Sega is celebrating Sonic the Hedgehog’s 20th anniversary with the newest game in the Sonic series, Sonic Generations. The main concern a lot of people have with this new Sonic game is if it will slip up the trend that Sonic Colors started in revitalizing the franchise. Luckily, while it’s not perfect, Sonic Generations continues to be a step in the right direction even if it stumbles a little bit along the way.
The story starts out with Classic Sonic running through Green Hill Zone when all of a sudden this purple evil creature rips through it causing chaos. Back in Modern Sonic’s time, his cast of friends that he’s gathered over the 20 years are throwing him a surprise birthday party. The same evil purple creature takes all his buddies and rips through space and time freezing everything, along with stages from his past. It’s up to both Sonics to bring the stages and the crew back to life, and stop the purple creature from destroying all of existence.
The graphics in Sonic Generations are up to par with what is expected of this console generation, but they are by no means pushing the envelope. The redesigned classic stages look beautiful; especially some of the much older ones like Sky Sanctuary. The impressive part was seeing some of the modern game stages take on a 2D aspect and the older stages taking a 3D aspect.
Sound design is spot on in this game. Sega plays on nostalgia hard when it comes to classic Sonic’s sound design. His jumps sound the same as they were back on the Sega Genesis and retro music plays throughout the older stages and all in all it sounds really good. Modern Sonic’s music and sound effects also do a solid job of giving Generations that current feel that Sonic fans expect.
Sonic Generations has an interesting concept blending two Sonics with two different game designs into one experience. There is classic Sonic, that plays like a classic 2D Sonic game, and modern Sonic that will play similar to the current style of games like Sonic Unleashed. While this comes across like an amazing idea it does have a few problems.
The gameplay boils down to playing each stage two different ways – once as Classic Sonic, and once as Modern Sonic. Once three stages have been beaten in both these styles, Generations opens up some challenge rooms that take place in the previous levels. Once a challenge is met for each of these three stages, the player can progress to the boss. Once the boss is beaten, both Sonics get access to the next three stages and a chaos emerald.
Having to switch back and forth between the two play styles made things a bit difficult to control. Both Sonics play really different and have their own kind of style to get used to. By the time I got used to the style of one Sonic, switching to the next version was a bit cumbersome. This can become rather frustrating due to the fact that Classic Sonic maneuvers and controls a lot better than Modern Sonic.
The controls for Classic Sonic feel amazing and reminds me why I loved this series so much as a kid. The 2D stages are fast, fun, and full of different paths to choose from. The 2D stages are some of the best levels in the game. Unfortunately, the 3D stages can’t quite live up to the quality of the retro-style levels.
While the 3D stages might look better than the 2D stages in some aspects, they are just not as fun. Sonic does not control well in the 3D stages, more like a twitchy little rodent on 5 hour energy drinks than anything else. There were a lot of times where the homing attack did not work properly or Sonic’s boost would propel him off the stage with even the slightest nudge of the analog stick. It takes a couple of tries to get used to his speed, but with time and a lot of patience Sonic can in fact be controlled properly.
There are a lot of times where it also felt that you are moving so fast there doesn’t seem to be any time to see what is coming around the corner in some occasions and it was almost like a guessing game. It’s annoying when Sonic is moving down the track at a fun and fast speed, but then all of a sudden you lose all the momentum or get hit by something.
One of the more interesting aspects Sega added to Sonic Generations is a point system that allows the player to spend currency on new skills. At the end of stages, Sonic will get these points based on performance and be able to spend the points at a shop in the central hub. At the shop, the player can invest in skills like a quick stop or speed boost. Each skill also has a value based on how useful it is. Each page can only hold five skills and those skills cannot be valued more than a combined total of 100.
The bosses are fun and pay homage to old foes from the series. Each boss is different, but most of them are rather easy and there are too few of them. There are some sub-bosses called rival battles. These take place on completely different stages but they take characters like Shadow the Hedgehog and pit the player against them. These sections were more fun to me than the actual boss battles.
The challenge stages are okay, but really they are just meant to add to replayability of the title. While the challenges do add a little bit of length, Sonic Generations is still a short game. The main story can be blown through in a solid day of playing. The online options are really lacking as well and consists of only two modes. One mode has the player doing a track from story mode and posting the time to a ranked listing. The other mode tests to see how far the player can get in thirty minutes down one of the tracks.
Most of the replay value will come from wanting to play some of the stages until they are completely memorized and top marks earned. If all else fails, the original Sonic the Hedgehog game is unlockable so new and old players can go play the original adventure that started it all.
Sonic Generations is like reliving all of Sonic’s glories and failures all at once. The game is very fun when its running at full speed, but frustrating when the controls get in the way. It’s still a really good game and Sega should look at this title and see what they did right and what they did wrong.There needs to be tweaks made if Sonic is to become as popular as he was in the past.
