I had some trepidation when I heard the next Sonic game was going to be outsourced to a Western studio with some Naughty Dog alumni, complete with new character designs and a Knuckles who looked like he had been drinking nothing but protein shakes for the last ten years. But hey, it might not turn out so bad, right?
Well some in-game footage apparently leaked ahead of E3 and it really hasn’t inspired any confidence in me:
Oh god shut up already
The main three takeaways I had were:
- The last time we had an ‘in-depth’ (by which I mean incredibly shallow) combat system in a Sonic game it didn’t turn out so well.
- I thought one of the key takeaways from Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog was that the characters really need to keep quiet. That seems to have been tossed in the bin for this iteration and I don’t know that the quality of the banter on show here justifies that decision.
- The platforming/speed sections look…serviceable, I suppose. I’m not seeing anything amazing that would necessitate a purchase at this point (especially compared to the daytime stages in Unleashed or Generations as a whole), but it doesn’t look bad, at least.
Overall, unless they show something else that blows me away at E3 I’m probably still going to be in ‘wait and see’ mode. I’m not going to quibble about it not being 100% like the older 3D Sonics but it appears to be rather…vanilla.