Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal (Nintendo 3DS) Second Opinion Review

The Sonic Boom franchise offers new designs for the main characters, something that has divided fans. The new looks are fresh without taking things too far, except in the case of Knuckles, who looks like he's been hitting the gym along with a couple tons of steroids. Sticks, a new character to the series, is also a welcome addition to the multi-animal cast.

Unfortunately, the graphics are one of the only things the development team got right. Gameplay is wrong from the gate - Sonic and friends are slow. Very slow. There are videogame turtles speedier than this. Sonic has the ability to curl into a ball and make a tiny dash forward, as in past games, but the power seems useless in Shattered Crystal. Should players happen to get Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, or Sticks moving at anything remotely close to the series' namesake adjective, it will be short-lived; the game world is designed to stop progress dead in its tracks, either by enemies with laser shields that have to be torn away, platforming sections that are impossible to navigate at high speed, or one of many character-exclusive areas that require the player to come to a halt and change characters. There are a few moments of high-speed antics, and these are fun and work wonderfully when they appear, but they are extremely rare.

Each character has their own powers, like in past games, but in Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal the traits make no sense. Tails can't fly, Knuckles can't glide, and Sonic has the most upward mobility of all of them, thanks to being able to double-jump, perform an upward strike, and then jump again. Tails can only fly with the help of propellers, although he can glide the way Knuckles is supposed to. Knuckles instead burrows into the ground, which makes sense at least. Sticks can throw a player-controlled boomerang, something that would have made more sense for Tails, considering his use of sticky bombs and player-controlled remote submarines.

These powers are used to explore levels. Exploration is the main point of this game, which doesn't work well with the Sonic formula. Changing characters on the fly is easy, so to balance that out, Sanzaru Games has added several areas that act as automatic scripted events, featuring characters finally moving at breakneck speed while going through loops and along rails. These moments are neat and work well in 3D, but they often serve as points-of-no-return, and if players missed anything in the level before stepping into one, they usually don't get a chance to go back without restarting the stage.

Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal features shoddy-but-still-playable gameplay, but its story is unforgivable. Dialogue is horrendous, with everyone apparently losing their train of thought in mid-sentence and questioning their own reasoning almost as soon as it leaves their lips. These moments are supposed to be humorous, but it's hard to imagine who would find any of this funny. It is one thing to assume the audience is little kids, and another thing entirely to assume they can't form anything resembling a coherent thought. Sticks, for example, is supposed to have a few screws loose due to living alone in the wild for so long, but this characteristic is completely lost in-game because everyone comes across as though they received some heavy brain trauma immediately prior to the game's opening sequence. The voices are charming when they appear, but the all-text dialogue is awful. As for the story, it's a run-of-the-mill "find the character who got kidnapped by the bad guy and also collect shards of an ancient crystal" trope.

Where the game fails to achieve a sense of humour, it also fails to be at all cool. Gone are the days of Sonic tapping his foot and checking his watch if he's left alone for too long on-screen; now Sonic and friends use "tablets" that look like something out of the Leap Frog collection, sticky bombs, boomerangs, and other mundane things that are only cool according to the insistence of them being used. One feature that does work well is the "Enerbeam," a whip-like laser system used for flinging characters around or riding rails. Again, one of the few things the game gets right is heavily underused; the Enerbeam's primary function is transitioning between maps via the Touch Screen. One area of success comes from "worm tunnels," during which the camera shifts to behind the lead as they travel along a track, avoiding obstacles and collecting rings. The camera is over one shoulder, which sometimes obstructs the view, but, otherwise, these moments are some of the best in the game and come close to a true Sonic the Hedgehog experience.