give you a taste of just how fast Sonic can go. Leaves you wanting more. It's a quick level that exists to tease you into wanting to get better at other zones. But when every level is Chemical Plant act 1, you may as well be playing auto mario levels in Mario Maker.
There's a LOT of automated level design. Empty slopes, spring chains, rube goldberg machines that just speed Sonic up and it's just meant to be fun 'cuz Sonic go fast and that's apparently the only valid goal for a Sonic game to aim for. What baffles me is how criticized games like Sonic 4 or Forces were for this very same thing. People have historically been very critical of style over substance automated level design in Sonic games. To the point where I genuinely feel like if this game was called Sonic 4 Episode 3 and had graphics to match that, suddenly a LOT more people would have an issue with the level design present in this game. But because the style is 1 to 1 with what people associate with "good Sonic game" I get looked at like a madman for saying this game suffers from the exact same thing if not worse.
Whether that kind of design bothers you or not is of course personal preference, but I feel I'm being pretty objective in saying levels like Hydrocity act 2 rely on automation to an OBSCENE degree. How many times can you get picked up by a hand, revved up to full speed automatically, and shoved through empty tubes before you realize the game is playing itself? Chemical plant, Flying Battery, Studiopolis, even down to the final level Titanic Monarch heavily feature automated gameplay. And most levels that don't suffer from it quite as bad, are incredibly linear and mindless and get boring on repeat playthroughs anyway. No challenge at any point, very little actual platforming. Levels from sonic 3 generally don't feature interwoven alternate paths, but instead very isolated paths that don't meaningfully change how you play the level...in the rare moments more than 1 path exists. Alternate routes are more common in the automation filled stages, but the design of every path is merely more empty slopes anyway.
2D sonic level gimmicks are at their best when they interact with your momentum in some way. Like the ziplines in Green Hill act 2, or the spider bumper boss fight. But most of the level gimmicks are just shallow attempts to add variety and they don't play with the core gameplay very well. Chemical Plant act 2 for example has goo floors and touching the syringe makes the floors bouncy. Touching the syringe (That's almost always put in your direct path anyway) to reach the next part of the level isn't remotely interesting as a level gimmick. There's no substance there. As is the case with most of the game your first playthrough is going to look a LOT like your 20th no matter which character you're choosing to play even.
Out of the whole level list I only really like Press Garden, act 1 of Oil Ocean, Stardust Speedway act 2, and Act 1 of Metallic Madness. Green Hill's fine, feels more like an emerald hill rather than a Green Hill considering dying was actually possible in Green Hill originally...But as a level 1 it's fine. A Sonic game with a good green hill is the absolute bare minimum one could ask for and not remotely a big selling point for me. (Love those ziplines in act 2 tho)
And yeah there's only 4 totally original zones, the other 8 are nostalgia bait retreads. Because apparently the best we can hope for out of this series now is just being a worse version of something they already made. It's not a novel celebration and total reimagining of classic stages like Generations was. You're not getting some cool walk down the series history showing what iconic levels look like in the modern era in a totally new dimension. It's "Hey, wanna play an even lamer version of Hydrocity? What if we did Sky Chase from Sonic 2 but instead of being a bittersweet, ominous buildup to the final level it's buildup to a literal 10 second long train level instead? Would have loved the entire level to take place on a moving train, sick idea for a 2D sonic act. But that's not on the low effort nostalgia pandering agenda, so we're gonna drop the Final Boss from Sonic 2 on you as just another average boss you can kill by mindlessly jumping at it for 8 seconds instead!"
Speaking of, most bosses in the game all you do is take damage on purpose and use the I-frames to kill it in seconds. Total waste of time, just lame. When they take stuff like Sonic 2's oil ocean boss and expand it to be a more fully realized, objectively better fight I'm a happy camper. But rarely do they give old ideas a glow-up like that. More often there's ones like Studiopolis act 2's that's just a dreadfully long auto scroller who telegraphs its attacks like ten seconds in advance and it's impossible to speed up the fight at all. Also not a fan of how they hide special stages, I much prefer taking 50 rings to the end of the level, just a carryover from Sonic 3 I never cared for. Feels more in place with a mario-ish platformer not Sonic to say the least, already went into this in my Sonic 3 review. I love the 3D special stages in this game though, funnest part of the game imo. If you're going for 100% completion, the stupid amount of blue sphere you have to do combined with getting all the chaos emeralds, the pacing is hurt pretty hard. I like blue sphere well enough but we did not need so much blue sphere.
I understand Whitehead's team is full of long time genuine fans of the series and that's great. And I think they did what they HAD to do to make a Sonic game able to get mass appeal. But in the process to me it just feels like they're parading around Classic Sonic, desecrating all of it with a tinge of malice. Everything brought over done so with the explicit purpose of "fixing" something that was "wrong" with Sonic as a franchise. Not to say the creators have malice towards the series, but like I said their hand was forced. Sonic is MORE than green hill and chemical plant. But now that this game popped off all people are gonna be thinking, is EVERYTHING they've ever thought about this series was right. And as a seemingly rare genuine fan of almost all of it down to the depths of Labyrinth Zone and Eggmanland, it makes me sad. This is a good game but I outgrew its level design before it even came out.
Audiences have been saying this is what we need more of. But REALLY? Is ANOTHER low budget nostalgia bait release reliant almost entirely on decades old content really what this series needs MORE of? They've been doing almost nothing but that for over a decade itself now! I'm begging them to stop making Sonic games like this! The worst part is no other game they do this very same thing with gets an ounce of the praise, because despite this very hot take that Mania's very mid, seemingly almost everyone's on my side about this topic. No one was thrilled about some short, shallow renditions of chemical plant appearing in Forces, or the (Actually better than this game's) sky chase reference level in Sonic 4 Episode 2. This game did one thing that the others failed to do, and that's get the look and controls down. That's it, the level design is generally speaking no better than any other pitiful attempt to recapture the spirit of old Sonic games. If Superstars so much as looked like Mania I guarantee suddenly we'd be seeing way more attention and praise thrown its way. That game's actually decent boss fights and level design that's okay with punishing you might throw some people off, but first kneejerk reactions are everything with this series it seems.
To me this is just Sonic 4 Episode 3 and it's not even the best episode. Nevermind how this was when Sega realized they could nickle and dime fans. Waiting til' they get the digital sales they want to release a physical version, desperately hoping people double dip so they can recoup some money after they blew hundreds of millions on Sonic Boom. Which reminds me the PLUS dlc succ too.
Trust me I've tried a lot with this game. It started out Ok but the more I play it the more its level design bores me to tears. Just going through the motions and nothing more. Even speedrunning it puts me to sleep. It's best for my sanity and this game's endlessly dropping score that I never touch it again. Which isn't something I've said for just about any other Sonic game. I love replaying Sonic, even ones I criticize there's usually stuff I like about them. But I straight up wish this one didn't exist. Perhaps not a bad place to start if other 2D sonic games put you off but for me personally it's not designed for me at all.
As is the common tale with this series; Audiences didn't vibe with the more complex original game, so Sega responds by dumbing it down in an attempt to cast a wider net. Only to find an even smaller audience as the people who appreciated the complexity of the first game are let down, and generally wider audiences weren't gonna care anyway.
To be totally fair it's been long enough to warrant I give this game another go. My exact thoughts likely won't change but my score may differ upon revisit depending on how much fun I find it. But I know the mechanics and track design were gutted pretty hard. I think the gravity mechanics are a pretty sick idea and feels good to use but they end up feeling half baked and don't make up for how much depth they straight up removed from the first game. I don't find the story nearly as memorable this time either.
3 stars might be a bit generous, wouldn't be surprised if I found it even more mid on another playthrough. But I'll be happy to come back and say it's better than I remember if that ends up being the case.
Un-Gravitify is a h*eckin' ethereal song though, this game warrants its existence just for that song alone.
To be totally fair it's been long enough to warrant I give this game another go. My exact thoughts likely won't change but my score may differ upon revisit depending on how much fun I find it. But I know the mechanics and track design were gutted pretty hard. I think the gravity mechanics are a pretty sick idea and feels good to use but they end up feeling half baked and don't make up for how much depth they straight up removed from the first game. I don't find the story nearly as memorable this time either.
3 stars might be a bit generous, wouldn't be surprised if I found it even more mid on another playthrough. But I'll be happy to come back and say it's better than I remember if that ends up being the case.
Un-Gravitify is a h*eckin' ethereal song though, this game warrants its existence just for that song alone.
2006
This game is a major example of the difference between Nintendo and Sega. Nintendo is REALLY good at making games universally understandable. Anyone can pick up the latest Mario Kart and understand it, and with the items, feel like they have a chance to win even if by luck. But Sega comes up with some incredibly out-there idea and says You're gonna be stuck on Level 1 until you figure this out However it's an idea that's got a lot of depth and a high skill ceiling that feels amazing to get good at.
I'm glad this game has a good amount of fans but it's still very divisive because when it comes to racing games...How many people are willing to learn how to play a hoverboard Sonic game released the same day as Sonic 06 when they could just pick up Mario Kart and have everyone they know ready to join in? Would be sick to get a group of 4 people together to play Riders but first I'd have to find someone who knows how to play it.
Especially given Sonic's rep at the time, a lot of people write stuff like this game off. But I find with this series there's almost always a method to the madness. It may not be as intuitive as Mario Kart but in the long run I'll always get more out of a game like Riders.
So given that multiplayer for a niche game is almost entirely out of the question, it's a good thing this game has a very substantial single player experience. Fully animated cutscenes, hero, dark, and final stories. Bonus missions and unlockable gear and characters. There's a lot to sink your teeth into and there's a lot of moments that'll really challenge you to get better.
One of the many Sonic games that shows there was never a "dark age" in the 2000's.
I'm glad this game has a good amount of fans but it's still very divisive because when it comes to racing games...How many people are willing to learn how to play a hoverboard Sonic game released the same day as Sonic 06 when they could just pick up Mario Kart and have everyone they know ready to join in? Would be sick to get a group of 4 people together to play Riders but first I'd have to find someone who knows how to play it.
Especially given Sonic's rep at the time, a lot of people write stuff like this game off. But I find with this series there's almost always a method to the madness. It may not be as intuitive as Mario Kart but in the long run I'll always get more out of a game like Riders.
So given that multiplayer for a niche game is almost entirely out of the question, it's a good thing this game has a very substantial single player experience. Fully animated cutscenes, hero, dark, and final stories. Bonus missions and unlockable gear and characters. There's a lot to sink your teeth into and there's a lot of moments that'll really challenge you to get better.
One of the many Sonic games that shows there was never a "dark age" in the 2000's.
1998
It's not 2010 anymore we can stop pretending Jontron's video was a legitimate review of the game.
The controls are very responsive. Watching some people play, it seems like some don't know you can press a shoulder button to turn. Beyond that I have no idea what issues one could have controlling this game. The short length on top of optional collectibles gives different satisfying ways to beat the game. Could go for just the emeralds or you could get the emeralds AND the 5 coins while still having to win the race. Great for speedrunning.
It's not super balanced but come on, it's a Sega Saturn 3D platformer racing game not the next Esports craze. I actually like challenging myself with some of the objectively bad characters and still winning. On the off chance I get a 2nd person to play this with me it's cool I can handicap myself playing as Amy while they pick Super Sonic or something. And it's really nice the characters all are actually different in their own ways.
One of the best soundtracks in the industry. Just floating around with tails doll listening to "livin in the city" is a better experience than most things on this planet. And I struggle to think of a single album that's filled with exclusively bangers like this game's ost.
I honestly couldn't ask for more. Besides maybe more content but honestly only 5 tracks helps make it very replayable. Years later I got into Retroachievements and someone made a great set for this game that makes it feel a bit meatier relatively speaking so that's cool.
Love the graphics too. There really isn't a single thing I can really think to complain about. Nothing whatsoever I don't like. One of those games that proves a game CAN be perfect.
The controls are very responsive. Watching some people play, it seems like some don't know you can press a shoulder button to turn. Beyond that I have no idea what issues one could have controlling this game. The short length on top of optional collectibles gives different satisfying ways to beat the game. Could go for just the emeralds or you could get the emeralds AND the 5 coins while still having to win the race. Great for speedrunning.
It's not super balanced but come on, it's a Sega Saturn 3D platformer racing game not the next Esports craze. I actually like challenging myself with some of the objectively bad characters and still winning. On the off chance I get a 2nd person to play this with me it's cool I can handicap myself playing as Amy while they pick Super Sonic or something. And it's really nice the characters all are actually different in their own ways.
One of the best soundtracks in the industry. Just floating around with tails doll listening to "livin in the city" is a better experience than most things on this planet. And I struggle to think of a single album that's filled with exclusively bangers like this game's ost.
I honestly couldn't ask for more. Besides maybe more content but honestly only 5 tracks helps make it very replayable. Years later I got into Retroachievements and someone made a great set for this game that makes it feel a bit meatier relatively speaking so that's cool.
Love the graphics too. There really isn't a single thing I can really think to complain about. Nothing whatsoever I don't like. One of those games that proves a game CAN be perfect.
2023
My opinions on Sonic games are VERY iterative over time so my exact thoughts and score will likely change as I experience the game more. Replay value is incredibly important to me when it comes to Sonic so we'll see how it holds up on repeat playthroughs. But given the somewhat mixed reception I figured I'd jump in and say I really liked it.
As someone who loathed Frontiers, and found Mania/Forces both to be incredibly shallow...This is the first Sonic game in just about a decade I've really felt a spark of love for. I'm not usually a hater, I'm an adamant defender of a majority of this franchise - even the universally panned ones. But this here may end up ranking pretty high.
It hasn't felt excessively automated, there's ample room to use momentum to achieve big skips. I've heard some people say the music is more of that weird sonic 4/classic sonic in forces style where they try to make it sound like a genesis and it doesn't work great. No clue what they're talking about. As a whole it's my favorite sonic ost in a LONG time. Lagoon City act 2 is a new favorite. Sand Sanctuary act 1 is hot, bridge island makes me want to boot up the game and play it more. Tee Lopes' tracks are definitely the highlight but most of Jun's aren't remotely close to sounding like Sonic 4 either and the compositions are great so idk what the problem is.
Bosses have animations that could have been sped up for better pacing BUT they're also some of the better bosses in the series. I'll take some minor pacing issues in favor of having bosses that actually try to kill you with some varied and creative gameplay attached. As opposed to Sonic 3 or Mania's where almost every boss is just mindlessly jumping into it to shred it with I-frames. Robotnik's creations here give off a vibe that he's absolutely sick of Sonic at this point and is trying to cover all his bases. Huge step up from his goofy ineffective little vehicles he used in Sonic 2. Feels narratively fitting in that way. A big chunk of my playtime will be in time trial mode anyway so as one time bosses for the campaign I'm happy with them. Without a good time trial mode I could see them hurting pacing on repeat playthroughs though.
Haven't gotten around to Tails yet but Knuckles now climbs ledges and gets off the ground after flight much faster than he usually does. Immediately making this my favorite 2D knuckles appearance. Really happy Amy's playable in 2D again, tons of fun. Also Some zones have character specific bonus acts so that's cool.
I was worried they'd gimp the level design hard to compensate for 4 players but thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case. And speaking of, maybe don't play in multiplayer. 2 Players is borderline unplayable, would love to see the chaos of 4. The game struggles to figure out who to focus and you despawn the exact frame you inch off screen lol.
Feels good to have some positive Sonic opinions again. Of course it's when the fans decide suddenly they have an ounce of standards after a year of Simping for unity asset flip Frontiers but hey. This'll probably spark me putting up a lot more Sonic reviews up, most of which are positive 'cuz I think this series is way more consistently good than people are ready to admit.
Subject to change like I mentioned at the start but so far, better than Mania by a long shot <3
Edit 1: Played tails, he's tons of fun. He keeps all the momentum you currently have when you enter flight, making him way more fun to use than he usually is in 2D. Having fun with time trial mode~ Knuckles doesn't seem to build up speed when you glide for a long time so that unfortunately guts him a bit, otherwise all 4 characters are fun to play. The fire-dash chaos emerald power is shockingly powerful.
As someone who loathed Frontiers, and found Mania/Forces both to be incredibly shallow...This is the first Sonic game in just about a decade I've really felt a spark of love for. I'm not usually a hater, I'm an adamant defender of a majority of this franchise - even the universally panned ones. But this here may end up ranking pretty high.
It hasn't felt excessively automated, there's ample room to use momentum to achieve big skips. I've heard some people say the music is more of that weird sonic 4/classic sonic in forces style where they try to make it sound like a genesis and it doesn't work great. No clue what they're talking about. As a whole it's my favorite sonic ost in a LONG time. Lagoon City act 2 is a new favorite. Sand Sanctuary act 1 is hot, bridge island makes me want to boot up the game and play it more. Tee Lopes' tracks are definitely the highlight but most of Jun's aren't remotely close to sounding like Sonic 4 either and the compositions are great so idk what the problem is.
Bosses have animations that could have been sped up for better pacing BUT they're also some of the better bosses in the series. I'll take some minor pacing issues in favor of having bosses that actually try to kill you with some varied and creative gameplay attached. As opposed to Sonic 3 or Mania's where almost every boss is just mindlessly jumping into it to shred it with I-frames. Robotnik's creations here give off a vibe that he's absolutely sick of Sonic at this point and is trying to cover all his bases. Huge step up from his goofy ineffective little vehicles he used in Sonic 2. Feels narratively fitting in that way. A big chunk of my playtime will be in time trial mode anyway so as one time bosses for the campaign I'm happy with them. Without a good time trial mode I could see them hurting pacing on repeat playthroughs though.
Haven't gotten around to Tails yet but Knuckles now climbs ledges and gets off the ground after flight much faster than he usually does. Immediately making this my favorite 2D knuckles appearance. Really happy Amy's playable in 2D again, tons of fun. Also Some zones have character specific bonus acts so that's cool.
I was worried they'd gimp the level design hard to compensate for 4 players but thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case. And speaking of, maybe don't play in multiplayer. 2 Players is borderline unplayable, would love to see the chaos of 4. The game struggles to figure out who to focus and you despawn the exact frame you inch off screen lol.
Feels good to have some positive Sonic opinions again. Of course it's when the fans decide suddenly they have an ounce of standards after a year of Simping for unity asset flip Frontiers but hey. This'll probably spark me putting up a lot more Sonic reviews up, most of which are positive 'cuz I think this series is way more consistently good than people are ready to admit.
Subject to change like I mentioned at the start but so far, better than Mania by a long shot <3
Edit 1: Played tails, he's tons of fun. He keeps all the momentum you currently have when you enter flight, making him way more fun to use than he usually is in 2D. Having fun with time trial mode~ Knuckles doesn't seem to build up speed when you glide for a long time so that unfortunately guts him a bit, otherwise all 4 characters are fun to play. The fire-dash chaos emerald power is shockingly powerful.
Interestingly I came out of this game feeling very similar to how I did about the Mario movie. In that as a Mario experience it's practically everything I could ask for. It may not be the most consistently engaging or fulfilling experience, but it more than makes up for it by being a refreshing reminder of why I love the series.
I have some criticisms but they're not enough to stop me from saying everyone should play this one. Ultimately any problems I may have (for the most part) are a result of my personal preferred design philosophy being kind of the exact opposite of how Mario games are generally designed from 2007 onward. If I'm designing an obstacle in Mario Maker, I want to give that obstacle a win and fail condition, which is to say it's placed there with the intent that if the player doesn't engage with it properly they'll be hit by it. But from seeing how low my clear percentages are, and watching other people play my levels in person, on top of what kind of levels are the most popular in Mario Maker, I see why Nintendo no longer designs Mario like this. And I bring this up because I've been very critical of the philosophy Nintendo found to replace the more traditional method. But I think they finally found a way to make what usually feels like a formula on autopilot into something I can't help but respect.
Sure I may find myself occasionally wishing they'd iterate a bit more on their really good ideas. I'd like to see more "Do or die" scenarios. I'm not asking for brutal difficulty but a LOT of what's here feels like you have to meet halfway. I find that major chunks of a lot of already short levels I can run through pretty effortlessly. But I also find that this game makes me WANT to meet it halfway. The nature of its focus on unpredictable wonder makes me stay and soak in the artistry and appreciate the effort in the design that I could so easily fly over. You're consistently rewarded for thoroughly exploring. Even if it's just to find some purple coins to buy stuff in the shops, I actually want to buy everything there and you can go through your coin count really fast so it works out great.
Another thing that makes me able to appreciate the design is their take on online, which I find ingenious. You don't join a group of 3 other people in a dedicated lobby and just play through the game with them. It's closer to a Dark Souls sytem in some ways which is a shockingly good fit in execution. You'll see ghosts of players who just happen to be around the same area or level you are. If you or someone else dies in this mode, they have 5 seconds to try and touch someone else to revive. You can also leave down signs which people can touch to revive, and many people use them to hint at secrets. You can even share powerups from your reserve slot. I played through most of the game online. For some of the select few challenging levels I turned it off so I couldn't cheese past the only somewhat demanding platforming moments. But for most levels I wasn't dying anyway so I didn't feel like it was a detriment. If anything hearing someone die super far away off screen gave a rush as I tried to run over to save them. Even in the local co-op you can't physically run into each other or pick each other up like in the NSMB games. I can appreciate the chaos in past Mario multiplayer modes but the way it's done here encourages wholesome positivity and playing with randoms online was a surprise highlight because of that.
I love seeing a group of people help each other try to find secrets. (There's actually optional mini-levels designed entirely around that. Not sure they'd be great in single player but they were a lot of fun online) And I love that you don't feel stuck with them, you can always play at your own pace and you don't even have to finish the level with them. You get as much out of the online as you want and it's very unobtrusive. You'll get +50 heart points every time you help someone or just happen to reach the flagpole with them, which is a lot of fun even though I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything beyond intrinsic "I helped someone" energy. And furthermore it helps put the game's entire design philosophy into perspective. I may find most of the platforming comically easy but seeing the average player online, or playing co-op with someone like my mom...Makes me go "ah THAT'S why Nintendo designs it like this!" And I mean that in a positive way. It may not always lead to a game being made for me, but I find the prospect of designing a game truly for everyone fascinating and acknowledge how much of a challenge it is.
Starting from the Wii era Nintendo really pushed to be as inclusive as possible with their game design. The challenge being of course, that making a game for EVERYONE means they have to cater to my mother who hasn't held a controller since the SNES days...And someone like me, who has beaten every game in their catalogue let alone no-lifed much more demanding games. If there's anything Nintendo's got right during the Switch era, is that they finally found out how to make a game fun for both audiences.
I do have a few criticisms still though. Bosses are an easy one to point out. An area most Mario games falter in to be fair, but in some ways it's worse than ever here. I like the Wonder twists during them but idk how they make a game this creative and when it comes to making a boss fight...They make an empty rectangle and drop Bowser Jr. in it and give him the move left and right in his shell slowly moveset. They do have some decent iterations on the room layout as the fights progress but there's times the boss' moveset is so limited it can't even navigate its own simple room very well. The final boss was fun at least even if it failed to get a single hit off on me. And weirdly, 2 of the worlds don't have an end boss. On one hand I can appreciate the honesty. Like if you don't have an idea for a castle level and boss fight, I can respect that they chose not to go through the motions for what would have been a pretty mid world finale anyway. Just kinda ripping off the bandaid and saying "yeah sorry there's no cool conclusion, onto the next world" without wasting any time. So I get it, but doesn't make it any less lame. Feels like an area they had to cut a corner in because the rest of the experience is so ambitious.
One other small complaint starts with praise. This is the best world map I've seen out of a game like this in a long time. BUT it's still not as good as Mario World's map. Idk how important it is to others but I find the world map plays a HUGE role in a platformer's structure and is very important to me. Worlds are still very segmented off from each other, I don't understand why modern games feel the need to make 6 small, isolated worlds instead of making one big cohesive one. But Wonder does come close. They actually DO something with the small free roaming you're given unlike 3D World. There's stuff to find and each world has its own quirks and secrets. And I liked that one of the worlds was actually a hub containing the entrances for all the other main worlds. This game absolutely has fun with its world map but it still feels somewhat restrained from what SMW pulled off. Secret exits are still there and they're a lot of fun to find, but compared to SMW they're few and far between. And on a similar note the special world is nothing too special. The levels within are decently challenging relatively speaking and I think it's kind of cool how they tease you with the final challenge until you've found enough of the entrances throughout the other worlds. But it's ultimately pretty isolated, just there to host a few more challenging stages and your reward is simply the stages themselves. I really wish it wasn't so common for platformers to give you absolutely no reward whatsoever for 100% completion...BUT I liked the levels and finding them for what it's worth.
Only other thing that was a tad disappointing is that there's a few references to older Mario games' music. And hearing them put a smile on my face, but that's the only reason they're here. Considering there's a decent amount of music-themed stages, it feels like a waste for all of the reference music to be in 10 second long mini-stages. I can respect not wanting to rely on nostalgia bait, so in that sense it's cool they had restraint I guess. But it would have been cool to see levels designed around the old music instead of just single rooms where you go I recognize that! and move on. A handful of Rayman Legends style music levels using the reference songs they picked would likely force my hand to give a perfect 5 star.
But yeah big picture this has been my favorite 2D platformer in quite a long time. And just as Mario Odyssey did for 3D mario, Wonder did for 2D. Which is to say, brought me back into the series excited for its future for the first time since the NSMB era took me out of it. I definitely see myself wanting to play through this again, which is something I couldn't say for even really good modern platformers like DKC Tropical Freeze for example. The badge system that alters your moveset is really cool and I found all of them had valid utility. The bubble power-up especially has a surprising amount of utility as well. Looking forward to seeing and doing speedruns. And I'm curious how an exclusively offline playthrough would feel.
Also special shoutout to the huge amount of really good animation work they put in. The core concept behind the project is incredibly ambitious alone but to back it all up with such expressive animation the whole way through, on top of having multiple playable characters is insane. And then you realize the Elephant power-up functionally doubled the amount of animations they had to make and it's very evident how much care they put into this. Shoutouts to the new voice actors too. He had some huge shoes to fill after Charles Martinet retired but he did excellent. Luigi's spot on. And while Mario is at times clearly a different guy, it reminds me of the early days back when Mario's inflections would be a tad different between games as Charles himself grew into the character over time. I really like how he sounds here and I wouldn't be opposed to this just being his new voice moving forward. Less talked about is that Daisy's got a new actor as well and she does a great job, wouldn't have even noticed it was a different person. (Really happy she's playable in a major platformer for the first time too. Never been a huge Daisy fan necessarily but I'll take anything that's even technically Super Mario Land rep) And I'm glad they got a sizeable amount of lines in too. Featuring at least over 4 minutes of wahoo's and context sensitive yahoo's for every character.
Wouldn't be surprised if after sitting on it for a while if I bump this up to a perfect 5. But I could also see the very safe level design and game structure dropping to a clean 4 over time. Either way, I can't imagine a Mario fan not at least getting something out of this if not love it. Even as someone who's so cynical about style vs. substance level design that I don't even care for the galaxy games, this one's won me over. After each level the game shows you a random screenshot of your run through it. The fact that just about every single one is full of enough life to put on the back of the box shows how much personality is oozing out of every corner.
I have some criticisms but they're not enough to stop me from saying everyone should play this one. Ultimately any problems I may have (for the most part) are a result of my personal preferred design philosophy being kind of the exact opposite of how Mario games are generally designed from 2007 onward. If I'm designing an obstacle in Mario Maker, I want to give that obstacle a win and fail condition, which is to say it's placed there with the intent that if the player doesn't engage with it properly they'll be hit by it. But from seeing how low my clear percentages are, and watching other people play my levels in person, on top of what kind of levels are the most popular in Mario Maker, I see why Nintendo no longer designs Mario like this. And I bring this up because I've been very critical of the philosophy Nintendo found to replace the more traditional method. But I think they finally found a way to make what usually feels like a formula on autopilot into something I can't help but respect.
Sure I may find myself occasionally wishing they'd iterate a bit more on their really good ideas. I'd like to see more "Do or die" scenarios. I'm not asking for brutal difficulty but a LOT of what's here feels like you have to meet halfway. I find that major chunks of a lot of already short levels I can run through pretty effortlessly. But I also find that this game makes me WANT to meet it halfway. The nature of its focus on unpredictable wonder makes me stay and soak in the artistry and appreciate the effort in the design that I could so easily fly over. You're consistently rewarded for thoroughly exploring. Even if it's just to find some purple coins to buy stuff in the shops, I actually want to buy everything there and you can go through your coin count really fast so it works out great.
Another thing that makes me able to appreciate the design is their take on online, which I find ingenious. You don't join a group of 3 other people in a dedicated lobby and just play through the game with them. It's closer to a Dark Souls sytem in some ways which is a shockingly good fit in execution. You'll see ghosts of players who just happen to be around the same area or level you are. If you or someone else dies in this mode, they have 5 seconds to try and touch someone else to revive. You can also leave down signs which people can touch to revive, and many people use them to hint at secrets. You can even share powerups from your reserve slot. I played through most of the game online. For some of the select few challenging levels I turned it off so I couldn't cheese past the only somewhat demanding platforming moments. But for most levels I wasn't dying anyway so I didn't feel like it was a detriment. If anything hearing someone die super far away off screen gave a rush as I tried to run over to save them. Even in the local co-op you can't physically run into each other or pick each other up like in the NSMB games. I can appreciate the chaos in past Mario multiplayer modes but the way it's done here encourages wholesome positivity and playing with randoms online was a surprise highlight because of that.
I love seeing a group of people help each other try to find secrets. (There's actually optional mini-levels designed entirely around that. Not sure they'd be great in single player but they were a lot of fun online) And I love that you don't feel stuck with them, you can always play at your own pace and you don't even have to finish the level with them. You get as much out of the online as you want and it's very unobtrusive. You'll get +50 heart points every time you help someone or just happen to reach the flagpole with them, which is a lot of fun even though I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything beyond intrinsic "I helped someone" energy. And furthermore it helps put the game's entire design philosophy into perspective. I may find most of the platforming comically easy but seeing the average player online, or playing co-op with someone like my mom...Makes me go "ah THAT'S why Nintendo designs it like this!" And I mean that in a positive way. It may not always lead to a game being made for me, but I find the prospect of designing a game truly for everyone fascinating and acknowledge how much of a challenge it is.
Starting from the Wii era Nintendo really pushed to be as inclusive as possible with their game design. The challenge being of course, that making a game for EVERYONE means they have to cater to my mother who hasn't held a controller since the SNES days...And someone like me, who has beaten every game in their catalogue let alone no-lifed much more demanding games. If there's anything Nintendo's got right during the Switch era, is that they finally found out how to make a game fun for both audiences.
I do have a few criticisms still though. Bosses are an easy one to point out. An area most Mario games falter in to be fair, but in some ways it's worse than ever here. I like the Wonder twists during them but idk how they make a game this creative and when it comes to making a boss fight...They make an empty rectangle and drop Bowser Jr. in it and give him the move left and right in his shell slowly moveset. They do have some decent iterations on the room layout as the fights progress but there's times the boss' moveset is so limited it can't even navigate its own simple room very well. The final boss was fun at least even if it failed to get a single hit off on me. And weirdly, 2 of the worlds don't have an end boss. On one hand I can appreciate the honesty. Like if you don't have an idea for a castle level and boss fight, I can respect that they chose not to go through the motions for what would have been a pretty mid world finale anyway. Just kinda ripping off the bandaid and saying "yeah sorry there's no cool conclusion, onto the next world" without wasting any time. So I get it, but doesn't make it any less lame. Feels like an area they had to cut a corner in because the rest of the experience is so ambitious.
One other small complaint starts with praise. This is the best world map I've seen out of a game like this in a long time. BUT it's still not as good as Mario World's map. Idk how important it is to others but I find the world map plays a HUGE role in a platformer's structure and is very important to me. Worlds are still very segmented off from each other, I don't understand why modern games feel the need to make 6 small, isolated worlds instead of making one big cohesive one. But Wonder does come close. They actually DO something with the small free roaming you're given unlike 3D World. There's stuff to find and each world has its own quirks and secrets. And I liked that one of the worlds was actually a hub containing the entrances for all the other main worlds. This game absolutely has fun with its world map but it still feels somewhat restrained from what SMW pulled off. Secret exits are still there and they're a lot of fun to find, but compared to SMW they're few and far between. And on a similar note the special world is nothing too special. The levels within are decently challenging relatively speaking and I think it's kind of cool how they tease you with the final challenge until you've found enough of the entrances throughout the other worlds. But it's ultimately pretty isolated, just there to host a few more challenging stages and your reward is simply the stages themselves. I really wish it wasn't so common for platformers to give you absolutely no reward whatsoever for 100% completion...BUT I liked the levels and finding them for what it's worth.
Only other thing that was a tad disappointing is that there's a few references to older Mario games' music. And hearing them put a smile on my face, but that's the only reason they're here. Considering there's a decent amount of music-themed stages, it feels like a waste for all of the reference music to be in 10 second long mini-stages. I can respect not wanting to rely on nostalgia bait, so in that sense it's cool they had restraint I guess. But it would have been cool to see levels designed around the old music instead of just single rooms where you go I recognize that! and move on. A handful of Rayman Legends style music levels using the reference songs they picked would likely force my hand to give a perfect 5 star.
But yeah big picture this has been my favorite 2D platformer in quite a long time. And just as Mario Odyssey did for 3D mario, Wonder did for 2D. Which is to say, brought me back into the series excited for its future for the first time since the NSMB era took me out of it. I definitely see myself wanting to play through this again, which is something I couldn't say for even really good modern platformers like DKC Tropical Freeze for example. The badge system that alters your moveset is really cool and I found all of them had valid utility. The bubble power-up especially has a surprising amount of utility as well. Looking forward to seeing and doing speedruns. And I'm curious how an exclusively offline playthrough would feel.
Also special shoutout to the huge amount of really good animation work they put in. The core concept behind the project is incredibly ambitious alone but to back it all up with such expressive animation the whole way through, on top of having multiple playable characters is insane. And then you realize the Elephant power-up functionally doubled the amount of animations they had to make and it's very evident how much care they put into this. Shoutouts to the new voice actors too. He had some huge shoes to fill after Charles Martinet retired but he did excellent. Luigi's spot on. And while Mario is at times clearly a different guy, it reminds me of the early days back when Mario's inflections would be a tad different between games as Charles himself grew into the character over time. I really like how he sounds here and I wouldn't be opposed to this just being his new voice moving forward. Less talked about is that Daisy's got a new actor as well and she does a great job, wouldn't have even noticed it was a different person. (Really happy she's playable in a major platformer for the first time too. Never been a huge Daisy fan necessarily but I'll take anything that's even technically Super Mario Land rep) And I'm glad they got a sizeable amount of lines in too. Featuring at least over 4 minutes of wahoo's and context sensitive yahoo's for every character.
Wouldn't be surprised if after sitting on it for a while if I bump this up to a perfect 5. But I could also see the very safe level design and game structure dropping to a clean 4 over time. Either way, I can't imagine a Mario fan not at least getting something out of this if not love it. Even as someone who's so cynical about style vs. substance level design that I don't even care for the galaxy games, this one's won me over. After each level the game shows you a random screenshot of your run through it. The fact that just about every single one is full of enough life to put on the back of the box shows how much personality is oozing out of every corner.
1990
As I wait to pick up Wonder later today, I think back on what made 2D Mario special to begin with. This isn't the flashiest game out there, but it's always been THE Mario game for me. What really propells this one to being my favorite to this day is the huge emphasis on secrets. And not just secrets that give you small bonuses, but entire alternate routes through the game, and LOTS of them. There's stuff hidden in every corner of the level select map. Finding them at all is a lot of fun but especially finding ways to reach them early is great. There's secrets within secrets, and what's great is that they're not afraid to really reward you for finding them. I was amazed as a kid when I found out it really lets you go from world 2 to world 8 if you know what to do.
Total player freedom for what kind of experience you want. If it was a strictly linear affair it would still be great, but this aspect ensures I'll never outgrow this game as a player. As a toddler I played through the easy auto scroller, as an adult I'll take the secret path branching off eventually leading to some of the more challenging stages. It all just feels good, and I absolutely love the world map. Still haven't seen a level select map this good anywhere else. Which may seem like a weird thing to praise but this game's level map is so fully realized I'm often left a little disappointed that almost no other game goes that extra mile with theirs.
And that's truly what this game is as a whole, fully realized. Even if you're not finding a lot of hidden routes or finding the star world...It's got stuff like the ghost houses to give you a taste of the out of box thinking they want you to employ. They hide the Yellow switch out in the open and tease you with the other colors by showing the outline of blocks that WOULD be there if you found their switch hidden somewhere in the game. The forest of illusion's levels will lead to levels you've already beaten, forcing you to find the secret way through to reveal the actual path forward. It's ingenious stuff like this that makes this game special. They knew what made this game fun and unique, and made sure to lean into it.
Nintendo's at their best when they take common game ideas, put their own twist on them, and take that idea to its logical extreme. And this is a glowing example of that.
Total player freedom for what kind of experience you want. If it was a strictly linear affair it would still be great, but this aspect ensures I'll never outgrow this game as a player. As a toddler I played through the easy auto scroller, as an adult I'll take the secret path branching off eventually leading to some of the more challenging stages. It all just feels good, and I absolutely love the world map. Still haven't seen a level select map this good anywhere else. Which may seem like a weird thing to praise but this game's level map is so fully realized I'm often left a little disappointed that almost no other game goes that extra mile with theirs.
And that's truly what this game is as a whole, fully realized. Even if you're not finding a lot of hidden routes or finding the star world...It's got stuff like the ghost houses to give you a taste of the out of box thinking they want you to employ. They hide the Yellow switch out in the open and tease you with the other colors by showing the outline of blocks that WOULD be there if you found their switch hidden somewhere in the game. The forest of illusion's levels will lead to levels you've already beaten, forcing you to find the secret way through to reveal the actual path forward. It's ingenious stuff like this that makes this game special. They knew what made this game fun and unique, and made sure to lean into it.
Nintendo's at their best when they take common game ideas, put their own twist on them, and take that idea to its logical extreme. And this is a glowing example of that.