Ranking 35 Sonic Games For His 35th Anniversary (Part 3)

Go Back (#1-25)

26. Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)

There is no doubt this will be the most contentious placement on my rankings. I will not sugarcoat it: the original Sonic the Hedgehog is a bad video game. Everything about how the movement works is sloppy and uncontrollable. Sonic speeds up to maximum much too quickly, and then you’re again forced to bring him to a full stop every few seconds to navigate the stage. There’s no Tails or Knuckles to hang out with, and outside of Green Hill Zone I’d say every level in this game would be downright forgettable if I didn’t remember how bad they feel to play. Sonic the Hedgehog was a proof-of-concept game that proved the concept could be good – and they nailed it right away in the sequel – but I must judge it fairly against its peers. Every design element in this first game is fighting every other element, constantly pushing, starting, and stopping, jumping or falling, etc. There’s not even a spin dash! But I digress. I respect this game for what it created. Sonic the Hedgehog was not a massive success because of the gameplay; the poor gameplay was simply outweighed by the all-time best music, enchanting world, vivid visuals, and instantly lovable mascot.

27. Sonic Lost World (2013)

Of all the boring and forgettable slogs in Sonic’s 35-year catalog, Sonic Lost World has to be the most boring and forgettable. This Wii U exclusive began development right after Sonic Colors shipped and is meant to serve as its direct sequel. What ended up happening instead is that Sonic Team accidentally made a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy. Sonic has always taken inspiration from Mario, but Sonic Lost World might be the most shameless rip-off of a competing game I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen Palworld. Sonic travels across different miniature planets in space, each one with spherical surfaces and unique gravity (just like the Super Mario Galaxy games), solving platforming puzzles and generally doing awful parkour. Sonic actually is equipped with a run/parkour button this time, which I think was supposed to up the cool factor of running in a straight line – all it ends up doing is making it impossible to traverse properly. Seriously, it feels like moving through molasses. Add in Zavok and his gang of the most boring, uninspired villains in franchise history, and you’ve got a Grade A stinker. Admittedly, the music and visuals are great, but it’s nowhere near enough to carry Lost World to an acceptable level.

28. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (2008)

Did you know that Mass Effect developers Bioware made a turn-based RPG Sonic game in 2008 for the Nintendo DS? Did you know it was the last game they made before they were bought by EA? What a timeline. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is not a disaster by any means. It is ambitious, but that’s about where my praise for it ends. The RPG wizards over at Bioware just weren’t able to square this one, despite developing this game at the height of their power. The story was a train wreck, the dialogue trees were a joke, the UI was unreadable and unintuitive, and the combat system was just plain bad. Ultra repetitive and far too easy, combat didn’t offer enough interesting elements or enemy variety to justify how often it happened. This game is also one of the only two Sonic games with an actively bad soundtrack, which is such a devastating hit for a series that relies on its consistently excellent music. There are some really interesting ideas at play here, but none of them pan out. The Dark Brotherhood feels directionless and lost. If you’re one of those video game historian enthusiasts, it’s worth digging into. Otherwise, be glad you skipped it.

29. Sonic Forces: Speed Battle (2017)

I do not have much to say about this mobile game. It’s a sort of re-release of Sonic Dash reskinned with the art style from Sonic Forces. It also carries with it every microtransaction and ad-barrage problem I listed with Sonic Dash, with the difference being that it is online multiplayer only and miserable to actually play. For reasons I will never understand, it was downloaded over 100 million times, but every match I played ended with either one of my opponents disconnecting or the internet failing. At the end of the day, an infinite runner is simply not fun as a competitive multiplayer experience. This is a bad game. Don’t play it.

30. Sonic Forces (2017)

We have now entered the portion of the list comprised of games that are so bad they make me wish I had never heard of video games. I don’t think I have ever been as actively disappointed in a game as I was with Sonic Forces. I even went to a midnight release party at Best Buy at the elderly age of 24 to get it right away! Sonic Forces begins with an absurd premise where Zavok from Lost World, Metal Sonic, and a clone of Shadow beat Sonic to death and he dies onscreen. The war is lost. Six months pass, and Eggman kills a third of the world’s population while becoming the God King of the planet. Children don’t play in the streets anymore. Birds do not sing. Mothers hide in sewers, clutching their babies close. Knuckles is now the leader of the rebellion, the last vestige of resistance to the Egg Empire on Earth. Then, a new rebel – you! Sonic Forces has a singular redeeming feature, which is that you get to create an original Sonic character with a character creator and dress them up with tons of unlockable stuff. They then become best friends with Sonic, who is not dead but does not explain why he allowed billions to die in his absence.

As Sonic Forces is a sequel to Sonic Generations, you’re of course joined by classic Sonic again, whose levels are even worse this time. The 3D levels, which are the worst designed in franchise history, have you switching between Sonic and your OC while you run around on rails with almost no interactivity. You’ll unlock different powers to equip, but will find that only certain powers allow each stage to be finished; if you get 8 minutes into a stage and you have the wrong power equipped, tough luck. Quit to the menu and try again, idiot. Sonic Forces also has a terrible soundtrack, comprised of EDM tracks that sound like they were thrown together in 45 minutes by four people in separate countries with no means of communication. Seriously, it is one of the worst soundtracks for a AAA game ever. The constant softlocking, incredibly dumb story, and boring levels are almost worse because this is one of the only games in the series that runs perfectly and launched without any bugs or glitches. Ending in what I’d conservatively call one of the worst final bosses ever in gaming, I wish I could erase it all from my memory forever.

31. Sonic and the Black Knight (2009)

Sonic and the Black Knight is the second and final entry in the Wii-exclusive Sonic Storybook Chronicles. That might have happened because it is a monument to bad game design. Every design decision, top to bottom, that Sonic Team made while crafting this game was incorrect. Once again, the only redeemable features are the visuals and music, with every gameplay element begging you to stop playing. Sonic is magically transported into the story of The Knights of Camelot along with two chili dogs and must stop the demonic King Arthur from his despotic rule of the kingdom. King Arthur then sends his knights, which are Knuckles, Shadow, and Blaze in knight armor, after Sonic. Seriously, watch this opening cutscene, it is one of the funniest in history. Like its predecessor, this is the only cutscene in the game – the rest are visual novel-style.

Like Sonic and the Secret Rings, Black Knight is entirely an on-rails autorunner where Sonic is always moving forward. You must tilt the Wii remote left and right to steer him, although he’s moving much too quickly for the motion controls to actually guide him. If you want him to stop, you have to hold down a button, and there’s no ability to walk around or explore in any way. Unfortunately, there is a lot of combat that requires you to hold the button to stop, walk slowly around, aim, and use the Wii remote to inaccurately slash with your sword. Each level rewards you with mystery items that must be identified in the dumbest mini-game of all time, leaving you with items like an apple pie or cookie that do nothing. The characters are bland and forgettable, and the story is stupider than it’s ever been. Even without the broken controls and agonizing gameplay, the unbeatable, glitched-out boss fights should be enough to drive you straight to the Eject button.

32. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 (2010)

Conceived as a direct sequel to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was intended to release in a three-episode trilogy over three years for reasons I can’t explain. I think there were a lot of tiny factors that made this whole package so unappealing, such as no voice acting, no cutscenes, no characters besides Sonic, only being 2 hours long, and having a pretty busted physics engine. These things might not have mattered if it was fun to play, but if Lost World felt like slugging through molasses, then Sonic 4 felt like swimming in taffy. I don’t have anything good to say about this game in any capacity. Episode II released to abysmal sales and Episode III was promptly canceled. Good riddance, I say. This game was so bad we didn’t get another 2D Sonic game for seven more years until Mania released.

33. Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

Sonic ’06, originally released as just Sonic the Hedgehog, still is remembered as one of the most legendary flops of all time. All people want to do is talk about how insane it was that Sonic has a romance with a human woman and she kisses him at the end to bring him back from the dead, but I promise that is just the tip of the iceberg. This game was meant to be a reboot for the series as a whole. Development began under the production of Yuji Naka, Sonic creator and white-collar criminal, who resigned from SEGA halfway through the process. Scrambling, SEGA also realized that porting this game to the Wii and PC would take too long, so it would release only for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. SEGA also decided, not for the last time, that Sonic ’06 simply had to be on store shelves for Christmas 2006 and Sonic’s 15th anniversary, and knowingly sent it out roughly two-thirds of the way through development.

Sonic ’06 is modeled much like Sonic Adventure with a hub world and linear action stages that progress the story. Players switch between stages for Sonic, Shadow, and a new hedgehog called Silver. Sonic’s stages involve mostly running and snowboarding, Shadow has to drive around a mecha tank that works so badly you’ll wish you were in the Mako from Mass Effect, and Silver uses psychic powers to solve puzzles. Sonic ’06 was plagued by unfinished graphics, glitches every few seconds, unfinished maps, extremely poor voice acting, a camera that did not work, a dark and over-complicated story set in a fantasy world with real humans, unfinished boss fights, several minute-long load times, and of course the infamous human-hedgehog romance. SEGA did their best to erase it from existence in 2010, pulling all physical copies, removing it from digital stores, and removing all official mentions that it ever existed. But we remember.

34. Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (2014)

It’s not a good look for your franchise when two of the most legendary flops of all time can be found within it, but here we are. Sonic Boom, a Wii U exclusive, was also intended to fully reboot the series – this time with entirely new, awful designs for the characters. Once again, production was tumultuous and fast as Sonic Boom was developed by three different teams in three different locations led by Bob Rafei of Uncharted, Crash Bandicoot, and Jak and Daxter fame. SEGA decided that running was boring, and instead hired Big Red Button Entertainment to make an action-adventure game that would redefine what Sonic was. What started as an open zone experience became more linear as more and more features were cut, and more and more cutscenes were added to pad out the runtime. Once again, SEGA demanded that the game be released for the 2014 holiday season, and despite the CryEngine not working on the Wii U, they did.

SEGA knew Sonic Boom was such a disaster that they did not send out review copies for the first time in their company’s history. Once the overwhelmingly negative scores rolled in, the Metacritic score landed on a 32, making Sonic Boom officially one of the worst games ever created. First, the technical problems. None of the cutscenes were finished; most of the audio effects were missing and long stretches of game had no music due to the audio files not triggering; players could clip through the walls of most environments including the floors; there were constant frame drops and even console crashes; and the infamous Knuckles jump glitch allowed him to jump infinitely to cross to any island at any time, breaking the game even more. The story was a joke, full of Marvel-isms like “Uh, so that just happened”, and Knuckles was reduced to the intelligence of a sea sponge. The NPCs don’t seem to have any logic governing whether they know the characters or not, and quests start and fail at random intervals. The combat was arduous and awful, relying on the same single-button combat Unleashed featured but even more unpleasant against hordes of a single enemy type with one attack. As an idiot who bought it on launch day anyway, I’ll confess I did not make it far into Sonic Boom – I literally couldn’t, as I fell through the earth in the first zone and was unable to do anything to stop it but shut off my Wii U and remove the game.

35. Sonic Free Riders (2010)

It’s highly unlikely you’ve even heard of this game, as it was an Xbox Kinect exclusive and launch title, so its presence at the bottom of the list might be a surprise. The fact that Sonic Free Riders was this bad and served as the Kinect launch title probably foretold the fate of Xbox’s motion tracking hardware. Sonic Free Riders was the third game in the Sonic Riders trilogy, following Zero Gravity on the Wii. Got your Xbox 360 and Kinect set up? Great. Now, clear a 400 square foot area in your living room. Go ahead and throw out all those video games taking up space, you won’t need them anymore. Stand facing the TV with your arms in a wide T-pose and swing your body wildly from side to side to gain momentum, and kick forward and back as hard and as fast as you can as Tails snowboards down a mountain.

The concept of steering a board in real time with your real body is probably funny enough in retrospect, because of course it did not work at all, but the fact is that doing any meaningful control of the board required so much movement that many players reported crashing into their furniture. Then, the legendary multiplayer mode that required you and a friend to stand and face each other, clasp hands in the air, and squat as low as you could, shaking your butts in synchronization to steer while looking them dead in the eye. Another common complaint was that the Kinect could not read the body movements of larger people, and the game worked more accurately for skinny people. Even at the E3 2010 demo, the motion tracking just doesn’t work. I am not making any of this up. How could I? How could you, SEGA?

If you’ve made it this far, you probably vehemently disagree with some of these rankings. What did I mess up? Sound off in the comments!