Sonic Lost World (Wii U)

Sonic Lost World shouldn’t have been a Sonic game. That’s not me getting upset that this doesn’t meet some sort of metric for what constitutes a true Sonic game, but rather a bit of disappointment that Sonic elements needed to worm their way into a game that clearly wanted to stretch its creative legs far more. Sonic Lost World’s 3D platforming is frequently inventive and designs levels that defy gravity or even shift up how you even control Sonic the Hedgehog, but it always feels like it has to loop back to the familiar and ends up shying away from more exciting concept exploration because of it. It could have focused on the speedy reactionary platforming of Sonic or continued developing its wide range of platforming gimmicks, but we’re instead given a hodgepodge that wants to reinvent the series but can’t abandon old ideas either.

 

Sonic Lost World’s story even shows some of this mixed commitment. Initially, Sonic and his buddy Tails are once again trying to stop their nemesis, the evil scientist Doctor Eggman. However, as the battle goes airborne, the duo end up knocked off course, discovering a strange world in the sky called the Lost Hex. On this Lost Hex, six demonic looking creatures known as Zeti posses magnetic powers that could threaten the massive robot armies of Eggman, but initially he has them under his control as he orders the Deadly Six to battle Sonic while he develops an extractor to drain the world’s life force for power. Initially the Deadly Six just seem like some boss characters with extra personality, each expressing exaggerated simplistic concepts like one that loves to eat or one that acts like an old martial arts master. They’ll actually comment during stages and crop up more than once to mess with your adventure in their dedicated areas, and eventually they even hijack the main antagonist role as Sonic ends up forced to work with Eggman to try and take them down. There is a small attempt at even making a point about Sonic’s impulsive trust in his emotions being a bad thing as he keeps ignoring the informed viewpoints of his young pal Tails, buts its a fairly light look since more scenes are spent showing what the villains are up to. Building up a new enemy group isn’t a bad idea, but their colorful appearance looks a little at odds with Sonic series character design. They would be a fine group of villains for a new franchise, but it also feels like they’re given magnetic powers solely so they can take Eggman’s robots over so the game wouldn’t need to swap out its generic enemies once the villain role fully shifts over, just showing how the game can’t quite fit the two halves together too well.

Sonic Lost World makes use of both 3D stages and 2D side-scrolling levels, but it feels like it has far more creative ideas to explore when you’re free to move in every direction. The ground isn’t necessarily flat in Sonic Lost World, there being quite a few gravity-defying levels that take place on tube shaped ground or have you bouncing between little spherical planetoids, the focus not always on speed as there’s often something of note on every part of the object you’re running across. Red Rings serve as collectibles that reward you for looking around, so exploring the circumference of a cylindrical running area can often lead you to helpful discoveries. This can seem a little at odds with Sonic’s reputation for running fast, but there are levels where you’re meant to take your time and figure out how to progress while others will instead have you automatically sprinting forward and simply needing to move Sonic around to avoid deadly collisions. Regular rings return as a forgiving health system though, any injury besides things like crushing or falling down a pit causing you to drop all the rings you collected and any injury while you have none instead leading to you losing a life. This design choice made sense when the goal was to go lightning fast and you needed a bit of a cushion, but often in those levels where you’re running forward automatically, death comes instead by hitting a wall or missing a jump which the rings won’t protect you from.

 

That’s not to say levels are lacking because of the low speed. While you’ll often finding yourself holding the run button even in slower moments since even Sonic’s sprint isn’t often too fast, there are quite a lot of ideas at play that make you think about more than how you move forward. One stage sees Sonic trapped in a giant snowball you need to safely roll through obstacle courses, another has you needing to escape little planetoids by luring giant fruit into blenders so the juice that sprays out and can propel you elsewhere. Even when it’s not a unique idea, good theming can make levels more engaging, like the automatic sprint through a set of beehives where you need to line up with the holes in the hexes well or a trek across a jungle swamp where you try to trigger flower platforms to safely traverse. The 2D levels aren’t without their own creative ideas like maneuvering around floating sweets in the sky, although they do tend to play it safer in terms of new ideas at play. You can have something close to a stealth section where a robotic owl’s spotlight vision tries to hunt you down as you run, but these sections do tend to lean more towards just trying to avoid robots with straightforward attacks or trying to take the higher but trickier road since the rewards are often better when you’re daring.

 

Less ambitious side-scrolling stages isn’t much of a problem either, there are even 3D stages that go for more familiar platforming game concepts like trekking through a desert or using water geysers to get around a beach stage. Wisps also return from Sonic Colors to try and inject quick bits of novelty into both stage types. Players can find themselves drilling down through large underground areas with the yellow Wisp, flying through the sky with the red one, or even turning into the peculiar Indigo Wisp that breaks apart the level and then turns that into an orbiting ring of debris it can use to propel itself upward. Ones with smaller quick effects like the Cyan Wisp that fires you forward like a laser see a bit of use, but otherwise these are almost reasons to inject new play sections. So far though, we’ve been mostly looking at ideas that make individual stages interesting or effective, but there are foundational elements to Sonic Lost World’s design that end up pulling things down a bit.

Sonic’s main mode of attacking here is the Homing Attack. When you leap in the air or are near certain enemies, red indicators appear on foes or springs showing you can launch yourself at them. This helps to keep Sonic’s movement under control some, even though you’re often not even going that fast when running, you can adequately target things that could have been missed if not for these indicators popping up. However, the homing is unfortunately inconsistent. There are times I had to restart a level because an attempt to home into a spring led to me lodged in it instead. There are boss fights that drag on because the game won’t detect the targets adequately even when there are barely any options for the lock-on to latch onto. You need to collect small animal friends to unlock new stages which are often stored inside enemy robots to serve as their power source, so you’ll often want to attack any enemies you can reach, but the targeting lets this task down as it’s often either mindless or prone to unexpected issues.

 

Less smooth moments can crop up when you make use of the game’s wall running too. There are parts where Sonic can run along the side of a wall but they’re often completely optional because the game seems to have issues detecting how to move him along one, but there are other moments you can scale a wall vertically to reach a higher area or just avoid losing momentum from a run by going for something better described as a wall climb. Running vertically up the wall is used fairly regularly and yet it can sometimes feel like the game is anxious to let you travel up too quickly. When it’s required you feel oddly slow going up one when it’s not an action that really seemed to require much input from the player beyond the attempt to do so, meaning the hiccup in movement speed feels unnecessary. Meanwhile in 2D levels it can sometimes activate when you’re trying to more cleanly jump up a small ledge, leading to a small moment of disorientation. Neither usually has unfortunate results for the player, but it does start to make the movement feel at odds even with simpler moments of navigation, and there are definitely moments where the game attempts an idea that doesn’t work. Ice levels sometimes force Sonic to switch from a run to a skate which changes your reliable movement tools and leads to errors as you try to accommodate when the hedgehog changes from one movement type to the other without much indication. Generally checkpoints can be placed in poor places too. You might get trapped in an agonizing climb up a pinball machine that keeps stopping the action to roll slots for unexciting rewards or you might start off right before slow boss fights like one where you’re bounding around clouds slowly waiting and hoping the turtle robot fires missiles into a place where you can hit them in time before having to wait another round and try again.

 

Not all bosses are bad though, even with some homing attack inconsistencies. They do tend to involve noticing patterns to exploit, but then you’ve got fights like Zazz who runs around in the same area as you trying to deny the limited running space you have, and Master Zik actually defends himself with homing attack decoys that feel like they’re doing their job rather than being a flaw in the lock-on system. The superb music is the part that comes out the best unequivocally, the undersea levels having a beautiful theme, the Windy Hill Zone track being full of adventurous energy, and even the Deadly Six’s horn-heavy boss theme has a fun energy that matches the rather goofy antagonist group. A little robot called Omochao gives you optional tasks to shoot for in levels where you can earn any-time use items like shields or even surprisingly brief invincibility, and then the Red Rings help unlock bonus levels where you use touch screen seesaws or cannons to rescue extra animals quickly if you do come up short to the next stage unlock. It ends up being the kind of game where it can be easy to point at its moments of excellence or smart ideas, it even cordoning off some of its neatest ideas to a post-game “hidden world”, but there are too many normal levels where things rub you the wrong way for the more exciting levels to truly leave their mark.

THE VERDICT: Sonic Lost World is shackled by its awkward attempts to include Sonic series mainstays. When it takes off in a new direction with some unique danger or level theme it can craft some memorable levels with great music and interesting visuals, but when it pulls Sonic back towards speedy platforming it can feel like it’s literally prone to stumbling. In 2D he tries to run up walls when you don’t want him too and then he isn’t responsive enough in 3D, and the homing attack’s inconsistencies can drag out moments that would have been fine otherwise. Sonic Lost World will keep you on board as it doles out occasional bursts of inventiveness but then drag you back down to Earth with an aimless run through an unassuming stage, this hodgepodge thankfully still playable enough to see its best sights but it doesn’t spend enough time on them to really hook the player.

 

And so, I give Sonic Lost World for Wii U…

An OKAY rating. Sonic Lost World’s tube shaped stages and planetoids where you can run across their entire surface take clear inspiration from Super Mario Galaxy, and that might be why the game sometimes feels at odds with its Sonic identity. Those sections often include sections where you need to figure things out or engage a bit more with the environment, and it is entertaining to have those special challenges that ask you to be more than just reactive in how you explore a world. There are plenty of levels that can wow with their visual splendor or unique set pieces, but then you get to another level and there’s not much to the concept on show or its one that doesn’t gel well with the movement issues. The automatic running levels and somewhat related rail grinding segments do sometimes produce interesting stages, but it might have been better to actually limit Sonic’s speed elsewhere and focus in on more precise platforming. There are technically moments that do involve precision now but sometimes they’re ones that involve bad ideas like the slow bouncing across clouds mostly, but if the game felt it could afford to slow down there are many levels that would be improved as their intended challenges could have more time to thrive. The annoyances like targeting troubles are actually fairly easy to stomach thanks to the stages that really shine at least, and it’s possible that just a general smoothing of the controls could bump this up a rating, but it does feel like a shame that the design team really wanted to go outside their wheelhouse at times but then had to rein it back in because the blue hedgehog headlining the series has the weight of expectation on him.

 

The Sonic series having an identity crisis when it comes to its 3D platformers isn’t anything new, but a clear attempt was made to do things outside of the box here and that should have been leaned into more. Doing things in half-measures lead to a game that doesn’t hang together as well as it should, attempts to cling to the old ideas hampering the kind of movement that the stage designs seem built for. Perhaps one of Sonic’s friends could have taken top billing since this game was developed by Sonic Team after all and they might not want to invest time into a new intellectual property, but a lot of potential was lost when the creative stages were made to share space with less realized concepts, leading to a game with some memorable highs but a good deal of stages that barely leave an impression.