When I did a Positives episode on Sonic 2006 I honestly thought that was pretty much going to be the end of it. I was so firm in my belief that Sega would never release another bad Sonic game ever again and then just a few short weeks later we got this. Sonic Boom. Oh god, let's find the positives.
Sonic Boom is a terrible game and I know a lot of you out there probably already know that but guess what. This game, it's even worse than Sonic 2006 and that's incredible. This game takes everything that is wrong with Sonic the Hedgehog and amplifies it in a way that no other Sonic game has ever done in the past. And it's quite remarkable. I've never played a Sonic game this bad and I've played a lot. And Sonic 2006, which I played recently and also wasn't a big fan of, well this one just makes it look so much better. I can't understand how this game got to be made.
Let's take a look at a bunch of the problems that are in the game. Sonic Boom starts off in a very strange universe that they really don't set up or give you any understanding of what's actually going on. Now I'm just going to assume that this entire game world is based off of the TV series Sonic Boom that this game seems to be based off of. Look I don't know what came first the game or the TV series and frankly I don't care. As far as I can tell the video game doesn't make any attempt to explain anything that's going on but that's not its problem. The entire way that the game is designed from the point of view of basic game design is broken. Every single one of the characters has their own individual abilities but the problem is each character controls incredibly sloppy. The game has like a 15 frame per second issue that happens once in a while when you're moving really fast and when you're Sonic trying to avoid objects coming at you it sucks because you can't really get out of the way in time. In many instances when it does reach a proper frame rate there's these little visual glitches here and there that just appear all over the place and they really stand out. I mean like terrible glitches. Things that shouldn't be in a final product of a game.
One of the things I hate the most about this game is attacking enemies. See whenever you attack somebody in the game it feels so repetitive. Now I like fighting games and stuff like that but Sonic Boom treats everything like the most boring tasks in the world. But that's why I like the electric lasso or whatever the heck they call it. This thing makes the fighting gameplay pretty passable because at any point you can grab on to somebody and toss them out of the area of fighting and basically get rid of them pretty easily. I like that. There's a lot of instances in this game where you could sit there kicking or punching somebody or you could just throw them out of the area and make that whole portion of the game that much shorter. And believe me the less time you're playing this game the better. So positive number one is the electric lasso. From a design standpoint many of the graphics and textures in this game are bland or bad. Even some modeling work is pretty terrible. Now while I don't want to argue the fact that Sonic the Hedgehog doesn't look like the Sonic the Hedgehog of yesteryear. He does look kind of okay I guess. In fact I kind of like the way the characters look except for Knuckles. The dude looks like the Rock on steroids. So obviously that's kind of messed up. But one of the visual assets of this game I really liked is its lighting and visual effects. An example of this is in one sequence the characters are underwater and you can see the Sun going through the ocean and hitting the floor and it creates this really beautiful lighting effect. These little abstract visuals, the lighting and all that stuff look fantastic. In fact if there's one thing that's really impressive with the game it's the use of pretty much all the lighting and visual effects you'll find in the game. Now while there are a lot of glitches and issues all over the place every time you see one of these effects it kind of makes the game look normal, like the really high budget title it should have been. So that's my second positive, the lighting and effects are pretty cool.
Some say variety is the spice of life. Sonic Boom is like a fruitcake. They just kept stuffing things in and they didn't want to stop until it was just this big mass of disgusting spices and gelatinous fruit. But you know they did one thing right. Whenever you play the game you get to choose between a bunch of different characters and each character has their own individual abilities. This is really cool because if you don't like playing as Amy or Sonic the entire time you can switch it up once in a while and play as somebody else. Throughout the game there are areas where you can pick between one character or the other and these little areas are identified by specific character colors. So for instance Sonic has a blue color, Knuckles has red, Tails is yellow and Amy has pink. There's one specific instance that stands out where I didn't want to play as Tails anymore so I got to switch to be Sonic. While I was Sonic I could actually complete the level and a different side of the stage and that was it. I didn't have to play as the other character. So the third positive is that this game has a lot of choice between characters.
At one point when I was playing this game I encountered an area I wasn’t sure how to get out of. I tried a door thinking it was a door that Sonic could go through but we couldn't find a way to open it. That's when the incredible happened. Sonic glitched through the door and when that happened we skipped about 30 per cent of the game. That's insane. When that happened I couldn’t go back because I didn't know how we glitched through in the first place. So I was stuck with a huge chunk of the game cut out that I didn't have to play. I know what you're thinking, that's like the worst thing that could happen to a game! When they're designing something you want to make sure that you can play through the entire experience and when you get cut out from a huge segment of the game it's just wrong! But when you're playing Sonic Boom that's a positive. When we played this game for the first time a huge chunk was completely taken out and that means we didn't have to play the game for as long as everyone else. That's a positive in my book. So positive number four is sometimes this game glitches and completely cuts out huge sequences of the game.
Okay you know what Sega if you're listening I've got a problem with you. You're one of my most favorite companies from my childhood. I owned the Genesis, I used to love playing the Sega CD and the Game Gear was my portable system of choice when I was a young lad. But let me tell you something that I don't think you guys understand. You suck I mean everybody tells you that you suck but I don't think you understand that you suck. See Sonic isn't hard. It's not a difficult concept to make and people out there are making even better versions of Sonic games than you guys are capable of doing which blows my mind. Look at Sega Genesis and the Sonic games on there and just emulate those and bring them forward to the next generation. In fact speaking of generations, Sonic Generations was a fantastic game and pretty much took everything that was right about Sonic and made it perfect. It was one of the greatest games of Sonic I've ever played in my life but for some reason you guys keep dropping the ball again and again and this game right here proves that. Maybe you don't deserve to own this brand anymore. You might as well sell it to Sony or Nintendo. In fact you know what sell it to Nintendo. Let's make that a thing because honestly you guys don't know jack about making games anymore.
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