[Impressions] Sonic Forces Demo

The demo for Sonic Forces just released on the Nintendo Switch's Japanese e-shop, so I thought it was the perfect chance to write my next Impressions.

I want to be direct: this demo will probably go down as the worst demo of 2017. The demo itself has three different stages: one of them using modern Sonic, another using a preset Avatar character and a third one with a boss battle against Eggman using classic Sonic. Before tackling the content though, there's a much bigger issue with this demo: each time you start a stage you only have one minute to play it, no more, no less. That's right, you can only play sixty seconds of each stage, which means you can't play much of the game or complete any of the stages at all in this demo.

However, even if you have a timer you can still get a feeling for the gameplay and level design, and, unfortunately, those are not that great. The gameplay is what you'd expect, but the level design is the worrying part. Both in the modern Sonic and in the Avatar stages, the level design is strictly linear, which motivates the player to just complete the stages as fast as possible, without paying attention to sceneries or the contents of the stage itself. If I could put in other words, the game is reminding you that you "gotta go fast".

For the Avatar character, which is one of the main points for Sonic Forces, there's not much variety to play with here: you're given a preset appearance with the chance to choose between three different weapons each time you play the stage: a flamethrower, an electric whip and an hammer that smashes into the ground to turn enemies into cubes. Besides this, the Avatar character also has a grappling hook, that allows the player to grapple into objects in the air, for continued air time, or to project into enemies (similar to the way Sonic attacks enemies). Did it feel good to play with the Avatar character? No. The grappling hook has a long animation which kills the momentum and the weapons you can use (at least the ones available) are more of an excuse to pay attention to the enemies instead of a meaningful gameplay element.

All in all, ignoring the timer and focusing on the three minutes of total gameplay time you get across all the available stages, and assuming the rest of the game follows this design philosophy, I can infer a couple of aspects about this game: (1) the level design will be extremely linear, allowing the players to simply dash through the levels, and (2) the Avatar character seems to be a gimmick specific to Sonic Forces, not something that should hold its place in future installments for the series. To me, the Avatar character felt like something forced (no pun intended), rather than being an enjoyable alternative to play with Sonic or the other already existing characters.

Am I going to buy this game? No. Did I have any intentions of doing so before playing this demo? Not really. I've never been a big fan of the Sonic games, specially the 3D ones, so I never even thought about buying this game. However, I don't think this game will be good enough to hook new players into the Sonic franchise either.

#sonicforces #sonic #nintendoswitch #demo #impressions