Sonic Forces is Alright

Sonic the Hedgehog is easy to hate. Heck, Sonic the Hedgehog is fun to hate! Between the Megadrive games and Sonic Mania, there have been so many abysmal Sonic games, my first impulse when looking at trailers for yet another modern Sonic game is to roll my eyes and think, "Great, it's another one of those!" I'm pretty sure that the only reason they haven't put Sega's mascot out of his misery years ago is the legions of angsty fans, who desperately want to fuck him and his furry friends. I mean, somebody must still be buying all this crap despite the terrible review scores and when I look at DeviantArt I get a pretty good idea of who that crowd might be.

Not sure I want to know...

But it's not just the creepy fandom. Ever since Sonic and friends started to talk, things just got a little too cringeworthy. It's more annoying than any of their weird stories and settings. Sure, they had crazy shit ranging from the legend of King Arthur to werewolves to borderline beastiality, but modern Mario went from watersports to space to cities full of talking hat... spirit... things. All of that stuff worked out fine for Nintendo, but Sonic kept getting worse and worse. Mario doesn't talk. He doesn't have a fucking attitude, he doesn't tell people about how he rolls and his friends and enemies usually just grunt a little or give you a bit of random videogame gibberish and speech bubbles. They're far less annoying than Sonic's squeaky-voiced two-tailed sidekick, who never shuts up about how fucking awesome Sonic is. But hey, remember how annoyed we all got at Luigi? Of course not, because that never happened. Unlike Tails, Mario's brother has some fucking personality!

Then Sonic Mania happened and reminded us of how much we used to love Sonic when there was no ridiculous story, no awful voice acting... and no 3D, I guess? I gave it an 80 on GameStar, many other reviewers liked it even better than that. Easily one of the better 2D Sonic games out there, if not the best.

What's going on with his bright new colour, though?

That's when I saw a trailer for Sonic Forces and immediately hated it. More 3D, more cringe, another edgy villain, get this shit away from me. And Metacritic confirmed my gut feeling - at the time of this blog, 'professional' metascores are in the high 50s to low 60s, depending on which platform you check, with user ratings in the low to mid 70s.

Of course all critics are snobs, so when I saw this game for 30 Quid I decided to pick it up and give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, Sonic Forces uses the same mix of modern 3D levels and classic side-scrolling gameplay most people liked in Sonic Generations, so it seemed a bit odd that Forces scored considerably worse with reviewers. Then there's the main selling point of Forces, which is the ability to create your own playable character. And yes, they're obviously trying to appeal to the whole [Your name] the Hedgehog community of terrible, annoying die-hard fans with that, but why the hell wouldn't they? I couldn't care less about the fandom, but playing a custom character still felt fun. It's something lots of people like about games such as Warframe or Skyrim, so I'm not gonna knock Sonic for it.

Forget shitty fan characters like [You] the Hedgehog. Meet Fap the Wolf!

During my first hour or two with the game, Sonic Forces did little to win me over. Stages were 1-2 minutes in length, I did an absolutely terrible job completing them and still scored mostly S-ratings. The game grades you from A to C when you complete a level and gives you an S for being super awesome or something. It's mostly boosting and homing attacks like in other 3D Sonic titles, with the occasional quicktime event (mash X or press A at the right moment) and lots of action sequences, where you can see the characters do lots of super awesome shit while the game basically plays itself. It looks great, but it's also super easy and requires very little user input. You know, the kind of stuff that gets Call of Duty its annual 90% scores.

Gameplay with a custom character is only slightly different to playing Sonic. You still get a homing attack, but with the help of a grappling hook, which looks slightly different and plays the same. Instead of a boost or a spin dash your character gets to choose from various weapons like a flamethrower or a giant drill. I picked a lightning whip, because it felt the most fun to use and had a cool special ability, which let my character zip across the stage from one ring to the next at a hilariously speedy pace. All the weapons are massively overpowered. Forces is probably the easiest Sonic game I've ever played.

You don't have to be a die-hard fan to enjoy seeing your own character doing cool shit.

You get the occasional side-scrolling stage with 'classic' Sonic. While homing attacks will occasionally miss or not respond at all in 3D, classic Sonic controls like a charm. You get to visit classic zones like Green Hill or the Chemical Plant and there's some nice oldschool background music, which sounds almost exactly like a Megadrive track. Most of these stages are significantly easier than they were back in the day or in Sonic Mania. You also get infinite lives - if you murder Sonic, you get a 'Try Again' pop-up and respawn at the nearest checkpoint. Of course, dying several times and taking longer to complete a stage will hurt your overall rating, which may result in fewer rewards. Completing a stage will result in the game throwing a ton of clothes and items for your avatar at you. An S-rank will get you more stuff than a C. You get the idea.

I switch to Bastard the Cat if I want to mix things up a little.

There's a total of 30 stages (plus a bunch of hidden levels and bonus stages), but the first 20 or so are an absolute cakewalk. The later levels get a little more challenging, with one or two terrible side-scrolling bits, which feature your custom character, who controls like shit. The avatar is fine in 3D levels, but platforming in the pseudo 2D stages feels like everything is made out of soap. Your toon takes ages to speed up, walking almost on the spot for the first second, only to suddenly accelerate like crazy, which makes it borderline impossible to control your jumps. I got used to it after a while, but that particular segment was a pain in the ass, after classic Sonic behaved so well in his sidescrolling stages.

Chemical Plant Zone. Sadly without the original BGM.

The bits of the story I haven't skipped were unusually dark for a Sonic game. Forces begins with Sonic getting his ass kicked so hard, he's presumed dead and the entire world is taken over by Robotnik. There's no blood and gore or anything, but you do see a lot of generic characters imprisoned and caged as opposed to the usual bunch of cuddly bunnies turned into slightly less cuddly robots and the like. They've also dumped about every Sonic character ever in there, apart from Mighty, Cream, Blaze or Big the Cat and I'm a little embarrassed for noticing.
It's all still cringy as fuck, with the occasional joke that's so dumb it's funny again. Sonic to classic Sonic: "It's been Generations since we've last met!"

There's a whole lot of "We win, because we are friends and you don't even have friends, so ha!" bullshit happening. The vocals for the music of the 3D stages are pretty awful, as well. They're not 'Sonic R' levels of awful, but they're most certainly 'Live and Learn' levels of awful. Still, it was fun to see Fap and Sonic buddy up in some stages, where you get to control both characters like in Sonic Heroes. You even get to pick a voice for your toon, though they never really get to talk. It really just changes the way they grunt and scream as you get them killed repeatedly in each stage whilst trying to dodge a bottomless pit or a bullshit final boss, who creates these pits by lasering the shit out of the stage around you.

Sonic & Fap, BFFs

I've finished the story after about six or so hours, which isn't an awful lot of game for your money. That said, there's a bunch of daily missions, there are five or so hidden collectable items in each stage, you get extra rewards for finishing levels with an S-rank, then there's a bunch of little bonus challenges and extra stages, so there's still a fair amount of post-story content for you to play if you're into that sort of thing.

Much of the game feels more like baby's first platformer than a challenging Sonic title, which doesn't really bother me all that much. I don't need the levels to be super difficult when I just want to shave a few seconds of my completion type for a better rating and some more rewards. It's a bit stupid how much of each stage happens in spectacular cutscenes, where you don't really do anything but watch. Still, that stuff is pretty spectacular and Forces is a decent-looking game, which still maintains a steady 60FPS in 4K on my i7 and a GTX1070.

It runs remarkably worse on older hardware, though.

I had fun with it. It was a bit short, it's a bit easy, it plays itself a little too much and there are one or two annoying, frustrating bits, which suffer from shitty controls. It ain't perfect. But it's actually not terrible. So that's something. You know. For a 3D Sonic game.