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| I had the chance of choosing to go back, but I screwed that up. |
Dear Internet,
Time
for "Sonic and the Secret Rings" part two. Since I already covered the controls and how
they are as responsive as a potato, I guess I can talk about some of the other
aspects. How about the skill ring thing? At the beginning of the game, Sonic receives
a ring from Sharha. It is used to
allocate points into a variety of skills
that the player unlocks as they progress through the game. These skills are unlocked mostly by leveling
up, which occurs when the player is awarded experience points depending on the
score obtained after every level. Get
enough experience points and you level up.
The higher level you are, the more skill points that you can allocate. The game lets the player configure up to four
different combinations, but I never used more than one. Eventually if I got enough skill points, I
would use them on the skills I got. This
is a rather interesting mechanic that I really want to praise if it were not
for the fact that it all felt rather useless.
By the time I ended playing, I had never got to the point where I was
organizing the skills to maximize my ability to fit the situation. I never rearranged my allocated skills to fit
a race mission, an enemy fighting mission, or anything else. There was no need to do this because the
skills that the game threw at me were either essential to equip to try and get
through the mashed up experience or were so non-essential that I could easily
do without. I can think of a game like
"Trine 2' that also had skill points that could be reassigned at will,
even on the fly while playing. If you
did not have many skill points, you could dump them all into exploratory skills
when facing a puzzle or all into fighting skills when fighting enemies. "Secret Rings" never gets to this
point where one has to think critically of Sonic's abilities. You can just keep treating all your problems
like nails as you hammer through it.
The
menu is not something bad, but I feel like I have to mention it since it plays
so big a role in the game. Instead of
navigating an overworld like in "Sonic Adventure," Secret Rings"
unapologetically organizes all the missions into the perspective chapter. You select the level, then the mission, your
skills, and are asked if you are ready.
This is all well and good. There
is nothing wrong with this, short of the fact that the game will unlock
missions and not tell you sometimes which one will progress the story, but that
is done to encourage the player to play out the various missions in the same
hide-and-seek way that the characters are looking for the plot items. The one bad thing is the theme song. Every time that the player is thrown back to
the main menu, the same grating theme song plays. I am not even sure if the game has more than
one song at this point. It is an earworm
of a rock song with lyrics that might as well be nonsense words. I still do not know what the singer was
saying beyond "SEVEN RINGS IN HAND!"
Menu music should not get me more pumped up than the game does, but that
is probably more because of how little the game gets me excited than the upbeat
nature of the song. All it ended up
doing was making me speed through the menu system in hopes of listing to
anything else besides that one song.
The
story is not bad, nor is it going to win any honors any time soon. It is a simple Saturday morning cartoon
plot. It should not be anything more
considering that whenever Sonic tries to delve into the emotional spectrum it
hits angst and edge first and foremost.
Take Sonic's final form in this game for instance. While the game does take a large chunk out of
the "Arabian Nights" for the use of the aesthetics, do not expect any
sort of adaptation of the book and stories here. The game makes its own story to the point
that it is a wonder as to why they even bothered to use the fantastical Middle
East setting. It feels shoehorned in at
times. Some "Sonic" regular
cast members fill the roles of Sinbad, Ali Baba, and King Shahryar--who is referred
to as the main character of the "Arabian Nights," which is erroneous considering
the work rests heavily upon Scheherazade and her attempt to stop Shahryar's
daily killing of his wives at the risk of her own life. Then again, I guess you cannot put that in a
kid's game without raising a number of questions. However, what in the world made the developer
think that there should be a dinosaur level in the game is beyond me. It just shows that the game uses leftover
ideas from early development that were too far developed to scrap when they
finally got around to making a plot for the game.
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| A quick search of "Arabian Nights dinosaurs" leads to ONLY this game. |
Beyond those
gripes are a few other things that I found annoying. The game requires fine tuned movement that
the controls do not lend easily towards.
A stick based movement that does not make Sonic run by default would
have been much better. The game makes
use of collecting pearls to power up a special move bar. You can either speed things up or slow them
down using a filled bar. For the first
two levels, you do not have the special bar, but the pearls are everywhere. What happens is a questioning period where
the game has pearls thrown about the level but has not told you why they are
there to begin with. Numerous times in
the game, it boiled down into a game of memorization because of how quickly the
game threw obstacles at the player. This
is partially because of the unresponsive controls but also because the game's
camera is ridiculously close to Sonic rather than being pulled out to showcase
the world. I do not remember the
"Sonic Adventure" games having poor cameras, but that might have to
do with being able to actually control the camera in those cases.
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| On the plus side, the game does offer hints if you die too many times at a certain section. |
"Sonic
and the Secret Rings" is not a good game.
It was not fun. It bored me and
frustrated me to no nearly no ends. I
would have quit playing it yesterday but gave it a little more of a try because
of the Backlog. I sort of wish I did not
considering that it did not get any better.
Even after somewhat getting used to the controls, I still cannot recommend
this game except to those who want to punish themselves. It is a hair-pulling fiasco that only goes to
prove how not to make a game around motion controls. Maybe if the game had better controls I could
have like it, but that is like saying if I could see over a brick fence I would
enjoy the scenery. You do not know that
until it actually happens, and you could be staring point blank at a landfill.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Tomorrow is the "Battle Royale" film.
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