The Sonic Generations Review Topic

[Eternal EX]

Oh nice! Seems like it's keeping it's 80% average score. And even Jim gave it a rating instead of raping it. I'm surprised by what I'm seeing. Either humans are getting smarter or SEGA/SONIC TEAM did something great.

[Neon]

4Players.de Review

http://www.4players....enerations.html

360 - 83%

PS3 - 82%

Edited October 31, 2011 by Neon

[Indigo Rush]

Well then.

This game MUST be called:

SONIC GENER8IONS.

[HUNTER297]

4Players.de Review

http://www.4players....enerations.html

360 - 83%

PS3 - 82%

Dont know whats the difference beetwen those versions. I played both and while X360 ver. looks better (RAM probably) PS3 ver. got alot better Blur effect (CPU probably).

[Winston]

Well then.

This game MUST be called:

SONIC GENER8IONS.

O_O Oh God, it buuuuuuuurns!!!!!!

Also, Game Reactor must only like FPS's.

Edited October 31, 2011 by Metal-Hedgehog

[FinCooper]

Of course, the Gamereactor from Finland is the last of GR:s to get their review up When it does show up, i can do a quick translation.

[Crazizzle]

Hah, nice to see the 4/10 score is not part of Metacritic.

We could use a 9 to bump things up...Come on....!

No seriously, I still wish metacritic used some kind of weighted average. Or at least threw out one or two outliers on either side. One review should never unduly affect a game's perception. And unfortunately, people use those garbage aggregate rating sites.

Crazy eights!, btw.

Edited October 31, 2011 by Crazizzle

[Blue Blood]

Hah, nice to see the 4/10 score is not part of Metacritic.

We could use a 9 to bump things up...Come on....!

No seriously, I still wish metacritic used some kind of weighted average. Or at least threw out one or two outliers on either side. One review should never unduly affect a game's perception. And unfortunately, people use those garbage aggregate rating sites.

Crazy eights!, btw.

Edited October 31, 2011 by Blue Blood

[Voyant]

*pops in*

Wait sooo...no shit storm?

weird....

****

Also the game really needs some 9s somewhere to change the tides to its favor...hope it does. Considering this is a platformer on a HD consoles it doing pretty damn well though.

Edited October 31, 2011 by V0YANT

[turbojet]

You know what I'd like to see reviewers do? Try and name as many retail platformers as they can on the PS3/360 that are as good as Sonic Generations. You know, give readers the impression of how Sonic Generations is compared to other retail platformers on the HD consoles. It would really give readers an insight as to where Sonic Generations places with others of the same genre on the same consoles. Slight problem there. If they did that then critics would have to concede that Sonic Generations is far and away the best platformer available at retail on the PS3/360 to date. Oh well.

Edited October 31, 2011 by turbojet

[Barry the Nomad]

Was this shared yet?

GamesRadar gives it an 8/10:

http://www.gamesradar.com/sonic-generations/?page=1

[Balding Spider]

His Sonic Colors review seemed like the only one not written by someone from bizzaro world. And by the way, his Generations review is up.

Edited October 31, 2011 by Balding Spider

[Neon]

I'm pretty surprised that Jim gave Sonic Generations a higher score than Battlefield 3.

[CanofEpicSauce]

Just wonder what GT's gonna give it

[Sonic the Hedgehog in 3D]

The Metacritic for the Xbox 360 version has begun and it currently has 81

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/sonic-generations

Metro GameCentral gave it a 70

[Ferr]

Vandal Online, another spanish site, gave it an 8,5

http://www.vandal.net/analisis/ps3/sonic-generations/14249

[Blue Blood]

Wonderful. That 4/10 is still holding the complete average at just under 80% though. It's at 79.8% including it, or 81.5% without it.

[Voyant]

Good thing that 4/10 doesn't count on meta or gamerankings. Oh if only Sonic can get back his full charm like Mario games.

If he did people wouldn't hold back on 9ing it as much.

Edited October 31, 2011 by V0YANT

[NiGHTS]

Oh nice! Seems like it's keeping it's 80% average score. And even Jim gave it a rating instead of raping it. I'm surprised by what I'm seeing. Either humans are getting smarter or SEGA/SONIC TEAM did something great.

[Carbo]

I'll get onto putting the reviews in the opening post. Meanwhile, here's a translation of Gamereactor Sweden's 7/10 review.

20 years in the world of gaming. There's a lot to say. A lot of stories to tell. Sega and Sonic Team seem to be satisfied with half of that however. Viktor has written a review of Sonic Generations.

Sonic is a remnant of the 90's. A gaming hero who was perfectly niche'd for the past market's taste of games and style. During the 21st century he became something of a bad joke. A game hero who time after time tries to find some kind of existential justification in a 3D world that no longer needs him. The fans follow him and cheer him on, even when taking into account the doubts and embarrassing sidesteps. If Sega wanted to do a perfect tribute to the series they should have divided it for the fans. Sonic Generations isn't really that kind of tribute. Instead it's about nostalgia and a development team who, after countless "if"'s and "but"'s, finally seem to have gotten control over their own messy engine.

It's Sonic the Hedgehog's birthday. All of his friends have gathered to celebrate this occasion with cake and chili dogs when suddenly a dark entity interrupts the festivities by ripping apart the time and space continuum itself. Sonic and his friends get spread out across the multiverse like flakes in a snowstorm. All of this leads to Sonic meeting his younger self, the classic Sonic the Hedgehog from the Genesis age. Together they take off on a trip through 20 years of Sonic history in an attempt to restore order in the cosmos and save Sonic's friends from the mystic dark threat.

At first I actually had a lot of expectations on Sonic Generations' story. Not because I'm dumb, but because it's written by Ken Pontac and Warren Graff who in the past impressed a lot with the script for Sonic Colors and in other cases are most known for the violent web-comedy series Happy Tree Friends. Sadly it doesn't seem like Sonic Team gave them more than an A4-page to work with, which results in the story being both thin and detached. They've managed to squeeze in some really nice references to the series but don't count on a mammoth-sized work in the style of Epic Mickey.

Even though Sega tried to sell Sonic Generations as a comprehensive work of the Hedgehog's career the game is hardly a noble monument of the history of one of gaming's greatest icons. Sonic Generations rather seems to satisfy itself by putting the bar at being a greatest hits-album bought at Statoil. But! And this is an important "but". Sonic Generations is, all that said, a good Sonic-game. It's definitely not fantastic. Far from it. It's filled with issues and bad design, but it's still a good Sonic-game and nothing can change that.

After Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) was released and proved itself to be the worst Sonic-game and the platforming equivalent of Daikatana, Sonic Team chose to completely renovate their series. They seemed to have thought that the issue wasn't mostly in the fact that Sonic the Hedgehog was in every sense of the word an unfinished, uninspired, detestable game, but that the Sonic fans were split into two camps that would never be combined. Those who preferred Sonic from the Genesis-days and those who mostly appreciate the new, more modern Sonic. Whether this is true or clear projecting from Sonic Team's side is debatable. Personally I really think that fans mostly just wanted to see a good Sonic game. If it was in 2D or 3D didn't really matter.

Regardless, Sonic Team chose to develop what they called "The Hedgehog Engine" which would merge 2D and 3D game play in the Sonic series and combine the "uncombinable" parts of the Sonic fans. Sonic Generations is the third game that uses the Hedgehog Engine (*misinformed statement here) and two things can be noted from the game.

First things first it's that Sonic Team has finally started to get control over their own engine. They're not fumbling in the dark like in Sonic Unleashed and have a good observation over both it's pros, as well as it's cons. The level design is varied, creative and it dips into nostalgia filling levels such as Chemical Plant Zone in new, relevant iterations. The cheap deaths as well as the trial-and-error elements have been mostly worked out for a more path-based level design that certainly rewards good and skilled players but doesn't let anyone fall down to their death. The challenge lies instead in finding the fastest path to the goal which of course doesn't get more than right from a Sonic perspective.

Second is that in Sonic Generations it's clearer than ever that the Hedgehog Engine is a dead end that Sonic Team should have stopped peering down into a long, long time ago. Because the engine seems to only be held together by layers of electrical tape in the form of eye candy such as loops, visual fireworks and almost completely automated game play. I'll try to be as clear as I can be here. The Hedgehog Engine is some sort of tunnel vision from Sonic Team's end where the most important thing in the development is to get Sonic's speed to work both in a 2D and 3D perspective, not to build an interesting and functioning game mechanic that you can later build levels and the rest of the world around, which is far clearer with series like Mario where there's clear rules for what works and doesn't work in the games' framework. In Sonic Generations there is no game play centered continuity. One rule within the playability can suddenly vanish and return under different parts of a level.

Which would probably work if it wasn't for the fact that the transitions of these were so incredibly badly performed. Instead Sonic Team tries to hide this by filling the screen with a ton of visual peculiarities in the form of explosions, robots and killer whales to make the player distracted towards the game's shortcomings, which in itself isn't so abnormal, we can see this stuff in series like Uncharted. The difference is that a game like Uncharted would get us to ignore the scripted parts of certain moments where-as they're always painfully obvious in Hedgehog Engine and Sonic Generations.

As an example, in the Classic Sonic games there exists something known as pinball physics, which implies the feeling of what Sonic physics employed when he was moving or jumping. This code was what set the rules for playing then. In Sonic Generations these pinball physics have returned, after a weird absence in the traitorous Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1, and so far everything's good. The problem is that it turns on and off a little on it's own to admire the spectacular automatic game play in Sonic Generations, which leads to things feeling inconsistent and that you don't always get a clear picture over what rules that apply to the game. One moment you'll use the physics to build up momentum for a ramp. At other times the ramp is automated which turns off the physics and makes Sonic run on his own. This might seem like a small complaint when you read about it, but it really shines true throughout the entire experience with Sonic Generations like a niggling scratch on an LP.

With that said Sonic Generations is still the most complete use of the engine and it's fun to play from start to finish. The mechanics are broken but its so fun that you're willing to forgive a lot of it's flaws. For the most of the part, anyway.

It's clear that Sonic Team seem to have a lot of new found confidence after last year's unexpectful success with the Wii-game Sonic Colors. Sonic Generations is really not as good as that game, but it sees itself to keep it as close as it can. The switches between the two Sonics create variation and make the game play feel fresh even if it's clear that Sonic Team doesn't always know what to do with the old Sonic. He gets a lot less exposure than modern Sonic and stands constantly in the background both in terms of history and game play. Sonic Team have created some mighty fine levels for him which hold an unexpected amount of high quality and is only really held back by the iffy engine.

Modern Sonic is where the game truly shines and good thing too since Sonic Team has been working with his formula for so long now. It's not perfect by any stretch of the word. It's buggy and automated far too often but even then every level has its own fascinating moment that will leave your jaw wide open. Whether it's an awesomely composed nostalgic kick or a classic level that gives an unexpected twist. The bosses are also neat even though they're ridiculously sparse and it's only possible to play them with one of the two Hedgehogs.

That's the real problem with Sonic Generations. It goes back and forth between being incredibly generous or a very greedy game. That every level is presented with a ton of varied challenges, hard modes and other fun is incredibly generous and extends the replayability by a massive amount. At the same time there's only a handful of levels in the entire game and all of these really only consist of old storage food that has been polished, tweaked and tidied up some. It's also hard to hold back the rage when Sonic's first and most iconic decade only covers barely a third of the game while the rest of that is spent on Sonic Team repairing old levels from Sonic's 3D outings. It feels like a strange priority that shows that the new Sonic Team (Sonic Adventure and onward) doesn't really seem to accept that people mostly appreciate the older games.

Audiovisually, Sonic Generations switches between ugly and beautiful. Ugly when the framerate has frequent dips during levels like Speed Highway. Beautiful when you run through the game's lobby and the music switches between modern remixes for the modern Sonic and pixel-influenced versions for classic Sonic. In general there's more rights than wrongs. The sense of speed is powerful with graphics that are nicely blurred and music that's dampened by the air friction. Sadly it often occurs that Sonic blends into the colorful backgrounds which causes a lot of confusion.

My entire experience with Sonic Generations is like a pendulum swinging back and forth like this review for every hour I've spent with the game. When I'm in Generations' memorabilia room I get to hear a godly beautiful violin arrangement of Door Into Summer from half-forgotten Sega 32-X game Knuckles Chaotix that I'm close to shedding a tear in front of the TV. In other cases I want to spit on the game for having marginalized so many parts of Sonic's career in order to quickly produce a game based on old assets.

The result is that Sonic Generations is somewhat of a half-hearted celebration over the 20-years of his career. But maybe this is exactly the kind of celebration that Sonic deserves. Equal parts good and bad. Ten good years and ten terrible. The point is that you have fun with the game, and I've had plenty of that. From beginning to end. But I still hope that this is the last we see of Hedgehog Engine and that Sonic Team are brave enough to make Sonic Generations to somewhat of a book-end to the series so far, so that maybe in the future they can flip the page and write a completely new story for the world's fastest hedgehog.

7/10

Graphics: 7/10

Playability: 7/10

Sound: 9/10

Lasting Appeal: 7/10

[KrazyBean]

I'll get onto putting the reviews in the opening post. Meanwhile, here's a translation of Gamereactor Sweden's 7/10 review.

But I still hope that this is the last we see of Hedgehog Engine and that Sonic Team are brave enough to make Sonic Generations to somewhat of a book-end to the series so far, so that maybe in the future they can flip the page and write a completely new story for the world's fastest hedgehog.

OH MY GOD! THE HEDGEHOG ENGINE IS A GRAPHICS ENGINE NOT A GAMEPLAY STYLE MEANING THAT THEY CAN USE IT FOR ANY SONIC GAME IN THE FUTURE, WHY SHOULD THEY SCRAP IT WHILST THEY'VE ONLY USED IT TWICE?!

If I spent 3 and a half years making a graphics engine, I sure as hell wouldn't scrap it when I use it only twice.

Edited October 31, 2011 by KrazyBean14

[krazeeKidd102]

I'm terribly sorry, but that review from Gamereactor Norway was just a piss-poor, obviously biased, short, poorly slapped on "review". I'm normally not against reviews (besides Sterling's Colors review), but this sounds like someone simply looked at the game premise and wrote a review simply from that. Oh, and by the way:

As mentioned, there is nothing wrong with 2D pieces of the game, on the contrary, other than that we could get the same enjoyment from Sonic 4 on Xbox Live Arcade to significantly fewer gold coins.

Jesus Christ, did this guy even play that lazily-done abomination?! Did he even bother to play Classic Sonic in this game? Who knows, who the fuck cares? You can slap Sonic in an infinite loop and it would probably still be perfect for this guy if it was on a 2D plane.

I don't mind a negative review; I can get over it, but if someone's going to give a negative review on this game, can it AT LEAST be someone who can clearly show that he or she knows what they're talking about? God damn...

[Ruby Havoc]

Gameinformers review is up: 6.75

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/sonic_generations/b/xbox360/archive/2011/10/31/sonic-generations-review-a-suffering-hedgehog-s-life-flashes-before-his-eyes.aspx

[PSI Wind]

Another 7/10 for graphics? Ok, seriously

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWkEzF93iAA

View this in Original quality and TELL me this deserves a 7 in Graphics

Edited October 31, 2011 by PSI Wind

[KrazyBean]

LOL, reviewers don't even remember the classics anymore. Classic Sonic in Generations blows and nukes Sonic 4 out of the water.

Edited October 31, 2011 by KrazyBean14