Sonic got his start just about two decades ago, serving as the high-speed hero of a series of 2D platformers meant to compete with Mario. They did quite well, giving Sega a powerful mascot character that went on to star in all kinds of other games; racing, RPGs, 3D platformers, and so on. However, people have been clammoring for Sonic to return to the genre that made him great and finally Sonic the Hedgehog 4 is here to give us just that. Long-time fans of the series will be glad to know that this installment does pretty well for itself, and newcomers may be interested in trying this one out too.
Like the other main games in the series, Sonic 4 is a side-scrolling platformer and aside from its emphasis on speed it is otherwise pretty conventional for its kind; you run through stages, fight enemies by jumping on them, gather power-ups, and try to reach the end where you either clear the level and move on or have to fight a boss. It’s definitely old-school, but it works. This sort of simplicity is intentional, getting rid of the massive character roster other Sonic games had to focus on an exciting but easy to learn platforming experience. Many stages have some kind of gimmick to them, but it’s usually intuitive enough and either adds to the experience, or is quickly dealt with and doesn’t take away much from it.
Visually, Sonic 4 borrows heavily from the previous games. While the graphics are of course all new, they have obvious resemblances to what has come before. Power-ups are still housed in familiar monitors, stages tend to follow the "hill zone, casino zone, industrial zone, etc." series of themes so you’ll recognize quite a bit of it. They even went as far as to do a modernized version of the old "Se-Ga!" shout intro screen, no doubt intended to tell us up front that this would be a classic-style Sonic experience.
While fast and fun, this game does have some problems worth covering. The most immediately obvious are the controls, as while most of them feel natural enough there are some details that are just ’off’ and it will jar series veterans when the spin dash behaves differently than you expect, or jumping physics aren’t quite the same. Part of this was no doubt done to work with the new Homing Attack technique, which ports Sonic’s ’jumping, homing dive’ from his 3D games to the 2D form (and works surprisingly well, allowing them to make more open, acrobatic sections in some stages), but it’s still strange. There are also a few stage gimmicks that just aren’t fun, like moving through a series of giant pistons with very precise timing (a single failure means instant death) or some torch-light puzzles where you have to ignite certain areas in a specific order to proceed. Most of these are minor problems, but they stand out since they’re set as part of an otherwise fantastic Sonic experience.
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 isn’t perfect, but it is pretty good. Perhaps its most serious problem is its short length; you can have everything done in just a few hours, which is odd for a game costing about $15 USD on most systems. The majority of that short time is very fun however, so if you’ve been hoping for a new Sonic game that is faithful to the classic style then this is worth checking out.
