It’s a great use of a battle mechanic, but we sometimes felt that the timing was a bit unforgiving in its POW attack and defence. The rhythm taps consisted of an inner circle (the target to tap) and an outer circle closing in (the two circles touching is the indication to tap), but sometimes it’s unclear and disorienting to prepare for an onslaught of four to six taps. In other cases, we thought we were tapping in a consistent rhythm but the game found we were ever so slightly out, losing out on the final tap – in most cases, if you even get one of these taps incorrect, it could mean the difference between an enemy missing or dealing heavy damage. There didn’t seem to be a middle ground for getting most of them right.
It’s a small niggle in a system that can otherwise provide some interesting scenarios. The most interesting thing is the Flee command – if you tell Sonic and friends to turn tail and run, a Chase sequence appears where your party begins to run away from the right side of the screen to the left, with the enemy you were battling in hot pursuit. In order to successfully escape, you have to guide every character out of the enemy’s range, including hitting speed ramps to gain a greater distance. Tapping each character makes them jump, which avoids crates lying in your path – hitting a crate slows you down and allows the enemy to continue their chase.
The cool thing is that this can be flip-reversed, and you may end up chasing an enemy that’s realised they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. It’s something we’ve not seen before in an RPG, let alone a Sonic game, and is very interesting. Depending on how well you play, you get a rank (up to A) for your battle results and points are awarded to each participant.
As with any RPG game, there are side quests you can take part in too. None of the ones we engaged in resulted in anything superb in return – defeating all of the robots in Central City because the GUN troops basically can’t be bothered earns you the odd item for use in battle. Some, like a chap by a construction site, asks you to set up a pipe system which you can use later to explore other areas of the map. In Central City you get to meet the GUN Commander again (albeit in cartoony form) who gives you missions pertaining the main story as well, so there is plenty to do here, and we can’t wait to see what else the game has in store.
Not just because the game promises to be so big, but because it’s evident that BioWare have been doing their homework here. One look at the World Map and you can see areas to explore that refer back to past Sonic titles: Green Hill Zone, Angel Island (with connecting Mystic Ruins) and Central City (Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Battle) to name a few. We didn’t hear much of the music in the game (due to the background noise mostly) but one track that did jump out at us was a remake of Diamond Dust Zone (the Jun Senoue version) as the theme for Central City, which made us grin big grins.
In every nook and cranny there’s something from a past game, from the occasional Swatbot* enemy to the ‘bling’ SFX from the intro to Sonic the Hedgehog 2 being used for item collection and other random sound effect revivals. There’ll be over seven characters in the game with their personalities open for BioWare to use to the max – ones we didn’t get to see but know are in there include Shadow, Knuckles and Big, with references to Chaotix members Vector and Espio along the way.
* That’s no typo… there actually are Swatbots in this game.
There’s still a few months to go until Sonic Chronicles reaches store shelves, so we hope they can find time to refine the battle system a little bit and make it more forgiving (or clear) during the touchscreen tap/slide elements. What we have played so far looks incredibly promising, although we still don’t really know how the rest of the story will pan out. BioWare have impressed us so far, but we hope that the story remains as entertaining and respectful to the Sonic franchise as it did during our playtest.