User reviews

Sonic fumbles once again in this mediocre addition to the franchise. Really, what can I say that hasn't been said: the levels are short, the physics wonky as heck, Classic Sonic is a dead cow being milked to its limits, mischaracterization of characters, and I'm just scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Some of the redeeming qualities of this game is the soundtrack, the custom creator, the environments of the stages, some set pieces are pretty cool, but that's about it.

Not bad, but not very good.

Sonic Forces is a sad story. It had the potential of being one of Sonic's best games yet, and instead it became one of Sonic's most mediocre and disappointing games to date. The story tries to be the next SA1 or SA2, but instead the story had a villain with a cringe backstory, questionable usage of characters (cough cough Tails), a world that's like cardboard, a Mary Sue OC, and combined this all with a laughable script that try's to take itself both seriously and funny and with awful acting leads a game that overall, is painfully mediocre at its best, and an insult to the fans at its worst. Sonic could do WAY better than this insult of a game

So this is an interesting game for sure, I'm not really sure what to think of it. On the one hand is it as bad as some people would have you believe? No, not really. Would I say that I think the game is great? Probably not either. It's in this weird state where I think that the hate it gets is unwarranted but I'd hesitate to recommend this game entirely.

Basically put, if you like the way Generations or Unleashed played and would like more levels in that style then this is more of the same with regards to game play. But the story is a bit rubbish and some of the bosses are a bit on the weak side but I don't have many complaints with either the visuals, the music or the performance. They're all pretty good.

So I'd say, pick this up on sale if you'd like a "Generations level pack" but this is not really the game I wanted or needed, but I enjoyed my time with the game play and collectables that you can hunt for

Ever since the garbage that has been Sonic Boom, I was hoping when SEGA would just stop, rethink their actions, and go back to what made them great. When I first saw Classic Sonic in the trailer, I got a bit excited that this would be a sequel to Generations or a new experience. But, nope. It's just Super Mario Odyssey with the main focus being the OCs, a lower budget, horrible, unwanted voice acting, boring story and villains, unnecessary side characters, and trash character development. What's the point of having most of the characters here if they're just cheerleaders and aren't playable? However, what SEGA did to Tails is unforgivable. In Adventure 2, he defeated Eggman on his own, but since Unleashed, he's just a mere background character that does absolutely nothing. Wow, what a way to go.

As a person who owns this game and played it, I do agree it does have problems, but they never bothered me.

Basically, the story is Dr. Eggman has created a new scheme to take over the world, and after the first stage, Sonic is defeated by the mad scientist, especially since he has the aid of Infinite, a new villain for this game. After Sonic's defeat and imprisonment in space, Eggman goes on to take over 99% of the planet, but Knuckles forms a resistance, alongside some of Sonic's friends, to fight back. The story sounds a lot like Sonic SatAM, but getting rid of characters like Sally Acorn and replacing them with the game cast. However, they get a new member, the Rookie, which is a character you get to create using one of seven different species, each having a special ability, and being able to use Wispons, weapons using wisps' color powers without needing the wielder to transform. Once you make your Avatar (as the game will call it), he or she is sent on a mission to break Sonic out, eventually leading to the two teaming up, Also, Classic Sonic joins the fight, coming to the Modern Sonic dimension due the events of Sonic Mania.

So, the game allows you to create your own character for use in Avatar stages as well as the stages where he/she teams up with Sonic. However, one of the problems with it is how limited the selections are. You are limited to one Avatar until you beat the story, and customization options are limited from the start, as new clothing and Wispons are unlocked as you progress through the story as well as complete specific tasks. As for customization, don't expect to make a perfect replica of characters like Sally Acorn or any other non-game character, because the customization has it where shirt and pants are one single outfit, and females are forced to wear bodysuits (although you can make it the same color as the skin, but it will still show).

Depending on the stage, you play as Sonic, Classic Sonic, or the Avatar. Some stages have Sonic and the Avatar teaming up. Each one controls differently (the Avatars have a wire attack and can use Wispons, Sonic has his usual homing attack and can boost using white wisps, and Classic Sonic plays like he did in Sonic Generations). Sadly, another problem is the game can be beaten very quickly if you decide to go straight to the goal, with it being extended only if one decides to go for the collectibles like Red Star Rings that are hidden in almost every level. Also, some of the challenges can be a bit grindy, with some ranging from killing a certain number of enemies with a certain Wispon, to getting a certain medal rank as a certain species. While completionists and achievement hunters will find this nice, others will find it excessive and boring.

However, to ease the grinding, the game adds daily challenges that will add a score multiplier when completed. Sadly, these are insulting easy, as some will require you to change a certain article of clothing on your Avatar.

Other gripes include Episode Shadow, which acts like a prequel, and when beaten, unlocks Shadow for play in Modern Sonic's stages (the episode only has three stages, and Shadow is nothing more than a reskin of Sonic) and the fact that Classic Sonic was put in this game to link it to Sonic Mania (and solidify the game's entry as an anniversary title). Otherwise, the game is okay and is worth checking out if you are a Sonic fan.

You've heard it right, "Sonic was never good" "Sonic was only good in 2D" I've never bought into that, I thoroughly enjoyed Sonic from it's 2D days well into the 3D days but the series has been so thoroughly off track since 2006 with it's ill fated Sonic '06 entry. After a series if poorly conceived and boring gimmicks we were treated to Sonic Colors which felt like a real rebound for the series. Then came Generations, many loved it, I was meh on it to be honest, feeling it was too short and the controls too stiff for platforming.

Sonic Lost World came next which looked like Sega's sorry attempt to ride Mario's coattails with a Galaxy-esque design style and returning the Whisps from Sonic Colors. That game was dull and plagued by so many poor choices. Sonic Boom was another odd experiment that I had hopes for but was sorely disappointed on. Now we have Sonic Forces, promising at first, a game that's been in development for a long time, no sorry rush jobs, enough time to really think about the design mentalities from the last six years and a new generation of consoles to welcome to and it all has fallen apart. Everything done right in Colors has thoroughly been undone in this one game.

The flaws: Early promises with the first few stages until the game ramps it up with artificial difficulty with a slew of bottomless pits. True pits are time honored platform traditions, even in Sonic games but this game really laid it on thick! This game might as well be Bottomless Pits, the Game, featuring Sonic the Hedgehog. The most egregious of pits, the last two stages, Metropolis and The Tower level where precise timing is key to not falling in these pits that litter these stages.

The controls are clunky and awkward. You control between Modern Sonic, Classic Sonic (though I guess now he's just Alternate Sonic) and your own custom avatar. Classic Sonic can't make it up a simple loop even while running at a decent pace, what is this, Sonic 4? I thought we fixed this long ago, Sonic Team! Modern Sonic and Avatar are a little floaty thought somehow it doesn't work as it did before in the Adventure series. Again probably because the abundance of bottomless pits makes it easy to overshoot your platform. Despite being floaty your jump is also terribly gimped, as gimped as it was back in Generations. Somehow the game is floaty and gimped at the same time, I really don't understand.

The whisps are back but terribly this time. Perhaps the most fun aspect of Sonic Colors has been reduced to a small powerup that's good for maybe five seconds at most and is limited to one single weapon your avatar can get. And it's not as though your avatar can change weapons on the fly, no that'd mean doing something well in this. The homing attack, a Sonic staple for 20 years now, since Adventure 1, is here but is bizarrely relegated to the need of a reticule lock on mechanic. Why?! Why change what has been known for nearly two-decades, what's been ingrained into every player who ever picked up a modern 3D Sonic game, why of all things would you change that. This franchise has seen many changes over the years with it's mechanics and styles but if anything has been consistent it's the homing attack.

The Rage-Quit moment: I had two rage-quit moments in this, first was during the Zavok battle, the first boss in the game. The key is to hold your position on the ground and let his ground pound launch you into the air. This isn't communicated to you in anyway so what's your first instinct, jump into the air to get the homing attack! I must have jumped over and over again but nothing came about. I constantly restarted, intentionally died just thinking maybe I was hitting some kind of bug until I learned the proper way to do that. What's your first instinct in a game like this where the boss rides high in the air, or again any 3D Sonic game before Lost World? JUMP INTO A BOSS! The second moment was the final level, suddenly wall jumping is back! It was nowhere to be found for most of the game but now I have to do it here, with a slippery as can be custom character over an endless amount of pits. I couldn't make it through, I just got fed up with constantly falling and dying and falling and dying! The positives? Though I give this game a real failing score there are just a few bright spots, they're few and not enough to really save this but most of the music is pretty good. Probably one of the better soundtracks in a while from a series sometimes known for better music than games. The last few games have come to rely on dull orchestral scores (orchestral is usually great but not what I come to want in a Sonic game) and badly auto tuned theme songs. Forces goes back to the mix and match of rock and synth pop that made the Adventure games so memorable. But even there there's a few dull tunes, 2D Death Egg was garbage, not taking from either S3&K or Sonic 2 (likely for Sega being cheap in licensing). The story is the same goofy cheesy comedy we've had since Colors, which is for the best, Sonic trying to get too serious just comes off as trying too hard. We had it work once in SAT-AM let's call that lightning in a bottle magic and not keep trying it.

Early promises of Forces and early good will steadily faded the longer I played. I'm not going to waste more time by finishing it, I'm done with this game and I'm done with this franchise.

Sega has really hit Rock bottom With sonic Forces so I decided to do something different sega if your reading this then scrap sonic and say hello to Larry the pig. Yes this we'll be your new mascot, he Will sell plushis figures and games like Larry boom Larry 2 the rescue and Larry Forces.

Honestly, this game is a mix. While there's some bad moments like certain controls or plot holes. The rest of the game is decent. Sure it's a letdown for Sonic's 25th anniversary compared to mania, but when looked at alone it's surprisingly fun to play. Playing as 3 characters is a great refreshment for the series. Sure two of them are sonic and one is a character customization result, but at least we get more playstyles. My only complaint is that the main villain Infinite is just bad. His reason for becoming evil is because Shadow called him weak. That's as if someone tracked down a random YouTuber just because they commented "KYS lol." also the rest of infinite is just the "Evil dark and edgy" stereotype we all know but don't like. He's basically a Great Value Shadow that's past the expiration date. The soundtrack is great about 75-85% of the time, the level design isn't bad due to the fact only 3 people worked on it, the free dlc "Episode Shadow" is fun and I'm honestly glad to play as shadow after so long. If you want to get this game, get it when it's on sale because even though for me it's one of my favorite sonic games, it still has some minimal problems that can be fixed.

Sonic Forces is far from being the best of the franchise, but quite an enjoyable game. Probably the biggest issue is the story is sorta weak. The cutscenes can be seen rushed and doesn't tell us much about Sonic's journey. And the controls can be repetitive sometimes. But what makes up for it is fantastic graphics, some of the nice gameplay especially when you get to make a avatar for the game and likable charm from the previous Sonic games. Overall, it's definitely not the best Sonic game. But can't say it's the worst either.

Loved that you can make your own avatar, loved the plot, loved the backgrounds, but the gameplay is terrible.

For the most part it's super easy (so easy it's boring), but then there will just be a part of the map you have no way of knowing about so you can't not die a few times. Seems like the developers where like, "Let's make the game so easy a three year old can play it, but let's make sure they die a few times at random parts of the game just so they think it's hard."

Once you have played the entire map once you can play it again with your eyes closed. It's all about knowing where that one place you need to jump is.

Would have been a better game if it were open world instead of everything on a track.

Awful level design. Awful voice acting from the regular show background voice guy. Awful, boring, sterile cutscenes. Awful story. Awful villain. Awful music. Awful everything. It's another painful attempt at appealing to the fans after the other three hundred times. This game is the embodiment of a seven year old's idea of "edgy and cool", because those Sonic fans want the seriousness and deep complexity of Sonic The Hedgehog back really bad. It's downright embarrassing and annoying, it's not fun and it's just a boring reminder that the absolute garbage spewing from Sonic Team's big fat money filled mouth will be categorized as "okay", because the standards have become that low. At least you can laugh at the franchises' worst games, this one is just miserable and obnoxious.

Don't go and waste sixty dollars on this, not even if it's on sale. I would give it a 0 if I could.

Sonic Forces is the most recent mainline Sonic game, and i gotta be honest, this game.. isn't good at all, the story attempts to bring back the dark and edgy tone of past Sonic games, but it just fails really badly, i barely felt like anything even happened, Eggman has finally conquered the world along with his new invention or buddy named Infinite who is just one of the most generic villains in Sonic history, not having any interesting motivation or backstory, besides throwing a tantrum after Shadow obviously destroys him in the Episode Shadow prequel DLC, you also have some villains from the past Sonic games being Shadow, Zavok, Metal Sonic and Chaos showing up as fake illusions by Infinite, but for some reason, you don't fight Chaos or Shadow, showing me that they had no respect for the dreamcast fans, truly disappointing.

Now this game has 23 stages and 7 bosses, now while that sounds like a lot of content, all these stages are insanely short with most of them taking 1-3 minutes to complete, making you beat the entire game in under 4 hours, and this is an anniversary title (well, i mean, it kinda is!), it should be big!

Speaking of the stages, let's talk about the gameplay styles, this game has 3 gameplay styles being Modern Sonic, the avatar you can create and Classic Sonic, Modern Sonic has the best gameplay style most people would say, but that doesn't mean it's good, every single level in this game is mostly a linear bore-fest, Modern Sonic's physics have been completely destroyed, he has no run formation, he feels very slippery to control, his boost is way too OP and his double jump feels so weak and doesn't do anything at all unless you abuse the game's crazy momentum system.

So what about the avatar, the avatar is definitely the best part of this game in my opinion, not his gameplay as it is literally just Modern Sonic's gameplay except you don't have the boost, it's the fact you can make your own OC be canon to the storyline which is a really cool idea, there's also a bunch of accessories you can customize your avatar with.

And now we have Classic Sonic, yep, they ruined his physics COMPLETELY, he was obviously just a last-minute thought, so of course, his physics were gonna be bad considering Generations already didn't have the perfect physics for him, but yeah, here, he is just complete trash, his normal speed is incredibly slow, his jump feels too floaty, everything sucks about him, he's also not even relevant to the plot, only being here because of when Mania ended, he forms an emotional bond with Tails, when he really doesn't, because he has done nothing, then there's also the part where the game states he's from another dimension INSTEAD OF ANOTHER TIMELINE LIKE WE WERE TOLD BEFORE!!

I'm so done with this game, so much missed potential especially when you look at the visuals in the stages which just look gorgeous, but obviously, it was doomed to fail from the start as they used a new engine for this game, there's some other things here, like the soundtrack which is just ok compared to other Sonic OST's and the tag-team mechanic between Modern Sonic and the avatar which was kinda clunky, and the final boss which was once again, a copy of the Nega-Wisp armor from Colors, but yeah, that's about it!

This game has a huge list of problems but for each problem theres two good things. This game is not the 25th we deserved but is still entertaing enough to exist.

Beautiful graphics, amazing music, sweet story, cool villain, great controls.

I played the game and didn't really try to get high scores first time and the game looked so average to me with no unique experience.

But second time, I focused to get S scores, and the game turned out to be so enjoyable and challenging.

The story wasn't very strong but that didn't ruin my fun so i wouldn't count it negative.

The controls for Classic Sonic weren't very accurate. Changing directions in air isn't easy unlike Modern Sonic who has a good controlling and mobility.

The colours, the designs, the graphics, all of them gave this game its own mood and a decent atmosphere.

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There are multiple characters in this game. Tails, Knuckles, Silver, Shadow and others. But actually, the only playable characters are: Modern Sonic, Classic Sonic, and Your OC. You had brought back so many characters but still, I am only able to use 3 of them. I know Shadow is a playable character, but he has the same exact abilities that Sonic has.

You had diverse characters I wanted to use and not a created OC. I wanted to play some extraordinary experience with Silver. Or some different stages for Shadow. And not my OC. You can't show us a huge content and doesn't expect us to use it. It's like buying a Sonic game but Sonic is unplayable.

This game got so hated from the community for numerous reasons. But I actually liked this game and don't have any problem to see another Sonic game like this. Thank you Sega.

Gameplay is actually quite refined and enjoyable. What let's it down is the length of the levels. In my opinion, I think if the levels were between 4-6 minutes each that everyone would be calling this game sonics great return. I don't play sonic for a great story although it can help. I play for gameplay. I believe the gameplay is fine.