Ahoy there mateys! It’s me again, your one and only App Pirate, bringing you the latest booty in gaming from my search down Davey Jone’s locker. And boy did I go deep down Davey Jone’s locker this time! I remember the days when I was a young lad, and I thoroughly enjoyed the swashbucklin’ adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. I played it on my Nintendo Family Computer, and I even had a Sega console for Sonic the Hedgehog. Surely you can relate?
Now, our days of reminiscing are over, thanks to the recreation of Sonic CD! Faithful to the Sonic we all know and love, you’re faced with Sonic who runs, spins, and jumps through colorfully themed levels, and of course, let’s not forget smashing your enemies.
The Objective
In this game, Sonic travels to Never Lake, for the yearly appearance of Little Planet. The Little Planet is a place where past, present, and future (good and bad), collide, thanks to the powerful Time Stones hidden deep within the planet.
Sonic’s arch enemy Dr. Eggman, is at it again. He wants the powerful Time Stones for himself in order to control the future. Needless to say, the objective of the game is stop Dr. Eggman by destroying his machines from the past and recovering the missing Time Stones to prevent him from taking over the future.
The Game Play
Faithful to the Sonic we’ve all grown-up to love, Sonic’s movements still involve running, spinning, jumping around, and smashing your enemies. The graphics and soundtrack are also very much faithful to the original game -colorfully themed levels, environmental elements that can be interacted with, and cluttered backgrounds and landscapes to give it that retro-feel that fans will definitely be looking for.
The highlight of the game would be its time traveling feature, which greatly expands your game play. Each time travel leads you to a different environment, and each environment has its own stage design, graphics, music, and environmental elements. You achieve time travel by touching lamp posts with signs that say past or future. To fully succeed in time traveling, you have to be at a consistently high speed while touching the lamp posts. This is part of the game’s challenge.
While some places are well-suited for time travel, others will require knowing the right speed that will permit you to do so. As the main highlight of the game is time traveling, the challenge includes considering the repercussions of time travel.
For instance, when you go into the future, some enemies you encountered in the past may be rendered useless from years of aging. However, because the future is also highly advanced, some of Dr. Eggman’s machines may be more difficult to destroy. One way of destroying his machines easily would be going back all the way to the past, so that the machines are still easier to destroy.
The future also has two options – good and bad. The good future would be the easier route to take with less obstacles and no enemies to deal with. But if you’re up to the extra challenge, it would be great to explore the bad future as well.
The Verdict
What I like about this game is despite it being faithful to the Sonic we all know and love, I can definitely say that the game is non-linear, though it appears to be. The idea of time traveling poses more of a challenge, which means there are more things to look forward to in the game. If I may say so myself, Sonic CD has successfully time traveled as well, by bringing in good elements from the past (graphics and soundtrack), into the future (or should I say present).
Perhaps the only disadvantage is the game is quite pricey $4.99, but if you’re a true blue Sonic fan, then I believe it’s worth the purchase.
1 Comment
I will clean up & vacuum my family room on Friday!