A Mediocre Endless Runner with Spotty Performance – Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom Review

This is an endless runner based off the Sonic Boom tv show. It is your standard 3D three-lane runner where you swipe to switch lanes as well as dodge and attack. It is simple enough to learn and gets you playing pretty fast. The game has unlockable characters and timed challenges. You can spend real money to bypass some of these timers or buy one of the three currencies in the game. There is ad integration that sometimes requires timed views before you can get back to the action. It seems the game is designed for a younger audience, a theory supported by the age prompt when you first load the app. All this may sound aggressively rote and that’s because it absolutely is. This game is devoid of any real aspiration and serves as the most basic of skins for far superior examples in the genre. The only interesting mechanics that I found are those of banking rings between sections and a subsequent character swap should you choose (although this hardly makes any functional difference to the gameplay). Being a Sonic game the rings allow you to absorb a hit mid-run; if you manage to get more rings after taking damage you can keep getting hurt by enemies indefinitely, at least in theory. That said if you collide with a stationary object this will end your run regardless of your ring collection. Ultimately the game is pretty bland and doesn’t do much to switch up the gameplay, not even a cutscene for you trouble. Where the game falters the most is in it’s design and stability. As the difficulty of obstacles ramps up you will probably have difficulty determining the next hazard past the immediate danger, largely in part due to the shallow camera placement and the unnecessarily large objects/enemies covering the lanes. There are even UI elements, such as combo counters, that partially obscure portions of the track during curved sections. This is just baffling and makes the game feel cheap or, less charitably, willfully unfair. As for the game’s stability, I tested on an iPhone 11. The game does not seem particularly demanding graphically yet I encountered severe frame rate issues and general choppiness during the some of the more chaotic scenes when the difficulty of a track is maxing out. The game did essentially crash on me after I requested an ad-supported retry. The advertisement elements never loaded and therefore the continue button never did either, forcing me to exit out and restart the game. This cost me maybe 8 minutes of progress in a particularly good run for a timed event. This is when I committed to deleting the app for good. I could go on about how the controls are somewhat imprecise or how the hit boxes are questionable. I also failed to go into the level up system, or the power ups, or the exp prize tower. It doesn’t matter, because I do not suggest downloading this at all when there is much better use of your play time with others free to play games on the App Store. Someone might get a morsel of enjoyment out of this if they are attached to the Sonic property or are looking for an very low friction distraction to pass time, but again–this release is such a poor effort it is very hard to recommend.
Review by oscarinalvarez on Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom.