How About We Wait Until the Game Releases Before We Call it Bad?

I'd be lying if I said being able to hear from fans and fellows gamers much easier and more often thanks to YouTube was a bad thing. However, with it now being child's play to get your voice heard, well, there are some drawbacks to this. These days everyone is an armchair analyst and they've been going to town picking apart Sonic Forces, the subject of today's editorial. With each new bit of info that gets drop, more and more videos are hitting YouTube, most of them being negative. The latest cause for Sonic Forces being bad is the plethora of rings strewn about the levels we've seen thus far. 

Sonic Forces is doing what a number of modern platform games are doing these days and eliminating lives, so this  is one purpose they won't serve here. Rings do still function as a hit point, so if you get hit while you have rings on you, you won't die. What is different about losing rings in Sonic Forces, however, is that when you lose your rings, they are gone for good. Get hit and you won't be worrying about the rings you lost, you'll be worrying about finding some new ones. Damage boosting bosses will be a thing of the past, and depending on how challenging the boss fights in Forces are, losing rings could make boss encounters a lot more troublesome. 

Casino Forest, the latest level in Sonic Forces to be
revealed... and the reason for more complaints.

With rings being so plentiful or at least from the levels that we've seen so far, it looks like you won't be sweating bullets too often. Having played Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 on the Game Gear, I can tell you with the utmost assurance that being a one hit point wonder in act 3 of those games really bites. Since lost rings can't be reclaimed anymore, having a huge assortment of them could be Sonic Team's way of negating the new ring loss system. 

Other complaints about Forces center around the level design in that, from what we've seen so far, the levels appear to be very linear. I don't think I will ever understand the obsession the Sonic fanbase has with non linear levels. Levels that are non linear are great and all but just because a level has linear level design, that doesn't automatically make it bad. On the opposite end, a level can have multiple paths and still be designed poorly. Sonic CD is a game that encourages exploration with multiple level paths but a number of that game's zones are so frustrating to go through because the level design is atrocious. Non linear level design is not an automatic win and you can have levels that use linear design and still be good levels.

You may have noticed I've used the words "so far" numerous times throughout this editorial because, well, you know, the game has not come out yet. We have not seen everything Forces has to offer, so it's more than a little eye rolling to see videos hit YouTube saying that Forces will suck, that rings ruin the game, or that it is objectively bad. Not only have we not seen every bit of the game, most people doing the griping haven't even done the most important thing: play the dang game. 

Forces pre-release situation reminds me a lot of Paper Mario: Color Splash, a game that got a ton of hate before it released because it resembled Paper Mario: Sticker Star, a game many consider the ruination of the Paper Mario series. It wasn't just that, though. Color Splash was yet another Paper Mario game that didn't look like The Thousand Year Door, what many consider the best Paper Mario game. Color Splash was not only gut bustingly funny, it was worlds better than Sticker Star. Sadly, some people still haven't played it because they decided to label the game as bad based off of what they saw.

At the end of the day, I can kind of understand why some fans are approaching Sonic Forces with a heavy degree of skepticism. There have been some huge stinkers in Sonic's 3D history and the last 3D Sonic game to be released, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was compared to Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, one of, if not, the worst Sonic game of all time. As I said above, we haven't played the game yet and as I mentioned in a previous editorial, Sonic Forces is being developed by the same team that brought us Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, two of the best Sonic games (that critics and even some fans seem to have forgotten about all of a sudden). So instead of saying "X reason is why Sonic Forces is bad/ruined/awful" how about we wait until the game comes out, play it and then judge? Hoo boy, November 7th needs to hurry up and get here already. Not just because I'm really excited to play this game but because one way or another, all this pre-release criticism will end.