As bad as it can get
Sonic Forces is a bad game, I will just get that out right now. If you are coming to a review of Sonic Forces nearly three years after it was released to see if it was a good video game or not you can stop reading now. It is a bad game, you should not play it; please save yourself and move on. If you want to know why it is a bad game and why I subjected myself to this torture continue on.
So how did I end up here, you may ask. Well reader it all started out with a little thing called Sonic The Hedgehog(the movie) released into theaters on February 14th of 2020, by all accounts I had written off the movie as I do not really care about, or for, Sonic the Hedgehog(the character or franchise) but it came out and was getting pretty good reviews from fans and critics alike; because of this I told myself I needed to see the movie for myself to determine if its Sonic goggles or if it is a genuinely good movie. So I did what I sought out to do, I saw the movie and it indeed was a good movie removed from the Sonic goggles. This leads me back to the game franchise version of Sonic and how I have never finished a Sonic game, unless 7 year old me finished the first one and I had just blocked it out. I was determined to finish a Sonic game, my first Sonic game, but I wanted to do it in a different way, I wanted to play the bad Sonic games first; which is exactly what I did.
The story of Forces goes as such; Eggman has a big plan to take over the world with chaos emerald phantom ruby powered evil robots and VR enemies. He captures Sonic but then The Rookie(player created avatar) saves him and he's reunited with all his buddies as they work up a plan to defeat Eggman. Meanwhile another dimension’s Sonic(Classic Sonic) gets transported to Modern Sonic’s dimension where he meets up with Tails who went crazy after losing Modern Sonic. You go through some levels that kinda do something to help out with the coup d'état and eventually Eggman is defeated and all is right in the world. The story itself is not bad, it is very by the books, but how they tie the story into what you are doing in the levels themselves is very nonsensical. It feels like they took a week long Sonic anime story-arc and were forced to somehow fit gameplay into it; technically they did, but the game would have been better served as just a cartoon ala the GBA carts that had Spongebob on them.
The game, to put it lightly, plays like garbage that is somehow both sopping wet and on fire at the same time. The levels go back and forth between side scrolling Sonic action and behind the back Sonic action both of which fans of the franchise know well at this point. The problem with this is the game does a very bad job at the thing Sonic is most well known for, going fast. The levels are designed in a way that stops you at almost every opportunity and when you are able to get going fast, usually in the form of a cutscene type break from controlling the game, the sense of speed is poor at best. You take turns playing as Modern Sonic, Classic Sonic and The Rookie, Classic has no real attack, which is true to form but still frustrating, with Modern and The Rookie you have a dash attack that can take care of any enemy in your path while also propelling you forward and getting that speed of yours up. The problem with this attack is half of the time it does not even work; you are supposed to jump it then targets an enemy and you hit the button again to dash attack, but as I said half of the time it does not even target the enemy which leads to you losing all momentum either by just not moving forward at all you moving forward right into an enemies face and losing some of your precious rings.
The first half of the game was pretty much just that as a complaint, making it not bad just super mediocre. The second half of the game is where everything just ramps up to eleven on the crap-o-meter. At every moment possible in the second half of the game they make you suffer through the part of Sonic that everyone loves, precision platforming with death pits below. Floaty platforming controls combined with death pits and poor check-pointing meant I was replaying portions of these levels five or more times, which is the very opposite of going fast unless the “gotta go fast” they were going for was how fast someone could put down the game and never come back. Boss fights were a whole other ordeal with all but the last boss not having any checkpoints and some having multiple forms or stages to the fight, again leading to having to replay the entire boss fight because the controls forced me to jump off a platform when all I wanted to do was move a bit to the left.
That is all the bad but I do want to talk briefly about what is good, or at least not garbage, about the game. The game actually looks alright, all the characters and art inside the levels look nice and clean. Voice acting is alright even if the material they are working with is not the best and for the most part the music is decent, that is until they randomly add lyrics which was very jarring. One complaint about the visuals I had though was the actual cutscenes were decently blurrier than the rest of the game, which really made it feel like they ripped it from a Sonic Forces TV show.
I put myself through this so you do not have to; please I beg of you, do not torture yourself on this game like I did. At just over four hours of playtime for the main story and just being horrible almost all the way around I can not recommend it for the current price of $20 on Xbox One or Free on PS4(through PS+). Do not play this game, do not think about playing this game, go play almost any other game as that will be a better use of your time. Please, I'm begging you.