Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (Wii U, 2014) Certainly Exists

 NOTE: This review is part of a retrospective of the Sonic franchise. Feel free to read the other Sonic reviews I’ve done here - https://expithecat.blogspot.com/search/label/sonic%20retrospective

Well gang, I’m back to review the Sonic game of all time.

Background and History

Before I get into anything else, I should probably talk about Sonic Boom itself. In late 2013, the TV series was teased showcasing a few redesigns of the characters, with a trailer coming out in February 2014. This would sort of serve as a spin-off franchise split from the main Sonic series with new games for the Wii U and 3DS.

I’ve never really talked much about the Sonic cartoons in my reviews - mostly since I didn’t really see them for the most part as being relevant for the games - but this is one case where I feel like it’s important enough for the current subject material to at least give an overview of how I felt about the series. 

When the series first came out, I was… mixed on it. I had seen the first few episodes as they released (and uploaded online), but I think after the fifth episode I sort of just realized I wasn’t enjoying it that much - the humor didn’t appeal much to me at all which was sort of important in a series more focused on that aspect, and I didn’t like some of the character personality changes, especially Knuckles.

That said, I do feel like the show eventually grew on me. I started taking a greater liking towards the more “meta” style of humor that especially persisted in the second season of the show with various clips being shared online and I did eventually get around to giving the show another chance - especially around the time of the first Sonic movie releasing. And I’m glad I did, as I actually do rather enjoy the show - I don’t think it’s one of the best cartoons I’ve ever watched or anything, but it is fun to watch and I do like its style of humor. I’d probably even consider my favorite out of the Sonic cartoons up to this point, although with the exception of maybe SatAM that isn’t exactly a high bar. Still, it’s a solid show - not one of my favorite cartoons of all time or anything, but still, solid. Maybe that and the other cartoons can be a topic for another time.

But with that aside, I should mention too that Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric does have somewhat of an interesting development of it’s own. It can be dated back to late 2011 under the codename of “Project Apollo” but later being titled “Sonic Synergy” - intended as a more “Jak and Daxter” style of games developed by a studio called ‘Big Red Button Entertainment’, founded by former Naughty Dog employees. The game was intended to have more focus on combat and exploration than other Sonic games, even being considered as a 4-person co-op title. Initially, it was intended for a PC release, but development shifted to the Wii U as the game became part of Sega and Nintendo’s three game exclusivity deal with Lost World and Mario & Sonic 2014. This, however, led to the game being reworked in several ways - being narrowed down to two players max, and various mechanics being axed entirely due to the Wii U’s limitations. 

The game’s story was also changed as a way to fit in with the Sonic Boom cartoon that was to release in 2014, and of course that led to the game being changed to it’s final name of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. It is safe to assume that all these changes led to the game being rushed and the original vision of the team being pretty much neutered, especially as when the game released… well…

The game received pretty much unanimous negative reception from critics, Sonic fans and the general gaming community alike. Even before it’s official release, responses from E3 already were leaning in that direction, and it seemed like the problems people had with this game weren’t improved in time for the game’s release - much of it going towards aspects like the mediocre level design, poor optimization and overall lack of polish, and many people agreeing that it was basically the second coming of Sonic 06.

I remember, especially, the “Sonic was never good” narrative really ramping up around this time as well, which had been sort of a thing before that, but I feel like this game’s notoriety, especially after Colors and Generations seemed to have improved the franchise’s reputation, sort of led to (at least me seeing) various people claiming that the series was never good, or at the very least, stopped being good after Sonic Adventure 2 released. Maybe that was just a coincidence with me getting a bit older and starting to pay more attention to the online gaming community a bit more, but I don’t really remember seeing that as frequently in the first year after Rise of Lyric’s release.

Either way, this game was a failure, as was the Sonic Boom “reboot” in general. Sales for this game and it’s 3DS counterpart, Shattered Crystal, added up to a total of 620,000 copies by March 31, 2015. And keep in mind, that’s combined sales, and considering the 3DS was far more popular than the Wii U, it doesn’t paint a good picture of how the game sold. The show did receive a decent reception, but I couldn’t find any information about it’s total viewership. I have heard however that Cartoon Network’s scheduling for the series was pretty poor, with episodes airing very early in the morning, and the show only lasted for two seasons - the second of which aired only on Boomerang with the only exception being the first episode. I do get the impression that Sega ultimately wanted to move on from “Sonic Boom” entirely.

That said, I feel like after all this time, everyone sort of… forgot about this game. I still see it brought up occasionally, yet at the same time I feel like I still see more people talk about how awful Sonic 06 was all these years later (or how good it was) yet with Rise of Lyric I don’t see that quite to the same extent these days. I mean, I feel like I see more people talking about Forces being bad more often than Rise of Lyric being bad at the moment, and that game wasn’t as negatively received at launch as Rise of Lyric was. So, that sort of begs the question - was Rise of Lyric *really* the worst Sonic game ever? And I guess it’s finally time for me to figure that out.

Personal Experiences

Truth be told, I… don’t really remember my reaction when this game was initially announced. I remember seeing the Sonic redesigns for Sonic Boom and thinking “well that’s a bit weird,” but I honestly think I sort of forgot a game was going to come out in addition to the show. I’m not even sure if I was aware of the game until after E3 when I saw footage of it and it’s 3DS counterpart being released online. Compared to Lost World the previous year, nothing about it really grabbed my attention.

When it released, I sort of just got home and hopped on my PC to see people talking about how bad it turned out, with my thought just being “oh yeah, that released.” I was definitely still more about the classic games than anything, but at the same time, seeing the game being as bad as it was… kind of made me sad in a way. Sonic was, of course, one of my favorite franchises, and I did want to see it succeed. Especially at a time after it seemed like things were improving for the series with Colors and Generations - Lost World may have been a slight misstep critically, but it still didn’t receive as scathing reviews, whereas Rise of Lyric seemed like a giant step back into Sega repeating the same mistakes they did with 06.

You can probably guess that I inevitably joined the hate wagon against this game. This was of course despite having played it - I didn't own a Wii U at the time so I wouldn't be able to play it even if I wanted to - but based on what others were saying and what I had seen of the game, I pretty much declared it the worst Sonic game of all time.

Of course, that was long before I decided to write a series of reviews about the Sonic series. Initially I wasn’t sure whether to review this game - not because of it’s quality but I sort of had a hard time tracking down a copy of it. I eventually deciding on emulating it… but then I ended up modding my Wii U and legally acquiring a copy of the game that way

Story

While trying to defeat Eggman, Sonic, Tails, Amy and Knuckles find an ancient tomb with paintings of Sonic and Tails on the entrance, where they find inside an old snake creature called ‘Lyric’ who had been imprisoned a thousand years prior to the game’s events due to his plans of creating a robot army using the Chaos… Crystals (the Chaos Emeralds don’t real here). After being let out, however, he decides to go back to his plans and in the process, reluctantly teams up with Eggman.

Truth be told I have… very little to say about this story. What’s there… works, I guess (at least compared to whatever Lost World’s story was going for) but outside of the intro and ending it feels like there’s a massive middle with very little going on. There’s no real backstory or character development here and it feels like the plot as a whole goes pretty much nowhere. This wouldn’t be a huge deal to me, especially as someone who usually doesn’t put that much weight into Sonic storytelling in the first place, but considering this is intended as a prequel to the actual Sonic Boom series… why does it feel like this plot as a whole tells us so little about the alternate universe they’ve created here? I mean, hell, I won’t deny that I haven’t watched too much of the Sonic Boom TV series, but as far as I know none of the events of this game are really talked about there either - nothing about Lyric or the “ancients” that they were going for. Apparently it was stated at one point that what happened to Lyric after this game was going to be built upon later, but since the Sonic Boom sub-franchise basically flopped that most likely isn’t going to happen.

I also have to ask… what even is Shadow doing in this story? There’s a point where Sonic and Tails run into him, fight him in a boss battle, and he makes a brief appearance at the end but otherwise they basically do nothing with him in the plot.

All that said, I do gotta say the cutscene animation is… actually surprisingly good, arguably some of the best in the series. The in-game “cutscenes” are a bit stiff looking, but I do think they did manage to work the character designs in pretty much all of the major FMV cutscenes. There’s a lot of squashing and stretching of the characters and it does feel like they showed a lot of personality in their animations. 

The humor is a mixed bag - there was some character dialogue within the actual games that did admittedly get a chuckle out of me, but then you have stuff like…

“Take the road to the left!”

“I want *rocky road* ice cream!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSUy2JIvUOI

Y’know what, I’m just going to move on.

Presentation

When doing my bit of research surrounding this game’s development, I noted something about how the developers had wanted to go for an “organic” and “natural” looking world with cartoonish, handmade textures, but the results didn’t exactly come out well due to the Wii U’s low capabilities and the game’s optimization. And to an extent, I can kind of see where that comes from.

Truth be told, I think the game’s visual design at it’s core is pretty good. The environments of the levels and hub worlds look nice. I particularly really liked the look of levels like Crater Lake and the Ocean Purification Plant - they have a decently ‘natural’ feel to them while utilizing color and textures to still fit with the most cartoony art style of the Sonic characters. On that note, I mentioned how I liked the cutscene animation in this game and I think it does apply with the in-game character animation as well. I know I said the in-game cutscenes looked odd, and that still does apply, but when it comes to the gameplay animations of the character it still does have a lot of that ‘squash and stretch’ and cartoonish look.

So… what’s the problem? Well, to keep it simple - this game is not well optimized. I’ve seen some people describe the game as looking like a PS2 title, and while I don’t think it gets that bad, it is pretty blatantly not using the Wii U to it’s full potential. Yes, the Wii U wasn’t as powerful as the Xbox One or PS4, let alone a gaming PC, but there are definitely games on the system - Mario Kart 8, Bayonetta 2, Wind Waker HD, or hell, Sonic Lost World (all of which I should mention came out before this game) - that just look better than this game visually with a decent frame rate.

The textures, in particular, are something that don’t look too bad from afar, but in instances where the camera gets close of them (which is especially common in the in-game cutscenes), they look extremely low-res and blurry, as if someone scaled them down in Microsoft Paint, in addition to the environmental models looking pretty flat and low-poly at times.

But that’s not even mentioning stuff like the low frame rate that particularly shows up in the game’s Temple Run-esque sections and occasional pop-in. In those sections I mentioned, the framerate pretty frequently dips to around 15FPS territory with some pretty stuttery visuals. I have heard a big part of the game’s poor optimization was due to the game running on CryEngine 3 - the same engine used for Crysis 3, a game that at least used to be notoriously hard to run. Keep in mind, a lot of gaming PCs from that time period could barely handle CryEngine 3, and *this* game was on a system that was relatively low-power and the engine just wasn’t designed for. I have heard that this version of the engine was tweaked to run on the Wii U, but even then the game’s optimization still has a lot to be desired. I do get the impression that the development team was rushed to port the game on the Wii U among other things, and it is definitely noticeable.

There’s also the soundtrack which is composed by Richard Jacques - who also composed the soundtracks for 3D Blast on the Saturn, Sonic R and Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed. The first two especially are among my favorite soundtracks in the series, so in theory I would hope to really like Rise of Lyric’s soundtrack, but to me it’s… forgettable. It’s not particularly bad or anything, but there really aren’t any tracks that I remember very well or that I have a desire to go back and listen to. I feel like it goes for a pretty orchestral ambience kind of vibe but the result is probably one of the least memorable Sonic soundtracks out there.

I should mention too that the characters often talk during gameplay and a lot of the time they don’t shut up. Pretty frequently they comment on things that are extremely obvious, and pretty much on repeat (GOTTA LOVE RINGS). There was one point I remember, I believe in The Pit or Crater Lake, where Sonic made a comment about fighting (which I can’t remember the whole line itself)... literally three times. And I don’t mean three times in that level - I mean that he repeated himself once, right after he said it the first time, then said it again a few seconds later. If you think Omochao was bad, this game basically takes it to a whole new level. And boy does it get annoying.

Gameplay

Gonna get right to the point with this one - Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric really doesn’t play like a Sonic game, and I think that’s something you really gotta keep in mind when going into it. I will say that I haven’t played games like Jak and Daxter, which this game often gets compared to, but from what I can tell it does lean into being more of that type of game than a Sonic game. In a sense, it’s basically a spinoff game based on a cartoon (which of course is based on a game, thus completing the loop), and created by a completely separate developer with ties to the company that made Jak and Daxter. 

As such, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric isn’t a traditional Sonic game. There are Sonic elements here and there, but even those elements don’t really come into play as much as other Sonic games do. In particular, the spin dash is extremely weak in comparison to, say, the classic or Adventure games, almost to the point of being practically nonexistent.

The core gameplay itself is sort of a hodgepodge of a few different ideas - sections of basic (puzzle) platforming, sections that are reminiscent of games like Temple Run or Sonic Dash that have you going forward and dodging obstacles, and combat sections. There are a few other gameplay sections here and there - particularly the boating section and of course the hub world - but for the most part you’ll pretty much be playing through any of those first three.

Throughout the game, you have the option to play as four different characters in a Heroes-esque style. Each direction on the D-pad corresponds to a character you can select to play as - Sonic, Tails, Amy and Knuckles - all with their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses. Sonic of course has the highest speed and homing attacks, Tails can fly and use various gadgets in addition to being able to shoot enemies, Amy can use her hammer to swing on poles and walk along tightropes and Knuckles is the most powerful fighter and can burrow underground and climb on specially marked walls. All of which are used at certain parts of the game when traversing through the different levels - with some parts limiting you to only two characters at a time.

In a way - as someone who, again, never played Jak and Daxter - the core gameplay sort of reminded me of the 2007 Simpsons game if anything else. I remember playing that growing up and that sort of having similar concepts in of itself, and I can’t deny that I do like the core concept - having characters with different abilities that you can switch between in order to take advantage of their abilities to traverse each level/world. This also opens the door to co-op but… lol i don’t have any friends to play this with.

Either way though, in theory I do kind of like the idea they had going on with this game and the whole ‘Sonic Synergy’ project in general… but as you’d expect, it’s full of problems.

Truth is, I’m not exactly sure where to start, but to continue on from what I’ve been saying, this game, again, doesn’t feel like a traditional Sonic game. The ‘speed’ and ‘platforming’ tenants are there, but neither of those elements really play into each other, and instead are pretty much split into different “sections” (for lack of a better word) that I mentioned.

Most of the speed elements you’ll find in the Temple Run-esque speed sections in the game, which is pretty self-explanatory - Sonic and his friends are consistently moving forward and you use the Quick Step to move left or right to avoid obstacles that come up in your way. Occasionally you’ll find buttons and stuff that’ll open up a new path allowing you to find any items and whatnot.

These sections… aren’t great. First of all, the frame rate issues are definitely at their worst here. In pretty much all of these parts of the game the frame rate almost consistently dips to around 15FPS, and between the input lag and wonky camera leaves you with moments where you don’t really get enough of a chance to get out of the way of obstacles and get hurt. On the plus side, they are short and pretty easy, but I’ll just say this - I don’t like the Mach Speed sections in 06 nor do I like Secret Rings and so it’s not very surprising that these were generally the weakest part of the game for me. Well, aside for the boat sections, but that’s another story. Even with the problems I mentioned, it definitely felt like I could easily just get away with barely even touching the controller or any buttons. And with how basic and simple the gameplay is in these sections, I pretty much have nothing else to say about them.

While these sections are fairly frequent though, I would say the puzzle platforming and combat aspects take up most of the meat of the game. The former of which is sort of where I find the most integration with the concept of selecting different characters and their abilities - it’s very common that you’ll run into parts of the gameplay where you’ll need to, say, play as Knuckles to go through a path with a wall to climb or Amy through a path with metal tightropes and swinging poles, with these paths usually leading to a button you’ll have to press to continue forward.

The platforming in this game is… basic. Nothing about the level design really sticks out - you do occasionally get alternate paths that can be traversed with different characters and sometimes you may find goodies, but they still feel pretty sparse and don’t really give you much of a reason to traverse the area more than once. It is fun to occasionally use Sonic’s homing attack to move over pits, but other than that, the levels really don’t incorporate the characters’ movement and moveset in ways that would make them fun to replay and explore.

I mean, granted, the game doesn’t really give you much options with it’s movement in the first place other than the really basic stuff I mentioned with the character differences. The movement… works for a basic platformer I guess, but for one thing, everything just feels… slow. As I mentioned earlier, Sonic does have his spin dash, but for the most part it’s pretty much useless except in specific areas - like, for example, if you need to roll into a wheel that activates a part of the path that lets you move forward. Otherwise, you pretty much have no reason to use it other than spamming it to get across the massive, dull hub worlds.

And I feel like that’s one of the most noticeable issues I had with this game from the start - the characters feel a bit *too* situational in general. I get that in a game like this, I should expect situational elements to incentivize using the different characters, but the game doesn’t exactly do a great job of encouraging the player to try the different characters *aside* for those situational areas. Even in cases where you do have split paths or hidden rooms, it usually just feels like a “one and done” thing that doesn’t really go on much from that point. The different paths still just have the same basic platforming elements and don’t add too much interesting to the level design, and your reward for exploring is little more than, say, a few extra rings (which you can only carry a maximum of 100 unless you also buy Shattered Crystal and “connect” it which is… lol) or princess crowns that you can use to upgrade your abilities but… honestly even after trying to upgrade my characters they still pretty much all felt the same, making this feature just feel useless and underutilized.

That makes for a good segway to me talking about the next part of the gameplay - the combat, which quite frankly is some of the most repetitive, button mashy combat I have ever experienced in a video game. You may remember that I wasn’t too fond of the Werehog in Sonic Unleashed, but at the very least, I could give it credit for allowing different combo moves and the ability to “upgrade” a variety of your stats throughout the game. And sure, the game didn’t exactly do the best job incentivizing you to use those combos, but the option was at least there.

I can’t even say that about Rise of Lyric’s combat. Every character basically has the same one button attack and combo, as well as I guess the Enerbeam which you can use to fling enemies but even then doesn’t really feel satisfying or even that helpful aside for certain situations. A lot of the time I could pretty easily mash buttons until I finished off the enemies. Especially considering the game doesn’t really penalize you for doing bad - the ring system allows for multiple hits, and even when you die, you don’t really have “lives” in this game nor does the game even reset your progress for that area or anything.

Like I said, there is an ‘upgrade’ system, but the way it’s implemented is pretty underutilized. There’s sort of two parts to it - Team Upgrades via Crowns and the ‘Power Glyph’ system that rewards you for completing sidequests that grants additional abilities. In theory it is a good incentive for the player to explore the game, but I feel like the benefits either way don’t really add up. Either way, they don’t really feel like they contribute much of the gameplay, and for the most part, even when I did unlock upgrades and Power Glyphs, my team just felt the same - not much more powerful and the abilities added via the Power Glyph system really didn’t seem to help me that much at all.

Again, the situational feeling of the characters also comes to play here - a lot of the time I didn’t really feel any reason not to use Tails or Knuckles unless they weren’t available to me. Tails’ ranged attack especially pretty much let me hit enemies simply by mashing the shoot button while barely even getting hit and losing rings, and in more close combat Knuckles was usually the strongest and most powerful. Sonic does have a decent homing attack move, but that’s all that’s really going for him combat-wise, and Amy… doesn’t really have anything special to her at all.

Looking at the combat especially as well as the pretty basic platforming, I feel like a general theme with my criticisms towards this game is that it’s… monotonous. Now that I think about it, I feel like Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric contains a lot of the things I criticized in the Unleashed Werehog stages, made them a tad worse and added a lack of polish with the addition of a character system and some speed sections. Quite frankly, that was my issue with Rise of Lyric more than anything - it’s dull and repetitive.

That said, when it comes to things like glitches and whatnot that people often talked about around this game’s release… surprisingly I didn’t really encounter anything major. There were definitely it’s share of visual glitches, but I didn’t really find anything particularly game breaking that got in the way. The only time I think I encountered a glitch like that was in one area where coming out of a 2D section with Amy the game didn’t switch to the 3D point of view, and the only way I could get out of that was to reset. But… that was it. 

I will say I was playing the 1.1.0 version of this game - an update that came out a few months after the game’s release - so as such I didn’t really encounter anything like the Knuckles Infinite Jumping glitch or anything, but even that really seems like something that you would have to go out of your way to do. Either way, the game’s definitely unpolished and poorly optimized, but… I didn’t think glitches were necessarily a particular problem of mine here. I mean honestly I feel like I’ve seen worse glitches in most Bethesda games at launch which I feel like have gotten much less slack than this game.

I guess from there there are really only a couple more things I can really talk about. There was the boating section in this game which… sucked. The controls felt really odd and my complaint about the characters never shutting up basically felt like full force here, but on the bright side I really only remember one of those so, whatever. Otherwise, I don’t really have much to say about them.

And then there’s the hub worlds which I also wasn’t fond of. Again, the environments do look pretty good, and I’d say they’re at least better than 06’s hub worlds, but at the same time they definitely still aren’t fun to traverse. They pretty much just feel like giant hubs of nothing and especially with how slow Sonic and his friends feel it does feel like it takes a long time to get from one place to another. Sonic’s spin dash… kind of helps, but not very much.

In these hub worlds you do run into NPCs in which you can do various side quests for, and as mentioned these do unlock Power Glyphs, but since those Power Glyphs don’t really add that much to the game, I didn’t really feel any motivation to do most of them. A lot of the time I spent in hub worlds was just spin dashing around as Sonic, looking hard for where I needed to go next. The game generally does provide you with a small arrow to send you in the right direction, but sometimes it doesn’t, leaving me with the only option of looking up a walkthrough or longplay of the game if I didn’t want to spend 30 minutes just looking for the next level.

Conclusion

So yeah, Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric is bad, I think that was to be expected. The gameplay is generally just monotonous, dull and repetitive, and that’s on top of the game’s optimization issues and general lack of polish throughout. The combat is some of the most button-mashy shit I’ve seen and the platforming feels extremely basic with little incentive to really go back to any of the game’s levels.

That said, do I think this is the worst Sonic game ever made? I gotta be honest here… not exactly.

In a way, I sort of feel similarly about Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric that I do for ET on the Atari 2600. Yes, the game is not good, but considering the amount of infamy that it at least had for a couple years… I sort of expected the game to be worse than what’s basically Sonic’s equivalent of a licensed shovelware game. I’d say, at most, this game’s just a mediocre platformer made worse by a lack of polish and poor optimization.

And no, I don’t consider this game worse than 06. Even with the many problems this game has, I can’t say I ever really felt particularly frustrated by the game design or how the game played - at worst, usually I just felt bored and wanted to get the game over with. Hell, I’m not even sure if I would consider this game worse than Shadow the Hedgehog or Sonic and the Secret Rings - at least this game didn’t make me play it 10 times with a tedious and repetitive mission structure nor did it have a control scheme that reeked of early Wii motion gimmicky-ness. At the end of the day, it was just sort of a “one and done” experience with nothing I can really remember much about.

I’m not saying this game is good, nor am I giving it a recommendation, but again… I do feel like the initial opinion of this game had me believe it was far worse than it actually is, and to some extent, I sort of feel like most of the people who do consider this to be the “worst” Sonic game… haven’t really played it before. I’m not saying all people who say that haven’t played it, but definitely a good amount.

Still, Rise of Lyric is not a good game, and I don’t recommend it. Ultimately I’m mostly just saying I don’t think it’s the worst Sonic game ever, but it still definitely has quite a bit of problems and there’s definitely much better platformers and Sonic games in general that I would recommend over this game in a heartbeat. And that’s all I have to really say, the game doesn’t really give me much else to talk about, so, well, I guess I’ll end things there.