Summer of Sonic (6): Sonic 4 Episode 1

To go back to a point I started to make in the previous review and then stopped, let's talk about how I'm dividing up the eras of Sonic games. I'm of the general belief that paradigms shift in a gradual way that does not become obvious when looking for extreme granularity. Sonic, in my mind has three eras, but trying to define the when and where of those eras is tricky. To put in very evident signposts, very clearly: Sonic 1 is early era, Sonic Adventure is middle era, Sonic Unleashed is modern era.

Actually defining where the early era ends is the most difficult: Simply put, the pixel based Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Gear, SMS games are all very evidently early era. But Sonic gradually went into weird places, and while the Dreamcast is the middle era, the exact points around it I don't know.

The modern era, as I said elsewhere, lies with Sonic Unleashed. Everything I've read has stated that Unleashed is where they nailed down the 3d and got it working in a way used in Colours and Generations, and that's where I imagine it is going to stay. At least for the games Sonic Team's repulsive inability to stick to a working model doesn't rear its head.

It's very true, however, having played Sonic Adventure 2 (and hating it, yes) that Sonic's 3D begins all the way back there in some capacity. You can feel the outlines of the new ideas taking shape, but it's not there yet, and that's why I'm defining it like that. The middle era is when Sonic didn't "get" 3D, but it's still Sonic, I guess. Sonic Heroes was better about this, but it's still not quite Generations.

Meanwhile, Sonic actually has quite a few 2D games. Rush, Advance, so on and so forth. Many of these were developed by DIMPS, and while I don't personally like the DIMPS games, they went to them for the atavistic throwback that is Sonic 4 Episode 1, a modern era game desperately trying to be an early era game.

The results are... Interesting...

Sonic 4 Episode 1 is the sixth of nine games in the Summer of Sonic! The previous main entry is here, while the next bonus entry is here while the next main entry is here. Those two won't be up open initial posting, but that's just how this works.

I say interesting because the game is in fact not, actually, much of a throwback. Having just played Sonic 2 and S3&K, let's briefly address things those games have: a visual style, a musical punch, a fantastic physics engine, horrible mega drive slow down at random points. Does Sonic 4 have any of those?

No.

Sonic 4 isn't visually untoward, but I'm going to compare it to my recently played Sonic Adventure 2, SA2 at least tried. I didn't like the visuals, but I at least got the feeling someone sat down and thought about it. Sonic 4's visuals are just ... Plain and simple. They're serviceable, but they remind me of clip art. Bland, they provoke little in the way of nostalgia. The Sonic in this game is the lanky limbed modern Sonic, not the early era Sonic. So it's lanky limbed modern Sonic running and modern Sonicking in through a knock off clip art world. The emotion it stirs deep inside you is not, in fact, nostalgia.

The music here is much like the visuals, although mediocre music is generally more annoying than boilerplate visuals. Simply put, the music feels like it was bought off a website. It's effective at being music, but that's about the best I can say for it. Compare to Sonic 2 or S3&K's catchy, varied earworms and you're left wondering what those musicians are off doing. It does vary up the music from level to level, which seems like a good intention, but it's the store-bought chocolate chip cookie of music. You can tell there's a difference, but you quickly won't really bother to articulate how.

As for the physics they're... Um... They're very strange. The game feels less like it has a concise, unified set of boundaries and more like specific actions result in specific outcomes depending on context. The game is less about reacting to a changing environment with modifications to your general gameplan and more taking those specific actions to reach a very tight path the developer intended. While in the air, you can hit the button to do a homing attack or an odd air-burst of movement. If you don't, Sonic often floats around, or just feels very floppy. While it's nice to have - albeit unreal, yes - agency in motion it feels completely contradictory to playing the earlier games.

Lastly, it doesn't have the distinctive slow down when rings blast out of Sonic. You know, it's weird to say it, but that's kinda oddly part of the game. Not that I necessarily think you can not or should not make Sonic games without an artifact of the early 90s, but it feels like maybe emulating it in some way would help. I don't know. It's part of how the original game's balance worked.

So then, what is it? Sonic 4 Episode 1 is essentially an attempt - at least, as best I can tell - to groom a modern Sonic into a 2D game. Sort of. It's actually kind of tripping me up, because I have played Generations, but it was years ago and I can't quite remember if the physics were so ... Contextual? This game definitely doesn't feel like Sonic Heroes. I think I'm going to figure out how to emulate Sonic colors and see if it feels like this. Maybe it does, I'm not sure, but that wasn't mentioned when I read up on it.

The game had these moments of just... As I said, it isn't an early Sonic the Hedgehog game and I would be hard-pressed to imagine the level of divorce from reality necessary to actually think that is what they were doing. If they honestly did, and it wasn't just BS marketing, then I think there's some mental health issues. But it also has moments of just raw sloppiness where it barely feels like the people behind it had any idea how to make a game fun. There's a section in the generic named Aztec-ish ruins level where you need to tilt water to pop a block out. The section repeats, except this time, there's spikes and you get one hit before Sonic just dies. You have to sort of jiggle the mechanism around to get it to work. It takes a couple seconds, sure, but it's boring and it just slams the boot right down on any momentum the game had going. It does stuff like this over and over, just weird sections that either kill you repeatedly or make the game feel sluggish.

Enemies are SA2 level ugly and pointless in this game. It either rips off Sonic 2 enemies or just farts out generic bland. I don't want to talk about it.

Level design ... Highly referential, and it suffers for it. It feels like someone tried to make a cheap knock off of earlier Sonic stuff, like Sega found some indie developer and put the DIMPS name on it. Don't get me wrong, it has some bright patches of neat stuff, like a deck of playing cards that launches into a whirling rollercoaster, or the steam jets in the last act bouncing you all around. But on the most part, it looks to be trying to remake Green Hill Zone, Labyrinth zone, Casino Night zone and Metropolis Zone, and does none of these better than their originals... Well, ok the Green Hills analogue does have a nice variety of mechanics, but it looks worse and trying to speed run it is literally just trying to get down the rote memorization of the path the developers intended.

When you compare this to SA2 and Sonic Heroes, which I stated I either disliked or found too buggy to complete, the game is just so depressing. Like yes, I didn't like SA2 and elements were really bad; but they were it's own elements! This game just feels like it is poorly doing things you've already seen, and then adding a homing attack to them, and man the homing attack is super janky.

I've read complaining on the special stages, which are an homage to the first game's special stages but time based and you control the spinning of the screen, but I don't think they're really bad. In terms of "homage" they might be the best in the game, given they rouse memory but do something different. Unfortunately, each special stage may only be attempted if you haven't cleared it in a given level and if you reach the end of a level with enough rings, which means you need to redo levels over and over to make attempts.

Basically, you need to grind the game to keep trying, above and beyond the grinds in Sonic 2 or S3&K. Most of the levels will have something near the end that either kills you or strips your rings, so it's quite the chore and I lost interest.

Anyway, to be honest, I was sort of middling on this game. Yeah, the physics are pretty crappy and it doesn't really live up to its pedigree, but it's still sort of decent... Until you get to the end. Good lord. First, you're forced to do a boss rush of all the previous bosses. Given I, you know, just did the fourth zone's boss, I basically had to do it twice in 5 minutes. That's aggressively mediocre.

But the final boss, just, fart. Not only is it a rehash of the Sonic 2 boss, which in and of itself is a chore to see again but it adds new elements that draw out the already overlong and boring fight to the point of hyper-absurdity. It doesn't take that long, but most of the fight is spent standing around and waiting, and it looks and sounds worse than the sonic 2 version. So it's a boring chore, after a set of boring chores to end a game that was already not very good at being exciting or fun. There's an alarm klaxon going the entire time mixed with the horrific ending zone theme and... Like, man, I am not apologizing for not doing this fight. I tried it a couple times and just decided I could go trim my toenails.

So that's Sonic 4: Mediocre to bad visuals, bad to terrible music, weird wonky physics, horrible boss fights it makes you do over and over... But ultimately a game that asks and answers the question 'did the developers behind this game understand fun?' and by the last boss you're going - no, no they did not.