New Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice footage looks really boring

The only place you’ll be going fast is to sleep

At E3, Laura Kate Dale played a few levels of Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice and said she felt like she’d already seen all it has to offer and wasn’t impressed. Reading that and other negative articles about the game, I thought surely it must be better than the last games; surely Sega would try to improve. Boy was I wrong. While this bajillion-and-first entry in the Sonic franchise may not be as broken as Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric or Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), it may very well be far more boring.

Seven videos from NintenDaan show off a cutscene that seems to be taking cues from the successful TV show, a boss fight, behind-the-back gameplay, side-scrolling gameplay with Tails, and several mini-games including a submarine, a hovercraft, and a robot race. And they all look boring.

Besides the boss fight itself, there is an alarming lack of enemies: there’s a few in the Tails side-scrolling segment but zero in the rest. Not to mention it moves very slowly for a game that is about going fast (even when you set the video speed to 2x, it feels slower than it should). There is no banter from the characters like in Rise of Lyric, which along with a generic soundtrack makes the game feel lifeless. Aside from the boss fight, the bottom screen appears to be a complete afterthought.

In an earlier interview, Sega that it is targeting not the core Sonic fan-base, but rather the younger audience who are watching the TV show, buying the toys, and reading the comics (“ages 6-11”). The writing in the cutscene along with the seeming ease of the game sure do seem to support that idea.

[YouTube videos by NintenDaan]