When Sonic Forces was first unveiled at the tail end of Sonic’s 25th anniversary event,
I couldn’t have been happier.
“From the team that brought you Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations,” the reveal trailer
said.
That alone was enough to light up my hype sensors — after all, for those of us who
know the so-called “Sonic Cycle” hasn’t applied for over a decade, Colors and Generations
stand as lasting proof that Sonic and the third dimension can play nice together.
In fact, 2013’s Sonic Lost World was rightly criticized for, among other things, abandoning
the Boost-style gameplay formula that had endeared so many to Colors, Generations, and
the Day stages in Sonic Unleashed.
And that’s why the idea of Sonic Team taking a page from their own book and returning to
this formula for Sonic Forces was so exciting.
Sonic Mania had been announced literally minutes prior as an authentic return to form for Classic
Sonic, while Forces would bring Modern Sonic back in the form that had finally proven his
viability in the first place.
SEGA’s plan seemed foolproof.
Of course, we already know how the first part of this plan turned out: Sonic Mania released
just a couple of months ago to rave reviews across the board and is widely regarded as
the best thing to happen to Sonic in more than 20 years.
But what of Sonic Forces?
Has Sonic Team managed to deliver on the promise of a definitive follow-up to Colors and Generations?
Well, no, not really.
As it turns out, Forces is an odd mishmash of half-realized ideas and odd concepts that
don’t really feel like they go together or even like they were thought through completely.
Some of the individual components of a great Modern Sonic game are here, such as the Boost-style
gameplay I mentioned earlier, and Forces does occasionally achieve moments of greatness
rivaling the best Generations and Colors had to offer.
But those moments are always fleeting, and the time in-between those moments is mostly
hampered by uninspired level design and a focus on brand-new elements that feel like
unnecessary dead weight at best.
This point is perhaps best exemplified by the game’s bizarre focus on the Hero Character,
a blank-slate avatar you can model after one of seven different animals and outfit with
an utterly mind-boggling number of custom clothing and accessories.
You then get to see this character interact with and work alongside Sonic and his friends
throughout the entirety of Forces’ story as the game’s third playable character,
and I admit there may be a certain appeal in that for certain audiences and age groups,
an appeal that is lost on me personally.
But either way, the problem is that after all is said and done, the Hero Character offers
almost nothing of value to the game other than their astounding meme potential.
Gameplay-wise, the Hero Character simply plays like a low-budget version of Modern Sonic:
they have a wire hook that serves the same purpose as the Homing Attack but feels far
less satisfying to use, and instead of Sonic’s beloved Boost ability, they use a variety
of handheld weapons called “Wispons” that are massively unbalanced in the player’s
favor across the board.
The first Wispon you get — a flamethrower — is more than capable of demolishing anything
the game throws at you with little effort, and as such the game doesn’t offer any incentive
to explore other Wispon types other than alternate paths through a level that occasionally require
a specific Wispon ability to access.
Like the Hero Character in general, the Wispons just feel half-baked and haphazardly implemented.
And just in case you think you can more or less ignore the Hero Character outside of
a few exclusive levels, think again — pretty much the whole game is anchored around this
avatar-like presence, to the point where there are nearly as many Hero Character levels in
the 30-stage campaign as there are Modern Sonic levels, with Classic Sonic bringing
up the rear.
Unfortunately, Forces likely wouldn’t have fared much better even without the Hero Character’s
baggage weighing it down.
For example, Classic Sonic’s presence in Forces feels similarly unjustified and half-baked.
Not only does he gets the least amount of playtime of all three characters by a decent
margin, he also doesn’t have a single level in Forces that is as fun, memorable, or well-designed
as any given Classic Sonic stage in Generations.
None of the Classic Sonic levels in Forces are outright awful, mind you, and some can
be fun in the moment, but they all share the same ho-hum, uninspired level design that
permeates the rest of the game.
And yes, that sadly includes the Modern Sonic levels as well.
As it turns out, fans were right to be worried by what appeared to be an alarmingly short,
straightforward Modern Sonic stage in the recent Forces demo for Nintendo Switch.
Other than a couple of genuinely great ones that show up toward the end of the campaign,
the Modern Sonic levels in Forces are surprisingly brief affairs that strongly favor protracted
2D segments over the 3D gameplay that popularized Colors and Generations in the first place.
And considering the fact that all of Classic Sonic’s and around half of the Hero Character’s
gameplay is already 2D, I’m once again left with the feeling that relatively little thought
went into how, or even if, all of the different elements in Forces would fit together.
For example, how many Sonic fans were honestly asking for Green Hill and Chemical Plant to
return YET AGAIN?
Both zones already featured in Sonic Generations and, much more recently, Sonic Mania.
And not only are they back again in Forces, they both serve as the setting for multiple
stages in an already brief campaign, limiting the game’s scope in what feels like an obvious
effort to save development time by reusing assets.
And while we’re still on the subject of oddly random and half-baked design elements,
I should touch on the random quick time events that pop up in some stages, including the
Modern Sonic and Hero Character-powered “Double Boost” ability that has been shown off in
trailers.
Now, I don’t intrinsically hate quick time events, but to my dismay, these QTEs and Double
Boost sequences don’t require any player input at all.
The game does a decent job of making it look like players need to participate, but you
can literally put the controller down during these sequences and all you’ll miss out
on is extra points.
Once again, I’m left wondering why these things are even in the game when they add
literally nothing of value to it.
There is one unifying element that all three playable characters share in common, but unfortunately
it represents the biggest problem with Forces: poor controls paired with utterly nonsensical
platforming physics.
I can’t tell you how many bottomless pits I’ve fallen into thanks to Forces’ bizarre
concepts of momentum and mid-air physics and how those things should work in a video game.
Making precision jumps is an exercise in frustration more often than not thanks to each character’s
sluggish mid-air movement.
Thankfully, checkpoints are common and Sonic Team has graciously done away with the concept
of lives for Forces, so you’ll never experience any major setbacks no matter how many times
you die.
Much of this review has been deservedly negative, but let me be clear: Forces isn’t all bad,
and there are indeed some elements worth celebrating other than generous checkpoints, the removal
of lives, and a couple of stronger levels later in the game.
Forces benefits from a hilariously grimdark story that takes itself completely seriously,
resulting in wonderful moments like Knuckles solemnly remarking on the horrors of war.
Some may understandably see this as a negative, but with strong voice acting across the board
from Sonic’s usual stable of performers, I see Forces’ bizarrely nonsensical story
about Sonic and friends taking back a world conquered by Eggman as a bright spot injecting
some genuine charm into an experience that is otherwise mostly bland and unremarkable.
Forces also benefits from a strong visual presentation, at least on the PlayStation
4, which is the version this review is based on.
The PS4 version of Forces outputs at 1080p and maintains a smooth 60 frames per second
at all times, lending the game an especially elegant, polished look that isn’t necessarily
carried over to other platforms — particularly the Nintendo Switch version, which outputs
at 720p even in TV Mode with the framerate cut in half to 30 frames per second.
Still, Forces is a great-looking game at least on the PS4, and even if the level designs
aren’t inspired, the attractive locations they’re set in certainly are.
And then there’s the soundtrack led by Modern Sonic veteran composer Tomoya Ohtani, which
maintains the series’ impressive musical pedigree even as it takes some risks and delves
into genres you might not expect from a Modern Sonic soundtrack, including drum and bass,
electronica, and even Eurodance.
The Hero Character’s levels in particular benefit from some deliciously cheesy vocals,
which feels like coming home if you’re a longtime fan of Sonic soundtracks.
It doesn’t all work, and there are some genuine low points — mainly the majority
of Classic Sonic’s level themes, which suffer from the Sonic 4 effect of sounding like they
were composed using SEGA Genesis hardware without any understanding of how to make that
hardware sing — quite literally, in this case.
But the majority of the soundtrack lands right on the mark and is reflective of Sonic’s
typically high musical standards.
It’s just a shame that Sonic Forces in general fails to exceed or even meet the expectations
previously set by Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations.
If Sonic Team had stayed the course and truly designed Sonic Forces to be Modern Sonic’s
next big game instead of burying him underneath all the Hero Character nonsense and a universal
regression in control and level design, this might have been a very different review.
Instead, Sonic Forces just left me feeling “Meh.”
While it does benefit from a strong audiovisual presentation and there are moments of Generations-like
greatness toward the end of the campaign, the rest of Sonic Forces is defined by a combination
of half-baked ideas and forgettable level designs that plant it firmly in the realm
of mediocrity.
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