Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1, StreetPass Support

.

Review:

Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2014, is a Platformer based on the Sonic Boom animated television series, much like the Wii U game Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric released alongside it. However, unlike Rise of Lyric, Shattered Crystal seems to have at least some idea of how a Sonic game should play, although that’s not to say that this game doesn’t have its own issues.

The presentation here is good, featuring nice, detailed 3D characters and backgrounds, decent but forgettable music, and while this game forces you to sit through its text-only story cutscenes (ugh), at the very least it doesn’t constantly interrupt the gameplay with them like Rise of Lyric did.

The core gameplay here is good, although I do have a few nitpicks here. Like Rise of Lyric, players swap between four characters (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Sticks). Each of these characters has a unique special ability needed to get past some obstacles, which can be somewhat annoying whenever you reach such a roadblock. This game also re-uses Rise of Lyric’s energy grappling beam thing, but it’s context-sensitive so you only ever use its button when you’re prompted to do so. However, aside from these issues, this game mostly gets Sonic gameplay right, with a good sense of speed, and decent Platforming mechanics.

Unfortunately, the problem is the level design and game progression. Individual levels in this game are absolutely huge, and it can take 10-15 minutes to complete just one of these levels (for comparison, speedrunners have completed the entirety of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game within 10-15 minutes). These levels are repetitive and don’t really do anything to justify their ridiculous length, making it feel like a ridiculous amount of unnecessary padding.

However, it gets worse because these levels are designed to be mazelike, and the game demands that you explore them – players cannot progress without completing multiple goals within these levels, with multiple goals requiring players to uncover all of a level’s hidden secrets. If the level design was less boring, this might not be so bad, but as-is this makes the tedious job of going back into the game’s levels multiple times to search for missed collectables a chore… and that chore is made worse by multiple points in the level that you’re prevented from backtracking, meaning that if you miss one of those hidden items you’ll have to re-play the entire massive level all over again.

Another frustration here is that one of the level goals needed to progress is collecting a quota of rings numbering in the hundreds. Levels are so long that you’ll have plenty enough by the time each level is over… unless you take a hit. Yes, even though this game expects players to grab hundreds of rings in each level, it still retains the mechanic that Sonic loses all of them whenever he takes a hit. You can grab 20 or so that drop from you, but that hardly makes up for the potentially hundreds you lost, forcing you to restart the super-long level again.

I’m really frustrated with Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal, because I really do feel like there was a good game here, if the game’s designers didn’t create such stupidly-long levels, and didn’t tie progression to goals that they then made artificially difficult to complete. If they wanted an exploration-heavy Sonic game, I could see how that might work, but they would have needed more interesting level design, and game design conducive to such exploration. However, with these issues in place, it feels like this game is dangling fun gameplay in front of you while at the same time constantly slapping you with its frustrating game design whenever you find yourself enjoying that gameplay. The result is a game that’s occasionally fun, but overall too frustrating to recommend.

tl;dr – Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal gets the basic Sonic gameplay right, but then messes things up with tedious, repetitive level design, and progression tied to goals that the game makes artificially difficult to accomplish, requiring numerous trips through the game’s long, repetitive levels. The result is fun gameplay wrapped in a package that makes it far too frustrating to enjoy that gameplay.

Grade: C

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, Ilya Zverev, Connor Armstrong, Eli Goodman, K.H. Kristoffer Wulff, Stov, and Gabriel Coronado-Medina. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}