It's taken years of gruesome experimentation but Sonic Team's designers have finally pulled it off. They've created the Ur-Sidekick, the Sidekick of Sidekicks, a total embodiment of a wayward franchise that can be invested with the traits of every other noxious bit-part this universe has produced. The task at hand may be to run down Dr Eggman's latest henchman, Infinite, a preening, masked spectre who can mess with dimensions and resurrect old nemeses to fight you, but if you really want to stare into the abyss of time, to witness reality cracking and splintering under the eternal return of the same, look no further than the hyper-accessorised, player-crafted abomination at your side.
Shadow's scalp! Amy's boots! Silver's gloves! A T-shirt with Knuckles on it! Those goggles whatshisname wears! Every completed stage or mission brings with it an avalanche of on-brand tees, caps, suits, boots and full-body paintjobs, such that the story becomes less about thwarting Eggman than feeding up Sonic's latest accomplice, shovelling the viscera of both Sonic also-rans and forgotten properties like Super Monkey Ball into its furnace maw. You keep waiting for somebody - poor abused Classic Sonic, who would surely be screaming inconsolably if he were able to speak, or Eggman, who has been cloning the hedgehog for decades - to notice, to raise a trembling finger toward the ravenous void at the game's heart. Horror has a face, they say. Wrong! Horror has a face you can customise.
This summer's fan-made 2D throwback Sonic Mania had me feeling like a child again. Forces makes me a feel like I'm a million years old, like Saturn in his dotage, munching on the corpses of his offspring. It isn't an utterly abysmal game by any means, a reasonably slick continuation of the entwined 3D race-course and retro 2D platforming stage design that reached its apex in Sonic Generations. But it is a profoundly empty experience, a rearranging of pieces that have long since (blue) blurred into one, and the addition of a custom player avatar you can deck with the pelts of other characters only hammers that point home.
0 comments:
Post a Comment