What The Heck Happened To Sonic Dash: A Review Of The Game's Current State

Sonic Dash, Sonic Dash, Sonic Dash. It is the longest lasting and most prolific of the Sonic mobile game titles, spawning multiple sequels, spin-offs and revised rereleases. It's the game that put Hardlight, SEGA's premiere mobile development studio on the map. What was once a simple game meant to cash in on the endless runner trend starting with Temple Run became its own beast entirely... For better and for worse.

Sonic Dash is now a very different game than it was when it launched in 2013, and frankly? Things have gotten a little too out of control as greed starts to overtake this mobile title. And it took this recent rush to get the one-and-done character, Series Knuckles to have it really hit me. The grind to get this character through my busy schedule made things all the more apparent how flawed Dash's current state is.

A Sonic Dash Primer

But for those not in the know, what does Sonic Dash play like?

Sonic Dash plays like your average endless runner, seeing just how far you can go in a single run. As you traverse from zone to zone, you'll encounter badniks, traps, bottomless pits and structures all looking to put an end to your run as soon as possible.

But there are a few Sonic twists to the usual formula to make things more dynamic than just running. First of all, in most endless runners your main character is incredibly fragile. Aside from the occasional power up, your character can only take one hit from anything before the run is instantly over - and you have to pay in-game currency to revive yourself. 

But, with this being a Sonic game and all, taking a hit from Badniks, spikes or bombs only causes you to spill your rings or lose a shield. This makes the game much more forgiving, as half of the obstacles you face can be survived. With that in mind, you just need to make sure you have at least one ring to stay in the fight.

That doesn't mean you should be reckless and lose your rings willy nilly or anything. You'll want to hang onto them to power up your characters. When you reach the end of a zone, you get a multiplier of the rings you bank into your inventory. Play your cards right, and stay alive for long and you can rack up plenty of rings to buff your characters.

There are also bosses that reward you with lots of points when beaten. Through the game's history, you can face Dr. Eggman from both the games and movies, Zazz from Lost World and even Bash, an original Pac-Man ghost made just for Sonic Dash!

More and More Features

As the game continued its life, more additions were added to spice up Dash's playability. Prolifically, a campaign of sorts was introduced. The goal of the game now is to save Flickies by busting up Badniks, and then collect gems by completing missions in order to build homes for these lost animals. It instills a greater sense of progression as there is now a goal worth accomplishing instead of just hoarding rings or getting tokens for exclusive event characters.

As the game continued to rack up more and more downloads, Hardlight was encouraged to keep updating the game with new characters! While most are hand me downs from Sonic Forces Mobile these days, there have been a variety of interesting crossovers as well, from Angry Birds Epic, Sanrio, Danimals, Android, and even Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man together for the very last time in any official capacity!

Play Your Cards Right?

So, all's well and good, right? A fun free to play Sonic romp. Sure, there's a grind especially during events, but nothing a bit of persistence can't stop. Events don't take long, usually around an hour or so. It's all uphill from here, right?

Sure, sure. Until THESE showed up.

The card update. Oh, Dreadknux, my sweet summer child. If only you knew what was coming. What was an update marketed as a way to get a variety of characters from the start turned into a grind that made the game a tedious slog.

These cards are sprinkled on the map for you to collect in a run. And here's the first problem with them: they're big, glowing, distracting eyesores that absolutely tank performance. If you are playing Dash on older hardware especially, the game will start chugging as all these animated assets get added on top of an already-high-speed game where you're changing locations left and right. Naturally, the performance hit will hamper your reaction time and put an end to your runs much sooner.

The second issue with them is, they're not just needed to unlock characters, but upgrades too. So not only are rings needed now, but so are cards to even be able to level up. If you have a character you really like, you have to keep hunting for their cards in order for them to reach their full potential.

The third (and most offensive) issue? This absolutely RUINS events. Getting limited characters is much more tedious now.

Previously, all you had to do was run and collect tokens, which were in abundance. And those tokens were only for the event character. So you didn't need to worry about getting doubles of a character you own, as every token got you closer to the character you wanted. Once they were unlocked, you just upgraded them with your rings - without any pressure of a looming time limit. Easy peasy.

Well, not anymore! The event character's cards are now mixed up with everything else! So you'll be picking up tons of Amys, Tangles and Charmys on your way to get just one character card of Series Knuckles. This makes the grind even longer than it was before.

Sure, the cards gets more frequent as the run goes on, but then you are hit with another unfortunate roadblock once you inevitably die and try to run again...

There's a daily cap.

A. Daily. Cap.

A cap you can bypass like, three times with Red Rings and ads, but once it is done, it's done for the day. And this accounts for all those common cards you nabbed too, so if you're really unlucky, you won't be making a ton of progress in an event for one day. 

And if you're really, REALLY unlucky and reach the cap during multiple days and still don't unlock the character, you might not get 'em at all. See you in the rerun... If they even GET a rerun! Like I said, Series Knuckles is going away forever after this, and he isn't the only character subjected to this case of FOMO.

Don't forget! You still need even more cards of a limited character if you so much as want to make them viable for gameplay with upgrades!

Used Card Dealership

Why? Why did they do this? What is the point in adding to all this tedium?

...You know why, there's an in-game store. They want you to hate the grind, buy the character, and then buy them again to afford the upgrades. The card system is to force you to buy duplicates and have a steady revenue stream coming in, cause Sonic Forces Mobile did it.

So, why do I still play this? The sunk cost fallacy, basically. I got all the collaboration characters, and I'm still gunning for a full collection. And these are characters that aren't in the code for the other versions.

But unless you are that desperate for collaborations, please, I implore you. Play another version of Sonic Dash. Any version. Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom only got five characters, it's not that hard to complete. Or just play Prime Dash or Dash+ with Netflix or Apple Arcade respectively. These versions use the original iteration of the game with the tokens, and is a lot more lenient with Red Rings and event grinding due to having no microtransactions.

Cause Sonic Dash is fun, there's a reason it still stands tall today as a giant of the endless runner genre. But it's a tragedy to see the game devolve into some kind of single player version of Sonic Forces Mobile, and I hope Hardlight and SEGA listens to the feedback of what Dash has become. I know I'm not the only one who has these issues with the game.

And hopefully, one day, we may run in peace.