He’s not called Sonic because he has all the speed and grace of somebody trying to reverse park a Volvo station wagon, you know? He’s called Sonic ‘cos he’s FAST, damned fast.
Which raises a teensy-weensy question about the premise of this game, whereby once again Sonic and his mates are plonked onto the kind of hoverboards Marty McFly would drown in drool over, before being sent off to traverse all manner of futuristic racetracks a la Wipeout or F-Zero. Why slow the ‘hog down?! It’s kind of like parking a Ferrari on the back of a truck and sending it out on a track with hopes of breaking speed records. Rather dumb and, frankly, rather pointless.
‘Dumb’ and ‘pointless’; two adjectives which could also be applied to Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity. Another average racing game with Sonic’s head sticky-taped on - why can’t the spiky one get respect nowadays?
After the lukewarm response to the original Sonic Riders – generally agreed to look kind of pretty but handle like a dog in socks on a newly polished roller rink – you’d think the big cheeses at Sonic Team might have had a bit of a powwow as to how to improve things for a sequel. Instead, it appears they just decided to throw in a few kitchen sinks like bullet time, anti-grav, and swapping rings for gear, and hoped for the best.
It hasn’t worked.
Now, for those who just can’t cope with trudging fairly deeply into a review with no real description of what the game is about, we’ll elucidate. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Dr Identity Crisis and 13 others from both the Sonicverse and SEGAverse are eventually available to take part in a series of races around 16 tracks. It’s all because a ringlike meteorite is gently hurtling (go oxymoron, go!) to ground and sending a bunch of security robots all haywire. Conveniently, Tails has nabbed this ring thing, however a bunch of berserk robots are kind of sweating oil to get it. They chase Sonic; they discover an anti-gravity field; blah blah blah – race time!
While racing games really don’t need back stories, we will give a nod to the lovely animated intro here (even if Sonic does sound like Fry from Futurama); it’s well worth a viewing before subjecting yourself to racing frustration heck.
Why so frustrating? Simple: the controls are crappy. You can hold the Wii-mote sideways or frontwards, using the old school D-pad to control things, or, preferably, jam in a GameCube controller, which at least has a modicum of heft to it. Bought a ‘Classic Controller’? Well, suffer, as it ain’t supported here. Whilst it’s a relief that there’s no insane waggling required, using the D-pad is far from ideal as it tends to leave your thumb with about as much sensation as if it were sculpted from Nerf – and quickly too. Oh, you can do the tilt thing with the Wii-mote to steer, but be prepared to lurch around like a drunken sailor, for it’s about as responsive as one.
Also, in story mode at least, the Wii-controlled players are utter bastards (we refuse to entertain the notion that we’re just shite). It usually just takes one hit on any of all manner of hazards plonked about the courses and you may as well tuck your game into beddybobos and kiss it goodnight, as no amount of speed-ups or generally ace hovering, grinding or otherwise stunting will get you back in the lead. That the bullet time, gravity-bending stuff slows you down, but nobody else, doesn’t exactly help much, either.
“Oh, but online multiplayer would help, surely?” you may inquire. And perhaps it would, however the only sniff of online activity is the ability to share best lap times with the rest of the world, although being able to download the ghosts of racers fast to challenge is reasonably neat-o.
At least some effort has been made to provide some longevity. Between getting through the all-too-brief story mode, cracking the various arcade levels, the requisite training modes and accumulating all the bonus bits and bobs, it will take the average a player a fair bit of Sonic-time to “complete”. As to why anybody would voluntarily do that to themselves, however, is something we can only ponder.
Hurtling around bumping into walls may be fun if you’re all straitjacketed up and safely ensconced in a room with squooshy rubber padding, but when you’re on a hoverboard, facing pointy, hard circuits and it makes you bork races, you could easily end up losing marbles rather than just points. Which, rather neatly, brings us right back to those rubber rooms
… Sunrise, sunset.