Atrociously designed. – Sonic Runners Adventure Review

Sonic Runners Adventure follows up the original Sonic Runners by maintaining the same gameplay, but different levels and different means of progression. While the game controls fine, it has many problems that keep this game from even being worth $3. To start, this game does sport some improvements over the original. First, the roulette system is gone. You now unlock characters and buddies solely with rings collected in game, or by progressing through the story. This game also uses the same soundtrack from Sonic Runners (which was awesome) and looks really good for a mobile game. All the characters control exactly the same from the previous game, so if you have experience with Sonic Runners you’ll pick up the game in no time. If you haven’t, the controls are very easy to learn so you can pick up and play the game anytime. Unfortunately, that’s where all the positives end. The level design in this game is just atrocious. Green Hill and Desert Ruins are fine, they’re basic levels and if you mess up, you’ll be given a chance to save yourself and keep the run going. However, Lava Mountain and Sky Sanctuary are hard for all the wrong reasons. Most of the late game levels are completely unforgiving, and sometimes completely broken, where messing up once will send you into a bottomless pit, and trying t recover sends you into even more obstacles that will only end your run. Some levels are designed so incompetently that you’ll start to feel like the game wasn’t tested at all. For example, in some power stages you’ll need to perform a jump to pass an obstacle, but you would have hit an enemy before, so you’ll be forced to do a dash attack instead, running you into the obstacle and killing you. I’ve also experienced plenty of moments where I would take damage from nothing at all after firing myself perfectly from a cannon. Be prepared to sink a lot of rings into revives, because the level design expects you to perform perfectly, and even then incompetent design kicks in and will force you to die anyways. Another giant problem with this game is the means of progressing through the story, which is somehow worse than the original Runners. In this game, each level has goals, and these goals range from remedial tasks like destroying X amount of enemies or gathering X rings, to specific and arbitrarily hard tasks such as using a certain character to destroy way too many enemies, or even just completing a level without taking a single hit (in a runner, good luck with that, especially with this game’s awful level design). The worst part is that the goals are MANDATORY for progression. To move to the next level, you need to get at least 1 Star in the previous level (getting no stars counts the run as a failure), and to reach new zones you have to collect a set amount of stars. The moment I saw I needed to have 85 stars to move on to Sky Sanctuary was the moment I decided to give this game 1/5 stars. The problems don’t end there. I had plenty of technical issues while playing, such as frame drops that caused even more deaths (I’m on an iPhone 6 with iOS 11.2), to taking damage from obstacles I clearly didn’t touch, to even boss battles with unavoidable attacks because a spike ball just so happened to clip my character’s hit box. There also isn’t anything else to do in this game besides the story, giving it much less replayability than the original Sonic Runners. I also should mention the automated sequences are just glorified yet completely unnecessary ways to show you may be increasing in speed. This game fixes few things from the original Sonic Runners, but also takes away the fun, endless runner aspect and makes it an incompetently designed $3 mobile adventure game with a short and very boring story and some of the worst game design for a 2D runner. Somehow Gameloft took something that was broken but had potential, and made it even worse with much less lasting appeal than the previous game (I was done with this game after 2 days of playing, I don’t even want to go for the 100% because it’s just not worth it). This game is a $3 scam, and just as disappointing as Sonic Forces was.
Review by The_AIsian on Sonic Runners Adventure.