Review – Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal, a unique perspective

Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice releases later this month, but as it so happens, we here at SEGA Nerds never did a formal review of the original 3DS Sonic Boom title- Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal. I personally blame Chris for this oversight.

Anyway…

The problem now is that you’ve likely seen everything you need to know about whether Shattered Crystal is a good game for you to pick up. What else could I possibly add? Honestly, not a whole heck of a lot. So, instead of doing a full review of the game, I’ve decided to try my very first video review and get a completely fresh perspective on Shattered Crystal from someone whose voice is rarely heard in the gaming community.

And no, it’s not a woman’s perspective, or the black perspective, or the gay perspective. That’s right. It’s time for us all to experience… the blind perspective.†

I will list a few more of my own thoughts on Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal below the video.

 

 

Still with us?

With any luck, you enjoyed the video and I hope that we all learned from someone in our lesser-privileged, handicapable community. This was my first attempt at a video review, and I’d appreciate any constructive feedback.

My own thoughts?

I mentioned a few positive points in the video, so I won’t expound on them here. To make a few additional points, however, I found the character-swapping mechanic to be rather seamless, and being able to switch characters on the fly was a nice touch. Adding Sticks as a playable character also helped set this game apart from other Sonic titles, and her boomerang was a unique addition to the game.

There’s a bit of variation in the stages, too, which helped break up the action a bit. In addition to the standard side-scrolling levels, Sonic races against boss characters in an auto-running, behind-the-back parkour stages, which are all rather fun, though perhaps a bit on the easy side.

To add a couple of gripes, the stage backgrounds and settings aren’t very inspired. There’s not much life or charm to the stage designs, and that goes for many of the enemy designs, as well. This may not have been quite as noticeable if the stages weren’t so long, so painfully long, at times. Sure, you can cruise through many of them rather quickly, but did you collect everything necessary to progress to the next stage? If you didn’t, you have to go back, and hunting around for everything you missed gets to be a bit of a chore. Truth be told, I even got lost once or twice, spending nearly half an hour in one stage just trying to get back out. Maybe I’m old and confuse easily, or maybe each stage didn’t need to be its own mini-Metroid adventure.

Too little…?

Yeah, this review probably comes far too late for anyone looking for help in making the decision to buy Shattered Crystal, but I do think it was a fun primer setting up the release of Fire & Ice later in September. Honestly, the reception of Shattered Crystal was probably hurt by its simultaneous release with the more highly-derided Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric on Wii U.

The foundations for a successful, new take on Sonic are present in Shattered Crystal, and with just a little more time and tweaking, Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice could very well be a solid game to tide us all over before Sonic Mania is released in 2017.

PROS:

+ Nice unlockables
+ Funny, well-written interludes
+ Seamless character swapping
+ Stage variety

CONS:

– Bland tunes
– Collect-a-thon progression
– Uninspired art design
– You can get lost

 

*Disclosure: I don’t actually have a way to capture 3DS gameplay, so the gameplay in the video review comes from official SEGA promotional materials.

†Note: It has come to my attention that the term “perspective” is triggering to the vision impaired. That is all. I just thought I would mention that it had come to my attention.