After writing my top ten Wii U backlog list last week i decided to play one of those games, after all the large open world games i had recently played i decided on the seemingly forgotten exclusive Sonic game Sonic Lost World and as it turns out... i can see why no one talks about it.
First of all i must say that the presentation is fantastic. Lost world is a bright and colourful game that oozes the cheesy charm that Sonic used to have. It Runs perfectly well on Wii U too and the music is great which is standard for the series. A few of the worlds are beautifully designed too, Windy Hill Zone, Tropical coast and Frozen factory in particular are so great to look at and provide some of the more fun high speed platforming action. It also contains a few really interesting pieces of Free DLC in the form of a Yoshi's Island world and a Legend of Zelda world. These worlds are super cool and are arguably the best parts of the game!
Now for the bad..... the game just doesn't feel right. It's hard to explain but it feels like 3 different games mashed together and it just doesn't work. Firstly the controls are strange. Sonic now runs while you hold the ZR button which feels unnatural, Sonic just doesn't pick up momentum in a way you would expect, this caused me to fly off the edge of platforms or be unable to change direction as quickly as the level required.
The second part of the control woes is the parkour. look, it felt like every game tried to do this at the time and it does LOOK cool but it just doesn't translate to fun. The amount of times i had Sonic running half way up a wall by accident, failing to jump or again flinging himself off an edge was insane. Couple this with a completely random level design structure (some levels are like Mario galaxy, some pull the camera way back almost like its open world and others are super close behind Sonic in a cylinder) and its a recipe for frustration.
The final and crucially worst part of the game is the damned wisps. Oh my god these things barely work. They almost all required some form of motion control with the gamepad and again do not work as intended and feel shoehorned into the game.
Overall this is sonic Lost World's biggest problem, it just doesn't know what game it wants to be. If they had gone all in on the parkour, fixed the wall run and not used the Wisps i feel like this game could be something special. It looks great, Sounds great and even the new characters are fun... but its just not fun to play.
Its better than Sonic Boom though.... so there's that.
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