Review Time: Sonic Lost Worlds

It’s about time I got to reviewing Sonic Lost Worlds. I would have done it sooner, but I wanted to make an attempt to finish the game first. And I would have… had the game decided not to pad out the gameplay so much that it crossed the line between piddling about to wasting my time. That and I got distracted with FTL. A much better game. You can find it on GOG.com and Steam for a very cheap price and it’s worth every penny.

But since I’m a Sonic fan and wanted to talk about this game, let’s talk about this game. I’ll get the good parts out of the way early and move on to my itemized list of things that just don’t work well with this game. First, it has been years since Robotnik / Eggman has taken such a large role in the plot of the game. Yes, he’s usually the villain of the game, but this game he is removed from that role and pushed to the side to team with Sonic and Tails. Being a fan of Robotnik and loving the interaction between him and Sonic was some of the only entertaining bits to this game.

The soundtrack, as always, is a step above most games. Cheerful tunes matched to colorful stages, all with the pacing of quickness but not necessarily panicked or hurried in any way. Visually, the game looks fantastic and is probably one of the best looking games in the franchise. And one of the best looking games I’ve ever played. There’s so much color and vibrant image on display that it almost makes you want to forget some of the more annoying features the game brings to the table.

Okay… I think that’s that. Let’s move on to the rest.

Let’s start with the story. Sonic and Tails chase Robotnik down to a new planet where they encounter new aliens that act as his enforcers. Due to Sonic’s meddling, Robotnik loses control of these new alien associates, which, as it turns out, is bad for not only Robotnik, but Sonic as well. The aliens (known as the “Deadly Six”) then take control of Robotnik’s machines and turn against everyone. Then they use their newfound mech army to drain the planet below of life using Robotnik’s machine that has yet to be completed. The device, being completely unstable, will destroy the planet unless Sonic, Tails, and Robotnik can stop it. While that all sounds good on paper, there are some problems.

First, the “Deadly Six” are the least threatening enemies I’ve ever encountered in a game. They’re all trope-heavy characters, making them all one-dimensional and boring. They’re also not that intimidating when you boil them down to their tropes of: the crazy one, the glutton, the Debbie Thornberry, the imitation goth, the old sensei, and the very generic leader who wants to destroy everything to get revenge on whoever (Robotnik presumably). When you can characterize them as this and see how uninterested they are in YOU (the player/Sonic) then it becomes a game of enduring their stupid bullshit to get to the end.

But there isn’t a sense of urgency to the game at all, like the plot would imply. During cutscenes, Sonic, Tails, and Robotnik are just briskly walking along. You never see them hiding or moving at a pace that would imply they really give a shit about saving the planet or avoiding being killed. If they don’t care about the plight of the world this time around, why the fuck should I? And it doesn’t help the cutscenes are only there to either deliver blatant exposition or make a joke, and sometimes, a bit of both.

That said, the game’s mechanics also imply of lack of urgency. The game brings back a stupid mechanic that was last seen in Sonic Unleashed (as I recall) for the Xbox and PlayStation where you had to collect an arbitrary amount of bullshit collectables before you could unlock the next level. At first, progression isn’t too big a deal. But then the amounts of collectables (this time it’s small animals) drastically increases until you’re at a wall because you’re 1000 animals short of unlocking the next level. Nothing breaks a story more than having to replay levels because of a stupid gimmick like that.

There’s also the fact that Sonic has been slowed down in this game to aid with precision platforming. This both works and doesn’t work at the same time, leading me to believe that this gameplay decision was pretty much a waste of time. It works in that you COULD platform more easily, but you still have the other issue that the game takes place on a Mario Galaxy kind of environment in which the planet is no flat and the angle at which the camera looks on certain areas makes it difficult to discern where the platform you need to land on really is. If this was a feature that impacted the 2D gameplay, that would make sense since you could then see everything just fine. But here, it doesn’t really work as intended.

But wait! This feature didn’t slow Sonic down entirely. He can run faster if you hold down a button. Here’s the issue I have with that. I like to move fast through entire levels. That’s what I loved most about older games. Therefore, why is it that the population of people who can’t play Sonic games and need them slowed down have to be catered to over the existing fanbase? Why shouldn’t be that THEY have to hold the button to slow Sonic down and he can run naturally otherwise? Or, better yet, why not just make the button toggle his run speed high or low? No need to hold if it is just an on/off switch. Seriously, this is why SEGA should just hire me to help them make Sonic games.

What also doesn’t help with precision platforming is other changes to Sonic’s movement. For example, his homing attack his been altered again, and just when I was finally getting to appreciate it in Sonic Generations. First off, you have to have an enemy present for it to do anything. Otherwise the second jump is really pitiful and you don’t get any distance to cover the slightly bigger gaps you could have in the previous games. The ability to homing attack on rails in order for easier switching is gone entirely as well. While it was shitty in Sonic 06 (because it often wouldn’t work), it was perfected in both Colors and Generations to a point where that was just the way to keep it. Why bother changing it?

Oh, and the homing attack doesn’t lock on to items anymore, just enemies. Instead, you have to stop and jump onto the item (because if you run and jump at it, you’ll likely miss a bunch because I assume the hitbox on it is weird). Yes, I’m aware that’s how the item boxes worked in the first games. But, you know what? Fuck the old games. That was an old mechanic that needed to be improved, and it WAS improved. Since Sonic Adventure, you could either use a homing attack or simply run into the item bubble, allowing you to keep your momentum and progress at the same or greater speed. This game decides to fuck that notion in the face and squirt blinding nostalgia all over it, or just stupidity.

Also the lives system is still here, but utilized to the same pointless degree the NewSuperMario games do (or really, most Mario games). If you lose your lives, there’s no game over. There’s no continue counter to remind you of your shame at losing. There’s no penalty at all for losing all your lives other than you must restart the level from the beginning rather than at the convenient checkpoint. When you lose all your lives you just get four more and continue. This makes me wonder why do they even bother keeping this system around? I question it in Mario, but I question it more here.

And if you’re going to persist on keeping this stupid bullshit in the game, then at least explain to me why I don’t get an extra life when I reach 100 rings? I noticed this when I was almost out of lives at one point and also saw I was close to 100 rings. I made a bigger effort to collect more only to find out they serve no purpose other than to allow you to take a hit. Um… this mechanic has been around since SONIC THE HEDGEHOG IN 1990! If you’re going to keep the lives, YOU NEED TO KEEP THIS TOO! Otherwise we only collect one ring and won’t bother with the rest because they serve no purpose beyond that single ring. There’s no upgrades or Chao Garden to waste them on, so there’s really no benefit to collecting them all other than raising your score. But that doesn’t matter either because the grading system isn’t there this time, which I was surprised by since every other bit of bullshit is out on full display.

I better not forget to mention that when you get hit, the way you lose rings returns to the way it was prior to Shadow the Hedgehog (at least I think that’s where this started) where you get to keep a small amount of rings instead of losing all of them. While this isn’t a big deal, I did die because I had gotten used to it being the newer way of doing things and I still can’t fathom why they elected to change that back after having set things up the way they have. Maybe to see how many players die because they didn’t pay attention after losing their rings?

Wisps from Sonic Colors also make a return for… really no reason at all other than to add more puzzles to levels that require the use of powers Sonic couldn’t normally acquire. Presumably because Sonic Team wanted to make a game with these powers but were contracted to make a Sonic game instead, so they did a half-assed compromise and gave us a half-assed Sonic game with these pointless powers instead. Some old wisps return and some new ones are added. The new ones add nothing to the game that was needed. You have one that can send Sonic to secret areas, but no the good ones where you collect spheres and rings to find Chaos Emeralds, just a secret room with one of those new red rings to go presumably murder an Xbox. You have another that turns Sonic into a musical note and lets him bounce across other musical notes to get over large gaps of a stage… Basically just a slower and stupider version of the lightspeed shoes to do a light dash over a trail of rings. But the wisps aren’t in the story in any way, so I don’t understand why they’re even here to begin with.

Either way, I’d recommend only playing in the off-TV mode for this game. The wisps utilize the second screen for the most part and pull you away from the big TV. But if it’s all on the lower screen, then you don’t have to waste your time doing that. But, more than that, any hints or tips you receive in a level will also only appear on the bottom screen when you click the icon to bring them up (which also only appears on the bottom screen). So if you’re stuck an don’t understand why something isn’t working or how an element of the game works, it might be because the game doesn’t just tell you with Omochao like it has in previous games. I’m not sure why THIS of all things was changed. There isn’t even a tutorial level to explain the new controls, so it’s even harder to figure out exactly what the fuck is going on half the game.

Back to the “Deadly Six,” your boss fights are a mix of boring and just bad. You fight all the Deadly Six on a variety of levels, each having at least two boss fights unless they have some beyond where I’m at now as rematches. Both fights generally play the same, just a different attack they use or maybe it’s a bit faster. Regardless, the boss fights are just boring. It’s not nearly as creative as the Perfect Chaos fight they remade for Sonic Generations where it was just a stage that tried to kill you and you had to reach a point to hit the monster controlling the stage. Why couldn’t more fights have taken that approach or the approach of the giant mechs?

Also, and this is just a personal nitpick of mine, but the Eggpawn enemies (which have been around since Sonic Heroes) now require TWO strikes to take down instead of just one. I was baffled by that. Mario never changes how the basic goombas go down. Pokemon keeps Magikarp consistent. When you have a staple enemy in a game series for that long, you generally don’t mess with it like that and it was just weird to see that.

People have said Sonic hasn’t been good for years (namely since he went into 3D). I’m of a differing opinion in that all the 3D games have been one experiment after another to find the best fit for the Sonic series. While we had unmitigated successes (Sonic Adventure 2) and horrible failures (Sonic 2006) at least SEGA was willing to take risks with new ideas and hope for the best. That’s what got us Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations. But now we’re back to experimenting again, which doesn’t really make sense given that we struck the last two games in a row. It’s trying to incorporate a mix of ideas that don’t blend together well and it makes for a rather unfortunate aftertaste.

Is it the worst in the series? Not really. To make a film comparison, this is bad on the level of Amazing Spiderman where it has a couple of moments where it kind of works, but, overall, it doesn’t work period. But it’s also so boring and pointless that it doesn’t really make me angry at the game, more apathetic and depressed we didn’t get a threepeat to follow Generations. Meanwhile, Sonic 06 is much more like Green Lantern in that there are so many bad things going on and the game is so ridiculously stupid and frustrating that you have to just hate it without stopping it. But this also makes Lost Worlds worse, in a sense. Because at least I walked away from Sonic 06 after I beat it. I refused to let a shit game beat me because of how angry it made me. And it also a great example of bad game design at its worst. Sonic 06 is something you can learn from, but I feel like Lost Worlds really doesn’t serve a purpose other than a shiny paperweight.

But, again, I wasn’t expecting this game to be perfect. I never expect a Sonic game to be perfect. I was just hoping for maybe a little more effort than this. I was hoping for something with more teeth. With more purpose. Instead, we just got a boring stroll through some woods where generic cartoon aliens are trying to commit genocide. It’s Space Jam without the basketball and Michael Jordan is replaced by Dr. Robotnik. … actually, kinda want to see that happen now.