With the release just a week away, early reviews are beginning to roll in for Sonic Generations. Thanks to members of Sonic Stadium’s forums, reviews are being compiled and new details from the game are being revealed. Before we get to the reviews, I thought this was an interesting tidbit: Iizuka revealed at Paris Games Week that the original Sonic the Hedgehog will be an unlockable in Generations. As long as the emulation is perfect, I’m all for adding a ninth copy of the game to my collection.
As for early reviews, the Germans have gotten their hands on the finished game. Videogameszone.de rated the game an 85/100 while the magazine 360 Live rated the game a similar 8.5/10. Very respectable scores! After the break, details from the two reviews.
German Sonic Stadium member MarcelloF culled the following tidbits from the magazine review:
Pros:
• Fast paced
• Lot’s of unlockables
• Different paths
• Completely dubbed in German with the professional Sonic X actorsCons:
• The approximately 30 frames per second slightly slow the pace of the game
• Few Boss fights
• Camera occasionally unreasonable
• Loading times could be shorter
Unlockables: 14 character biographies, 50 pieces of music, 130 concept-arts and 13 videos
A few skills: Run faster under water, lower loss of speed while going up slopes and 8 more
Sonic 1 will cost 7777 pointsChaos Emeralds seem to be obtained from bosses: “(…) Or the fight with Metal Sonic to get one of the seven magical Emerald-Crystals (lol)”
Main game (9 Zones, 18 acts) will take about 4 hours, adding missions, Emeralds etc, 3 more. So 7 hours total.
And there’s a bit on the Collector’s Edition. The statue is 15cm and the ring is about 4 cm in diameter.
So far so good, everything is shaping up quite nicely! One week to go!
UPDATE: New video! Skip ahead to 1:30 to see a Sonic and Knuckles race through Green Hill at sunset, complete with a remix of Super Sonic Racing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCcj0Foq8w
Super SEGA fans should notice that the Super Sonic Racing remix includes samples from the infamous SEGA Saturn promo video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haOCJ8wL0OA
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I’m disappointed in the length of the game, especially given the length of its development time. Probably could have used a couple more stages.
But still incredibly excited, of course.
Well, it is a Sonic game. The name of which is speeding through stages. I’m okay with the length as long as the game is good. I almost want that after all these years than anything else.
I never look at games in terms of hours, I look at how enjoyable they are, so the 4-7 is lost on me. I have no clue how long Bayonetta was, but I know it was a load of fun. Sonic Unleashed probably took a long time to play through, longer than Bayonetta (thanks to the werehog) and it wasn’t very fun from start to finish. And yet, the day stages played one after another is great fun, and takes less than an hour.
As long as the game has replayability, which it appears to have, I’m happy with what I see. Sonic 2 takes less than an hour to play through, yet I find myself returning to it all the time.
Modern sonic’s level design mostly kills the length
@barry
I dont think sonic unleashed was longer than bayonetta even with the werehog. Bayonetta was a pretty lengthy single player game. It may have probably been the challenge, but at least bayonetta HAS something to compensate, if it had a short length. Sonic is an easy, non challenging(could have more of that), short game. That’s not really helping
@CrazyTails: You may be right. I just recall completing Bayonetta in one month (one playthrough on the standard difficulty), while it took over a year for Unleashed (I came back to the game once a month to try, and fail, to complete werehog stages). So its not so much start to finish time, as it is which game had more moments of difficulty and frustration which lead to having to replay a stage over and over.
In terms of Generations, I’m certain it wont be like Unleashed with the 30 minute werehog stages causing frustration and making the game appear longer than usual. I’m also certain it will be better than Colors, thanks to the variety of skills and gameplay styles giving more replay value.
Yeah no doubt I will enjoy the game and replay it to death. Im hopefull the game will run 60 fps.
It’s not that it will bother me or anything, but it’s about time sonic games become a bit more lengthy. Sonic generations could have benefited from 2 acts per sonic for instance, making 4 acts per zone. They wouldn’t have to make new assets but just design more stages. It would just need time, which they had gotten. But I have a weird feeling that sonic generations wasn’t in development from late 2008(unleashed’s launch). Probably less.
*60 fps on pc*
I have an inkling we’ll see more acts via DLC. Perhaps hard modes of acts 1&2, or acts 3&4 which are shorter but challenging in a good way?
Also, new video in the post above (adding it now).
eh length shouldn’t be an issue. You could run through the classics in about the same amount of time too (4-5 hrs). Better that than to have the game padded out with awkward hub world exploration, bad cutscenes, and alternative gameplay styles (Sa, Sa2, 06, Unleashed)
My chief concern is that the review mentions unfair difficulty spikes aka bad level design later in the game.
“The whole thing is so perfect but not for long. Especially in the last three to four stages precise jumps are often crucial for survival, but almost impossible to Timing. Here only the principle of trial and error, but the series is, admittedly, been around since the beginning an integral part of the Sonic gameplay.
Really unfair what is happening but is never heavy and even passages which at first perhaps a little frustrating to go with a little practice and the correct timing embossed loose from the hand.”
Obviously this is google translate at work but you get the idea. It was these kinds of design choices that ended up hurting Colors the most review wise so i’m expecting a similar metacritic for this game (75-80 range).
Segas games often catch shit for being too short. I take it as a good sign. It means they want more.
4-7 hours to complete… Ehhhh. That’s a tad too short. =|
If I weren’t such a devoted fan, then I wouldn’t be buying this game at full price.
Well, at least it’s $50 vs $60 for consoles, and only $30 on Steam w/ Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
Honestly….what do you guys expect? True Sonic games that don’t rely on recycled content or slower game play have ALWAYS been short. Back when I first seriously played Sonic 3 I could blow through that thing in an afternoon. None of the Genesis games where more then four or five hours long, and they all would have been beatable pretty quickly if they where as forgiving as modern games are. Same goes for the Adventure games: I can blast through Sonic’s story in just four hours without much of a problem, and this was a game before the speed boost.
The only way Sonic games have ever managed to be longer then this is when they recycled content and added slower characters. Sure, Adventure as a whole was a ten hour experience, but did you really want to spend two of those hours playing as Big the Cat? Or as Amy? Heck, look at Adventure 2. I spent most of my time playing as the non Sonic characters, since most any Sonic level could be beaten in about 10 minutes or less. Heroes just recycled the same game four times and forced you to complete switch puzzles and defeat enemy rooms. Sonic 06….was just a slow shitty game all around so lets not bring it up. Sonic Unleashed had the Werehog and hub stages (though I will say I enjoyed the hub stages, and the werehog wasn’t terrible, the latter still brought down what could have been a very good Sonic only experience). Sonic Colors reused the same level designs and props six times over, and even then only managed to be around 6 hours.
Sonic games are short by nature, and every solution to fix this non-problem has resulted in a poorer game. Frankly, I’ll take a superb 4-7 hour experience over a shitty ten hour one. Besides, Sonic games aren’t about sheer completion anyway: they are about replaying the levels, getting better at them, and finding new hidden areas and getting better scores. This is something the Unleashed/Colors formula excels at especially.
In any case, don’t get your hopes up for these early reviews. It was the same story with Sonic Colors. Just wait until the likes of Destructoid has a shot at tearing it down.
“True Sonic games that don’t rely on recycled content’
funny you say this because modern sonic games depend on recycled content. See sonic colors. No way is Sega going to be able to afford a variety of environments on the scope of Mario Galaxy.
I’m not expecting a 20 hour game, of course. But Sonic Colors I felt was too short, and the game actually could have been long enough if they added another planet or two. I hope Sonic Generations doesn’t have that same issue.
9 zones is really short. That’s fewer than Sonic 2, for example, and Sonic 3 and Knuckles as well.
There’s a big difference between 4 and 7 hours, by the way. 7 hours would be fine. But if you really can hit the boss in 4 hours I’d be really disappointed with that for a game in this day and age.
Everyone forgets that videogames in their Golden AGES were not longer than 4 hours MAX. Majority was about an hour. BUT games were twice+ the fun than next gen games. Its not about how many hours is the game its about quality, gameplay, FUN, great soundtrack and replay value. And Sonic Generations has it all. From the two demos and the videos I’ve seen I could give the game 9.5 and the non hardcore fans should give it 9.0 not 0.1 less!!!!
It is not like SEGA are releasing the game at RRP, its about 17% off in whatever country you purchase it from.
Of course the game would be longer if they took away the boost mechanic from modern Sonic and made him slower. I think that gameplay element certainly is an issue to game length.
While the replay value of the acts help the games longevity, lets also remember that there are 90 total missions which, from what we’ve seen in the preview video above, will either be entirely new layouts or tweaked layouts of the standard acts with new music and graphical changes (sunset, perhaps a nighttime Rooftop Run with Unleashed night music?). Basically the missions are the extra acts from Colors, but thankfully separated from the standard act.
I enjoyed Colors, but in replaying it I hated how selecting any act after the first one for a stage was like a game of chance. Either it was a full on 3D/2D stage or it was a short 2D puzzle. I finally just consulted Sonic Stadium forum members and got a list of the stages that played like real Sonic stages, so I could avoid the more tedious puzzles.
“Everyone forgets that videogames in their Golden AGES were not longer than 4 hours MAX. ”
But that was before (for the most part) games used any sort of save feature. It was very possible for you to lose all your lives/continues and have to start the entire game again. It was a very different time for gaming and you really can’t compare them, imo, that way.
“9 zones is really short. That’s fewer than Sonic 2, for example, and Sonic 3 and Knuckles as well.
There’s a big difference between 4 and 7 hours, by the way. 7 hours would be fine. But if you really can hit the boss in 4 hours I’d be really disappointed with that for a game in this day and age.”
Actually, Sonic 2 was basically 9 stages and a boss battle. Don’t let level names fool you. Sky Chase and Wing Fortress are two halfs of a single sky themed stage, and all Death Egg is is a few hallways and two boss battles.
Also, Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles where released as two separate games. Again, they weren’t any longer. Sonic 3 was actually only six stages long and included a save feature. Sonic & Knuckles was eight, I believe.
So yeah, as I was saying, Sonic games have never been particularly long.
As for the “4 or 7 hours” thing, I was taking the extra missions into account. You don’t care about that sort of content but I do, so I included both estimates. In any game I like playing an assortment of side missions, and I don’t like rushing to the end.