Look, I know that what I’m about to say is going to bring out the skeptics. It’s a claim that a certain subset of gamers have been repeating in some form for God knows how many years, trying to play PR for a shaky series in an unstable period. I reject this kind of fandom. I am only concerned with the game you put in front of me at any given moment. If you give me good food, I will feast upon it. So believe me when I say that I do not utter the following words carelessly.
Sonic the Hedgehog is back as hell, baby.
Yes, after two decades of experiments that have yielded very uneven results, Sega finally has some real momentum going for its flagship series. Sonic is currently on a hot streak as of late 2023, delivering a trio of great games that culminates this month with the surprisingly superb Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. It’s an encouraging sign for a series that has long struggled to adapt the magic of its first 2D outings to other styles and genres. With this new hat trick, I have a renewed confidence that Sega gets it once again.
Sonic fans will disagree with where the series’ hot streak actually begins. The temptation would be to hand that honor to Sonic Frontiers, the series’ 2022 “open-zone” pivot, but that might be a little premature. While Frontiers has its shooters, it’s still a fairly polarizing game. It’s the series’ most experimental installment, and you can feel that in its messy movement, aggressive pop-in that makes fluid platforming at high speeds difficult, and unwieldy boss fights that struggle to balance pure spectacle with playability. There are plenty of good traits to balance it out, but it still sits around the middle of the road for the series going off of its critical reception.
Instead, I pinpoint Sonic’s steady rise to a much lesser known game: Sonic Dream Team. Haven’t heard of it? That’s because it’s an Apple Arcade exclusive. Developed by Sonic Dash developer Hardlight, the underappreciated platformer is one of the series’ most focused “linear boost” games. Rather than shoehorning a gimmick in, as so many Sonic games in the post-Sonic Adventure 2 era have, Hardlight puts its focus squarely on game feel. There’s more reliable magnetism when grinding on rails or bouncing off of obstacles, turning each of its levels into a smooth roller-coaster ride. It felt like a quiet revelation in late 2023, especially coming off the comparatively middling Sonic Superstars (a retro platformer hampered by a shoehorned-in ability system) released just a few months before Dream Team.
I expected that to be a one-off success. After all, Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka claimed that Frontiers was going to be the start of a “third generation” for Sonic. The implication was that the series would move further away from the tight linear platforming Dream Team provided to explore open world dreams. Instead, we got Sonic X Shadow Generations. And thank God for that.
While half of the package is a remaster of a good-but-not-great 2011 game, Shadow Generations gave us an entirely new game that felt just as substantial as the one it was bundled with. It’s terrific, an adrenaline-filled spectacle that doubles down on the series’ at times edgy attitude while delivering high-speed platforming. Though it wasn’t developed by Hardlight, I can feel a spiritual link between it and Dream Team. Both games have similarly tight controls and physics that make movement easier to predict. You can make big leaps on the fly and be confident that you’ll land where you want to be.
The last piece of Sega’s hat trick comes from an entirely different genre altogether. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds gives us a legitimate Mario Kart rival thanks to smart customization, a lap-transforming gimmick that keeps races fresh, and high-speed gameplay that’s worthy of the Sonic branding. It’s another game you could point to as a disconnected success that you can’t read into, but some consistency carries through. It carries the same energy as Shadow Generations, figuring out how to balance sugar-rush excitement with a game that controls smoothly at warp speed. Though it isn’t as precise as Mario Kart World, it’s still remarkable how much control I have over my vehicle, even when my eyes stray to marvel at its grand track design.
All three of these games take me back to my days playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as a kid on my Sega Genesis in ways that so many Sonic games have struggled to. In those classic platformers, the thrill came from shooting through 2D amusement parks with little interruption. One second I’m bouncing off a spring high into the air, the next I’m ziplining over a chasm. Those games always make me feel like I’m bouncing between rides, and they let me do that without being interrupted due to unpredictable physics. It’s a design ethos that the series slowly moved away from following the Sonic Adventure games, as Sega instead focused on inventing messy gimmicks to keep the series fresh. The core feel went neglected and the series’ identity slipped away with it.
I hope that these three games serve as a blueprint for the series’ future, more so than Sonic Frontiers. Each one understands the series’ potential in different ways, whether it’s creating fast and focused platforming that feels great to execute or dialing up the fireworks and letting you loose in a 4th of July celebration. Keep that up and I’ll run, not walk, every time a new Sonic game drops.
