Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

Description

Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was developed by Big Red Button and published by Sega exclusively for the Wii U and accompanied the Nintendo 3DS game Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal and the animated Sonic Boom television series, which all presented redesigned versions of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Doctor Eggman, Metal Sonic, and Shadow. The story begins when Sonic accidentally releases Lyric, the last member of an ancient technological civilisation. Lyric intends to find the Chaos Crystals, mechanise the world, and replace organic life with machines, forcing the four heroes to explore ancient ruins and prevent his return to power. The Sonic Boom brand is a separate continuity from the main Sonic the Hedgehog series.

The gameplay places greater emphasis on exploration, combat, and cooperation than a traditional Sonic game. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy accompany each other through most stages, with the player switching between them to use character-specific abilities. Each possesses an energy tether used to swing across gaps, disarm enemies, move objects, operate machinery, and connect with suspended rails. Levels combine hubs, linear platforming, combat arenas, two-dimensional sections, puzzles, collectibles, side missions, and automated running sequences that provide the game’s limited bursts of traditional Sonic speed. A second player can join in limited sections with the GamePad screen. However, combat consists of repeated basic attacks, abilities work only at designated points, and progress often involves defeating groups of robots or searching for switches. The game is considerably slow and repetitive for Sonic.

Initially developed under the titles Sonic Origins and Sonic Synergy, with an intended structure influenced by character-driven action adventures such as Jak and Daxter. It was built with CryEngine before Sega made the game Wii U exclusive, which the engine had not been designed for. This resulted in extensive modification, and planned features removed or simplified. The final game suffers from unstable frame rates, long loading times, camera faults, animation errors, characters passing through scenery, inconsistent collision detection, and glitches capable of bypassing substantial portions of stages. The colourful environments, character interactions, and Richard Jacques soundtrack, are overwhelmed by monotonous combat, restrictive platforming, excessive dialogue, broken AI, and lack of technical refinement. Consequently, reviews were overwhelmingly negative and the total sales of both Sonic Boom games were extremely poor.