Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Admittedly, I didn't buy the game from this site, but I feel I must warn others out there before wasting your money on this game. Ever since his debut into the 3D world, Sonic the Hedgehog has constantly had a hard time adapting to it. Sure, there are good ones like Sonic Generations and Sonic Adventure 2, but more less or not, Sonic 3D games have had numerous issues that make the games a chore to play and only kill the blue hedgehog more. So with Sonic Boom coming out, fans everywhere were hoping it'd bring Sonic back to glory as it seemed to be a new universe and everything. Even with the new character designs(Which were kind of weird, but I grew to accept them), people wanted to see it, especially since the developing crew, Big Red Button, consisted of former Naughty Dog employees. MD made games like Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, and an Uncharted game. So with something like this, you'd expect a winning combination and a glorious Sonic game. What we get instead is another stain on Sonic and only ruins him more. Rise of Lyric centers around our 4 heroes, Sonic, Knuckles, Amy, and Tails, as they accidentally wake up an ancient lizard named Lyric, who hates the environment because. . . reasons, I guess. Through a bit of exposition, the gang have to gather the Chaos. . . I mean, some power crystals to seal Lyric again. And that's as much story as you'll get. From there, you just go from one level to another doing the same thing over and over again until you beat the game. Now Sonic games aren't played for story alone, but if this is a new universe, this would be a good time to develop and flesh out the characters. We never know why Shadow is in the game, only to serve as a minor boss and that's it. What's the deal with Eggman? How did this universe's Sonic meet the others? There's no attempt to explore or flesh out this new world or universe. Why have a new universe if nothing is going to be explained or developed? Well, believe it or not, this is not the worst part of this game. Each character does bring their own trait to the table and you can control one of them with the press of a button when needed. Sonic is "speed"(I'll talk about that in a moment), Tails can hover, Knuckles can only climb specific walls and is a power house, and Amy has a good jump. While it sounds good on paper, Sonic gets the worst execution in this game. He is so slow and sluggish it's like he's got lead weights tied to him. The "fastest" Sonic will go is a light jog and that's it. This is a constant problem with recent Sonic games and it seems to be only getting worse. The characters themselves sound decent and the voice work is pretty good. Granted it's not amazing, but compared to some of the other Sonic game voice work, like 06, this is pretty good. However, what little goodwill about this is squandered immediately. In the game, the characters NEVER. SHUT. UP. AT ALL. They are always saying something about rings, a bounce spring, the speed areas, and stuff so obvious, Ray Charles could see it coming a mile away. This will make you hit that mute button faster than Sonic in this game. You're not missing much in sound anyway because of how bad and forgettable this game's music is. At least Sonic 06 had a good soundtrack. Next comes game play and boy does this game really mess up the Sonic formula. Instead of a get to the goal as fast as possible, they tried to combine puzzle solving, platforming, beat 'em up, and a little speed. What we get is a complete mess that never clicks together at all. The puzzles are mostly boring and very easy to solve, mostly due to the fact that the characters constantly, and I mean constantly, point out what to do. Where's the challenge in a puzzle if I'm given the answer right away? Platforming is no better. It feels very tedious and monotonous. They aren't even that creative at all. You hit a few buttons to make platforms appear and the paths are usually very linear. Again, no real difficulty. The only difficult part comes in something cheap and I'll get to that later. The beat 'em up, or combat, is by far the most tedious part of this whole game. When I saw it, I thought it'd be like the Batman Arkham series. You know, do a bunch of cool combos to destroy your enemies. No. It's the same thing over and over again. A one-two-punch and it's over. The characters do have special attacks like Sonic's homing attack, but you can't use them to do a combo. You can use your new whip to destroy enemies and toss them around like a lasso, but it doesn't do anything really. The only fun you'll have is tossing the enemies off a platform and into a bottomless pit, but even that gets boring after a while. Then there's the speed sections. If you thought the speed sections in Sonic 2006 were bad(And they really are), then this is even worse, if possible. One of the biggest issues in this game is the horrible frame rate. It is constantly below 30 frames and because of how bad it is, you can't get a good timing on when to avoid obstacles and you get hit cheaply a lot because of it. Add to that, the characters are constantly talking as well, whether it be speed boosts, how the road was made for them, it gets annoying. But the worst part is that it requires no effort to beat it. I'm serious, you can do nothing at all in these sections and still beat it since the game controls itself and while you will take damage, even if avoiding the obstacles, you can still beat it. What kind of level design is that? Who thought adding in something so broken would be fun? Speaking of broken, we come to the glitches. Remember how I pointed out something in platforming? Well here it is. There are times you'll be walking around like everything's fine, when you suddenly fall down a hole, even though there is a platform in front of you. Other times, you can walk through walls, or stand on "platforms" that aren't even there. You can even use a glitch by Knuckles allowing you to skip through a majority of the game. If this isn't bad programming, I don't know what is. As usual, we have a hub world and it's even worse than Sonic 06's if that's possible. The hub world is humongous, but it is so lifeless and dull. The place feels like one big ghost town and because of how slow everyone is, you'll be wanting to get from one area to another to get out of this place. The only purpose to this place, aside from getting you from one stage to another, is for you to do side quests for upgrades. I can tell you this much right now that you shouldn't bother with the side missions. None of them are fun at all and your upgrade rewards are downright useless and have no impact or change to the game at all. It feels like they tacked them on at the last moment to pad the game out more. As for the graphics, they aren't impressive at all. The levels look bland and the textures are low quality and the lighting is simple. This game could pass as a PS2 game. The cut scenes are the only good graphics and do look pretty nice. Aside from that, everything looks so bland and the level designs are as dull and lifeless as the hub world. Controls are alright, but nothing to write home about. You can move around freely and I found no real delays at all, but nothing really to complain or praise about. At the end of the day, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is another tedious mess of a modern day Sonic game. The gameplay is not only a mess, but it gets very tedious, very fast. The plot is paper thing, the music is awful, the characters never shut up, and it lacks everything about what made a Sonic game an actual Sonic game. This isn't even a Sonic game, it feels like a generic game with the Sonic characters in it. If you are a parent looking to get your kids a Christmas present, then please avoid this game at all costs. If you really want a good 3D Sonic game, go play Sonic Generations or Sonic Adventure 2 instead of wasting your time on this excuse of a game.