SAGE 2017: Review Slew #1

Greetings, folks! It’s SAGE once again and this year reviews are going to be a little bit different — given that SAGE is falling very close to NYCC, I’ll be handling review duties by myself this year! Because of that, I’d LIKE to keep reviews a little shorter and to the point, given I’m staring down the barrel of 40+ games, but if you’ve been reading TSSZ long enough you’ll know I tend to be a little long winded so that promise will probably get thrown out the window almost immediately! But enough talk; have at you:
Allegro the Melodic Warrior
I find myself a little conflicted about Allegro — this is a very creative game, with wonderful music and strong art direction that is just a little rough around the edges in a couple of very important places. Maybe it’s just backseat game design on my part, but I feel like certain things don’t make enough sense. Teleporters are marked by simple green squares on the floor, there’s a play/pause/stop function on the HUD that only seems to be there for style, and just lots of little things aren’t communicated to the player. I didn’t even know I could hop on an enemy’s head to damage them, even though I went through the game’s tutorial. Allegro evokes games like Freedom Planet, Tempo, and Ristar, but it stumbles on a couple of fundamentals. Hopefully they get ironed out (and the game also gets proper controller support).
 
Crash N.Tense Adventure
2017 is the year of being surprised by Crash Bandicoot, apparently. I’d never heard of this game, but wow, color me impressed. The environment art here is a little flat but everything else about this is bursting with personality. Crash and all his enemies are wonderfully animated and I laughed out loud when I did a belly flop. It also controls surprisingly well — at least as good as the official Crash Bandicoot games, if not actually better. This is awesome, and it’s going straight to my “games I hope get finished” list. Make sure you give it a shot.
 
Sonic Crisis Twilight Revelation
It’s always a little weird when I run across what I would define as “a fan game of a fan game.” Here, we have a game that is actually extremely blatant about how much it loves Nefault1st’s “Sonic vs. Darkness.” You have some of the exact same musical choices, some of the same graphical choices, and like “vs. Darkness”, it’s a boost-focused Sonic Rush-style game with Sonic Advance sprites. Unfortunately, Twilight Revelation is pretty clumsy about its execution — to give you an example, despite being a purely 2D game, it asked if I wanted to enable FXAA when I started it up; FXAA is an anti-aliasing technique largely reserved for 3D applications, not 2D. Nefault should be very flattered, but I’d probably steer clear of this in its current form.
 
Sonic NG
This is a pretty standard fan game with not much to really say about it. It’s a classic 2D Sonic game with slightly updated sprites to look closer to Modern Sonic. To talk to its creator directly: a piece of advice I’d give you is that your level is a little aimless. There’s a very core design tendency in games at the center of everything called “Risk vs. Reward” that states the greater the risk in getting somewhere, the greater the reward. This is one of the ways a level designer challenges a player. Your level could use a lot more of that, because I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere or accomplishing anything in its current version. I just sort of get lead down the one hallway, bopping the one enemy, and then the stage ends. Put in landmarks, put in secret areas, put in more enemies and find interesting ways to make the player deal with them. Make your level into a complete song, instead of just playing one note.
 
Sonic Adventure Reloaded
I guess I can’t fault this game for good intentions, but I knew upon starting it up that SonicGDK would take a lot of work to feel like Sonic Adventure. What I was greeted with was the most basic implementation of Emerald Coast imaginable; next to no detail, with stock SonicGDK assets for items and enemies. Warp rings skip you past things that aren’t implemented yet — including level transitions, the whale chase sequence, and the jump pads at the end of the stage. Then, upon finishing this cold, overcast version of Emerald Coast, Unreal Engine hard locked. Keep at it and maybe it’ll be worthwhile some day, but in its current state it needs all the work. I hate saying this about any game at SAGE, but you should probably avoid this one (for now).
 
Unlimited Tree’s Sonic 1
This is one of those Sonic fan games that makes me feel really nostalgic for the types of games my friends and I made back in the early 2000’s. Color usage is great, and the high contrast style gives the game a look of its own. Unfortunately, this is one of those games that doesn’t have controller support and needs it desperately — but I’m not sure how that would even work. At some point, the game asks you to split your attention between controlling Sonic and controlling the world around Sonic using two separate inputs. Not exactly controller friendly. Nor player friendly, as in the above screenshot, I ended up trapping myself with no way to get out. No wonder the game includes a “self destruct” button. It’s weird, but interesting.
 
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG
Modders seem to have a powerful will to “fix” broken games. All one has to do is look at games like Obsidian’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 or any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games to know that. If it’s broken, somebody out there somewhere will probably try to fix it. And so here we are: a painstaking Sonic 06 remake created in Unity. Porting and adapting official assets, it looks like the real deal — but more important here is what it’s changed. The Kingdom Valley demo from earlier this year showcased a game that was nearly identical to the real Sonic 06, warts and all, which incited bewilderment more than anything. Dusty Desert here changes things up a little more, giving Sonic heavier acceleration (minus) and better physics (plus), in addition to rewarding the player better for exploring the world, and, of course, taking steps to make that cursed sand a little more logical to navigate. It definitely paints a better picture of what this project is trying to achieve, but their accuracy comes at the cost of performance: despite emulating the look and feel of an 11 year old game Xbox 360 game, the framerate wasn’t entirely stable on my system, which has no problem handling modern releases like Metal Gear Solid 5, Resident Evil 7 and Doom 2016 at 60fps. That’s probably more on Unity than anything else. Still, give it a look.
 
See you tomorrow!