Sonic with Guns

This game has the honor of being one of the betert Sonic-clones. The game looks and sounds great with fun looking cartoon visuals. I especially like the animations of Spaz, Jazz's ADD-afflicted companion who's every animation makes him look ballistic. The music has that great techno style Epic was known for but with more jazzy, fun, upbeat tones. There's 3 characters to pick from who all have a different extra jump ability and a rather pointless kick variant. The game spans about half a dozen episodes, each with widely different themes. The most whacky one being a parody of hippy stoner culture that has the mad hatter as an enemy. There isn't much rhyme or reason to the locations which I didn't like. One moment you're in a medieval setting than you got some laboratory to fight a robot.

Unlike virtually all Sonic games and Jazz 1 this uses a really, really zoomed out camera which means you don't need to slow down as much as you don't need to worry about a rogue obstacle appearing infront of with you no warning. This combined with the extra movement powers the characters get allows for some serious maneuverability. It's a lot fun trying to play the game at full speed, in fact it handles high speed movement better than Sonic, but it doesn't end up being the better game. It has all the pieces in place to be a great platformer, good visuals, tight controls, fun to move, and a very large collection of power ups and movement/gun options. But it's all just thrown into a package without much sense of design or attempt to challenge the player.

Ok so there's tons of secrets everywhere, many extremely well hidden, with all sorts of pickups as a reward. But why should I care to pick up extra ammo when I am given more than enough (including an infinite ammo gun that's incredibly effective)? Why should I care about those jewels that just give points? Why do I care about getting extra lives when the game already gives me infinite continues, quick saving, and a stage select? And the 'bonus coins' just nail the point home, they take a lot of effort to find, there's tons of them and all you get for running around nabbing them is opening an extra room every once in awhile. There's tons of guns and a kick attack, what's the point of a kick if I never run out of ammo? Why have all those guns when every enemy except the bosses and a handful of really agile flying enemies die from even the weakest of them? Why give me all this agility and speed if the jumps do not require making use of them? The game would also be incredibly easy even if it didn't have all those respawn options mentioned before.

It's the story of western platformer designer from the 90s onward to today. Tons of raw content, usually great visuals and a cool style but no sense of design or proper difficulty handling.

I still enjoyed, perhaps I'll go back and play the first one some day.

The approach is perfect for kids or less serious gamers since they can explore as little or much as they want and the low difficulty+impressive moveset let's them bounce around without having to worry about too many game overs (the difficulty can be pretty much be set as low you want with the level select and saving, as if that wasn't needed it also had 4 difficulty settings). And of course, kids will love the cartoon styling.