Wow, where do I begin? Sonic Lost World is an unmitigated disaster, and nullifies the small amount of good will developer Sonic Team had generated with the decent Sonic Colors and the actually-quite-fantastic Sonic Generations. It’s a huge step back for the blue blur, who was starting to make us believe that he’d finally got the hang of this whole 3D thing, and is a thorough disappointment for Wii U owners who were hoping for a solid exclusive game to tide them over until the release of Super Mario 3D World later this year.
Sonic Lost World teams Sonic together with arch-nemesis Doctor Eggman, who must prevent the Deadly Six, a sextet of evil monsters, from taking over the world. The Deadly Six are an entirely forgettable bunch, and the humour the writers attempt to draw from them is embarrassing at best. There’s an overweight one who discusses nothing but food, a female one who discusses nothing but her appearance and an emo one who discusses nothing but the futility of life. Fun. The treatment of our hero isn’t much better, though, as Sonic obnoxiously whines his way through each and every cutscene whilst throwing an obligatory, excruciating pun into the conversation every once in a while that will likely cause even the most easily amused child to shake his/her head in disdain. Kids have Adventure Time these days, Sonic – your one-liners about “bein’ cool” in an ice level simply won’t cut the mustard.
Sonic Lost World‘s level design bares more than a passing resemblance to that of Super Mario Galaxy’s, with the world rotating underneath Sonic’s feet as he moves and bounce pads launching him from miniature planet to miniature planet. However, whereas Nintendo utilised this innovative design choice to winning effect in Galaxy, in Lost World its implementation stands as little more than a confusing hindrance. While each level certainly looks pretty, decorated with colours vibrant enough to inveigle the child inside of even the most pessimistic gamer, beneath those joyous aesthetics lies a convoluted mess of ill-devised ideas thrown hastily together by a development team that seems incapable of taking the ball and simply running with it.
Sonic is slower than he ever has been in Lost World, and this is in no small part due to running no longer being his default method of movement, with it being assigned to the Wii U GamePad’s ZR button instead. In truth, in Sonic’s Genesis heyday his speed was never the most prominent part of his games, despite it being his most marketable asset. In the original Sonic games, you’d often find yourself screeching to a halt in order to navigate your way past enemies and across treacherous pitfalls, and this remains the case in Sonic Lost World. However, in Lost World these road blocks are so frequent that each level becomes a frustrating exercise in trial and error.
This is a shame, because a few of its early levels show promise, with a few new acrobatic moves being added to Sonic’s repertoire that threatened to make Lost World a thrilling hybrid of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the aforementioned Super Mario Galaxy. Sonic can now run along walls, for instance, with this new ability allowing me to speedily access new routes and devise my own path through a level. The few stages that truly take advantage of this ability and beckon the player to explore them are the highlights of Lost World, but they are unfortunately few and far between.
Sonic Team has thrown a lot of ideas at the wall in Sonic Lost World, but none of these ideas have been satisfactorily developed upon. Sonic finds himself once again platforming in 2D in a few stages, but his progress in them is routinely short-lived due to pop-up enemies and the awkward implementation of the new ‘Color Powers’, which attempt to make use of the GamePad’s touchscreen but instead wind up being irritating, and often deadly, distractions. In one particularly unforgettable segment in the Silent Forest Zone I was tasked with guiding Sonic from one checkpoint to another using the yellow Color Power, which sees the hedgehog transforming into a drill (naturally) which you must then guide from one circular piece of earth to the next using the touchscreen. However, these pieces of earth are floating precariously in the sky, and awkwardly navigating between them saw me repeatedly falling to my doom. I never made it to that checkpoint of my own accord, instead shamefully opting for the game to transport me there when I had run out of lives. However, as I had no rings, I was promptly disposed of by an enemy and yet again found myself staring at the ‘Game Over’ screen, throwing me right back to the beginning of the stage.
While this is standard practice for platformers, almost every level is a tedious grind to the finish line in Sonic Lost World, meaning that I routinely met the Game Over screen with gritted teeth and clenched fists. If I felt that half of my deaths were due to my lack of proficiency at the game I would have praised Sonic Team for bringing some of that old-school difficulty to a modern 3D platformer, but the reality is so often did I tumble off of a ledge due to Sonic’s awkward pirouette jump in the ice levels, accidentally perform a homing attack on an unassailable enemy or wall jump right into the open mouth of a carnivorous worm-like monster, that Lost World‘s unforgiving difficulty level doesn’t strike me as a design choice made by Sonic Team, but rather a byproduct of the game’s multiple flaws.
Sonic Lost World is the best-looking game on the Wii U, and as such it is difficult to not be enticed by it. Unfortunately, it is little more than a pretty face, and is a thoroughly disappointing successor to the excellent Sonic Generations. As a Sonic fan, I feel completely exasperated by witnessing yet another failed attempt by Sonic Team to reinvent its mascot, after they had finally managed to create a successful 3D Sonic game.
Paul Tamburro is the Associate Gaming Editor for CraveOnline. You can follow him on Twitter @PaulTamburro.
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