Summer of Sonic (8): Sonic 4 Episode 2

I didn't really follow Sonic news, as I implied in the Generations review, for most of my and Sonic's lifetime. I've always had a soft spot for Sonic, and I've always admired Sega for staying vaguely relevant in the face of adversity. Sonic has had lots of average or below average games, and some truly legendary stinkers, but Sega just keeps coming back. And sometimes completely awesome happens, like Generations.

Writing about Sonic 4 starts to shift from being a target worthy of ire to feeling like you're bagging on someone who is just trying to keep their head up. I wonder about its development, who the team was, what kind of budget they were given. Sonic 2006 is legendary for being a hot pressed bad game sandwich, but the story of its development tells you exactly what they were making. Cutting a team for a AAA release after making grandiose claims and shortening its deadline. It's amazing the game is functional on a basic level, let alone the scope it is. It's a mansion of content, except they gave the builders half the time and half the team to do it. I doubt a house under those circumstances would even stand, let alone something you could walk around in, albeit at the price of being hurled off a cliff every couple minutes.

Tails has my expression

Rather than bagging on Sonic 4 Episode 2 with the same zest and zeal as I did the previous review, let's take a step back and discuss the other onus of Sonic frustration, outside of mixed resource development issues. Let's talk a little about Goes Fast and how Sonic as a franchise is perpetually stuck on a spectrum of problems.

Previous review in the Summer of Sonic is here. Next review, is here.


To stick out first with the review "proper" and like, Sonic 4 Episode 2 starts off very poorly, having learned absolutely nothing from the flaws of the previous game. The physics feel a little better, but after playing Generations and ATS, they end up feeling much worse. Why? Because S4E2's Sonic is Modern Sonic, except he has this weird half-ass control scheme that resembles neither Classic or Modern Sonic in generations. There's no boost button, there's no spin dash button, instead there's merge with Tails button and a homing attack.

I said in the Generations review that the game lays out a roadmap as to how to make an effective nostalgia game. Given one of the generally accepted Sonic spectrum problems (which I'll address in proper detail in a bit) is the addition of hokey new mechanics, it is really striking to have the Tails combo button and the +Tails moves. I mean I'm happy to have Tails show up, as he's been in most of the Sonic games, but this stuff just takes away from the gameplay in the same way Tails did in Sonic Adventure 2.

The visuals are saddening. They're weirdly generic, just as S4E1 was, but it feels like they choose non-generic locales to make generic. An amusement park in the snow and a haunted-ish ruined castle half under the water shouldn't feel so, but they do. They're not ugly or poorly put together, but somehow they just don't pop or feel right. I've read it's an issue with compression, but I'm not entirely sure how that can be articulated.

They're not good. They're bad. This game looks bad. I've gamed for twenty eight years of my life at least, and this one of the most depressing titles visually. It's somehow just so utterly lifeless.

The audio direction remains bad, in fact, I would almost say it's worse in this game. It's really jarring playing Sonic Generations alongside this game. It's jarring even comparing it to Colours or the Unleashed mod, or ... It's just unusually bad. A lot of the music feels less like someone composed a score, and more like a half-heard bit of elevator music looping out of a tinny speaker. It's honestly difficult to properly denigrate how trashcan this music is. It's not "retro" at all, it sounds like someone took the google android alarm sounds and arranged them into 12 second long loops. It's horrendous.

The music in Generations or the original games made you want to fire the game up just to listen to the audio test. This game? This game makes you not want to have ears anymore.

Enemy design in this game is also dreadful. The homing attack feels barely functional, especially after you've played Sonic Generations or even Sonic Lost World, where it works well in 2d just fine. Here it loves to hurl you at things you can't reach, or make the audio 'bip' but not actually work. The bosses are awful time-wastes with phased fights that take forever.

I find this game difficult, but it's not difficulty in a real way. It's boredom. It's actively hard to bring your A game when you're choking on the smoke of an absolute trashfire of a game. This game is honestly way more embarrassing than anything else that exists along the entire Sonic Cycle. Not because it's the worst - though it's aggressively terrible - but because they took the lessons of Sonic 4 Episode 1 and made it worse. That's just hurtful. I gave up on the game after getting to the act 2 and act 3 bosses, which both rotating around DOING NOTHING, just sitting around doing something menial while waiting for the boss to allow you to attack it. I kept dying less because I was being out-skilled and more basically I frantically, direly wanted it to be over already. And that's just a sign you shouldn't be playing a game. Don't play this game. The Desert boss takes over three minutes to get to the next phase. This is absurd. Four minutes of excruciating tedium just to die on the next phase and look up whatever the game wants you to do. Everything in this is so contextual, so "trying to puzzle out the designer's solution" as opposed to just, you know, playing as Sonic.

I shouldn't have to look up boss fights in a Sonic game, and I certainly shouldn't be doing it because you're punishing me with four minutes of CHORES before the part of the fight I haven't figured out. Argh. Ugh. Basically, this game is a smoldering trashpile that commits the greatest sin a game can: It is dull.  Also saints the boss music is just so bad. It's like 7 seconds of flat instrumental on endless, horrible repeat. I beat both of them, advanced to the next zone and found it involves a five minute long boring on a plane sequence.

It underpins three of the largest issues you see in Sonic games as they go.

One of them is the oft repeated mantra about "Sonic goes fast" and "Speed is a reward" and all this nonsense. Speed in Sonic games isn't a reward; shorter tracks are a skill based reward for speed running, but speed itself - that is, Sonic going fast on screen - can be accomplished with a spin dash. Rather, speed is a fundamental "switch" in gameplay that allows the game to break up sections and refresh their perspective. It keeps things interesting.

Sonic needs to oscillate between gameplay styles to reach the zen state of good Sonic gaming. You need fast sections, and sections of tension like platforming and monster bashing, to keep each of the elements fresh. The boss fights in Sonic 4 are the perfect example of what not to do: They go on and on forever while you can't do anything and don't even need to press a button. Sonic Generations on the other hand shows what to do: Zoom, Jump, Spin-dash an enemy and keep mixing it up. Or Boost, homing attack, homing jump, wall-grab then back to ... You get the idea.

That's not to say that speed running isn't important. Speed running is a good way of providing longevity to level designs. It's also not to say that making me wait around, staring at some atrocious boss cut scene or waiting to attack for more than a couple seconds isn't vehemently against Sonic's core gameplay.

The other issue is that it honestly feels from time to time, and I've mentioned this elsewhere, that Sonic designers don't understand this and - frankly - just don't understand how their games are fun. I'll talk about this more in the wrap-up, but questions like "why kill the player" or "why bore the player" are very relevant: What is the designer aiming for? It seems often like Sonic was originally designed around a set of mental responses, and those designs have carried forward, while the responses have not. You don't time out anymore, and your pool of lives basically don't matter, but you're still flippantly punished or put their sections or brutal tedium that aren't aimed at being fun.

Even Generations has this issue, though nowhere near the extent many of the other modern games do.

This does tie to speed running as well. Speed running is the "fun" skill ceiling for that kind of player, and they can enjoy it immensely, and even a casual player like me can if the game makes it fun enough. I can't imagine speed running in Sonic 4, though, because I can't imagine playing the game at all.

The third, and which I can't believe I'm even saying about a 2d Sonic, is the "too many gimmicks / too many characters" issue. Many of the 3d Sonics have consistent problems with pushing this too far, but Sonic 4 Episode 2 exemplifies this. Tails is great! Except adding another character needs to be an additional avenue of gameplay that expands on what makes Sonic feel good. It needs to add to the core gameplay. I think it ironic that Sonic Heroes actually did this well, while Sonic 4 just makes me groan. Especially given the ridiculous wind up animations that freeze the screen and take forever.

It's hard to really feel like Sonic 4 ever had the chance to truly be good. It feels like it is built from those two often repeated points about speed being a reward and Sonic having lots of gimmicks. Given neither of those directly interface with the third point - making the game fun - what chance did it have? A designer needs to step back and look at Sonic as a gaming engine and not "Sonic games", and not throw in as much awful nostalgia as possible in a game that doesn't even look like a 2d Sonic game.

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I have a lot of hope that Sonic Mania will bring Sonic back to the mainstream. Honestly, after playing ATS - which was good but not great - I feel like the fan community understands more how to make a good Sonic game, but maybe I'll be proven wrong. As for this game, it is a roadmap to making a cruddy platformer. No one would even mention or talk about this game if it didn't say Sonic on the tin, and that simply defines what it truly is to me.

A bad game sold on branding, from a franchise that after twenty years had forgotten what it knew at the beginning.