Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal (3DS, 2014) is Mid.

 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, I reviewed the first (and most infamous) of the Sonic Boom games, but I still have two more to go. Now onto the 3DS games!

Background and History

I already shared the story of the Sonic Boom sub-franchise in my Rise of Lyric review, and I couldn’t really find anything too interesting to add as far as Shattered Crystal’s development goes. Obviously this was the 3DS’ equivalent of the Wii U game, however this game was developed by Sanzaru Games as opposed to Big Red Button, but still with supervision from Sonic Team. Once again this game drifted away from the main series continuity, and compared to the Wii U game holds its own story, gameplay, and even aesthetic in terms of the environments and enemies.

Whereas Rise of Lyric was pretty much unanimously slammed by critics and fans alike, Shattered Crystal has more of a reception as being better than the Wii U game, but still overall just mediocre to okay depending on who you ask. But I feel like it was always kind of under the radar - when people refer to ‘Sonic Boom’ (at least as a game), most likely they’re referring to Rise of Lyric, but I feel like a lot of people forget not only Shattered Crystal, but also Fire and Ice which released a couple years later. I guess the negative reception of Rise of Lyric was so monstrous that it basically overshadowed the more middle of the road 3DS game that came out along with it.

Personal Experiences

Since I actually owned a 3DS in its heyday, I do have a bit more experience with Shattered Crystal than Rise of Lyric, but at the same time not too much. The game was sort of coming out around the time I was considering asking for a 2DS for Christmas, and my initial idea was to ask for Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal along with it, since it would be the latest Sonic game on that handheld. But as it was turning out that both Sonic Boom games weren’t getting very good receptions, I held off on it. I do remember also downloading a demo of the game after I did get my 2DS, but I think I played it for 5 minutes and decided I was bored.

To be honest with all the stigma around Sonic Boom as a sub-series brought on by Rise of Lyric, I sort of just brushed this game off - sure, it didn’t seem as bad as Rise of Lyric, but still wasn’t a game I had much desire to play at the time. 

But that was back in 2014-2015. We’re in 2022 now, and I’m doing a Sonic review series. After I completed my Rise of Lyric review, my initial idea was to try to play through Shattered Crystal on the Citra emulator. The game played fine there… but in the end I just decided to buy it off the 3DS eShop. But I will say this much, after playing the first couple levels I was actually surprised to find that… I didn’t dislike this game. In fact, I thought it was kind of fun. I’m going to put an asterisk and pin on that though since that was just my first impressions, and I’m writing this review after I’m done with the game, so…

Story

Like Rise of Lyric, Shattered Crystal sort of serves as a prequel to the television show, but takes on an entirely different plot. The game starts with Amy fighting Lyric, who has escaped from imprisonment and is looking for the fragments of the shattered Crystal (they said it!!) of Power. Lyric kidnaps Amy and places a mind control device on her, leading to Sonic and his friends to work together to find Amy and defeat Lyric.

My opinion on this plot is basically the same as Rise of Lyric’s. To be honest, as it is I’m not really sure where the connection to Rise of Lyric is - there’s pretty much no continuity between the two regarding how Lyric escaped imprisonment and his origin story. But either way, even on its own, once again it still doesn’t really tell a lot about the universe and doesn’t have any interesting character development or anything, mostly just serving exposition for the gameplay if anything. Shadow’s appearance in this game is a little more substantial than in Rise of Lyric - at least for serving context for Lyric’s mind reader device, but still ends up feeling somewhat pointless. There’s also a whole plot point about Metal Sonic and Eggman towards the middle of the game that goes absolutely nowhere. 

That said, the game also has it’s own FMV cutscenes and the animation of them is still pretty good - having that squash and stretch that gives each character personality. It is a bit mitigated by being compressed to fit on a 3DS cartridge, but that wasn’t necessarily something in their control. The FMV cutscenes themselves take up a small part of the story regardless - there’s one at the start, one in the middle, and one at the end, and the rest of the story is told through text boxes on top of 3D character models - similar to Rush Adventure or Generations 3DS. Still, I do think the animation the character models is decent for what it is, although Knuckles’ model and animations do look pretty odd throughout the game.

Presentation

Visually, this game looks about what I expect from a handheld side game. The character models are a bit rough, due to how pixelated they are, but they look fine, and the environments I think actually look pretty good. This game takes on a different aesthetic throughout compared to the Wii U game, and I would say is more colorful and vibrant. I really like the purple, pink and green aesthetic of Ancient Ruins in particular, and you do get a decent variety of themes as you move through different areas of each main level, but still in a way that makes the game’s art style feel fairly concise and consistent. I wouldn’t say it’s the best looking 3DS game, but the visuals are pretty good for what it is.

The soundtrack, like Rise of Lyric, is… fine but forgettable. Again, not particularly bad or anything - I did like some of the ambient tunes - but it’s not really a soundtrack I’m necessarily looking to go back to especially over other Sonic soundtracks. I will give this game one thing over Rise of Lyric though - the characters don’t speak over everything going on throughout the gameplay.

Gameplay

Between the initial two Sonic Boom games, Shattered Crystal definitely plays more like what you would expect from a Sonic game, but with a slight twist. This game is more strictly a 2D platformer with 3D models - compared to the last 3DS Sonic game, Lost World, which had full 3D sections - and compared to this game’s Wii U equivalent definitely has a greater focus on speed and exploration rather than combat or puzzle solving. 

But, between speed and exploration, this game definitely leans more on the latter aspect. Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal is basically a Sonic-style Metroidvania - having levels that not only contain branching paths, but branch out in all sorts of directions that encourage the player to explore. Your ‘main’ objective is to reach the end of each level, but the levels are big and contain a variety of different directions, stage mechanics and paths to go through. Granted, the levels aren’t necessarily interconnected like an actual Metroidvania game, but the level structure is definitely there.

Playing the levels as you would normally, like any other Sonic game, is… fun. I wouldn’t really say any of the level designs really stuck out to me, but just looking at Shattered Crystal as a side game, I did like the amount of variety and mechanics here. Sonic’s control and moveset feels decent - not the most fluid but he does have a good moveset and it definitely feels better incorporated into the level design than the Wii U game. There’s boosters to run into, things to swing off of, enemies to homing attack off of, and even some rail grinding. There is a little combat that pretty much just amounts to either using the homing attack on enemies or occasionally breaking their shields with the enerbeam, and in the latter case it does sort of stop the action, but for the most part it didn’t really hurt my enjoyment too much.

Character swapping is one major mechanic that carries over from the Wii U game. There’s four playable characters here - Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Sticks - which again have their own abilities and can be played as by pressing the corresponding direction on the D-pad. This comes on top of certain parts of each level that characters can be used to traverse - Sonic can dash through blue blocks, Tails can fly with the aid of these fan things, Knuckles can dig underground at certain points and Sticks has a boomerang which can be used to knock out generators powering these cylinder spike things blocking parts of the level.

Unfortunately, this game doesn’t fix my issue with the Wii U game in which the character swapping felt too situational. Sonic was definitely the character who controlled the best, and throughout playing this game, it sort of just felt like I would just use each character to get through a certain section, and then just continue playing as Sonic until I needed to play that character again. Aside from those design elements meant to be used with a certain character, the game still didn’t really incentivize using any of the other characters. The only other times I saw the other characters as a benefit were when I would use Sticks to throw her boomerang at enemies that were climbing on the ceiling. 

I think it’s especially the case since combat is almost nonexistent in this game. With the Wii U game, the characters did have at least some of their own unique mechanics when it came to combat - in particular, Knuckles being the strongest and Tails having a ranged attack - but since that aspect doesn’t really exist in this game, there’s pretty much no reason to use the other characters unless the game makes you use the other characters.

In a way both games basically make me respect how Heroes did character swapping even more than I did. Sure, each character in that game had their own benefits and were occasionally required to traverse through aspects of the level, but it still felt like Heroes just… integrated everything in the level design much better. There were often split pathways that could only be accessed through each character, allowing the player some options when playing as the different characters, and swapping itself felt faster pace in a way - there wasn’t a little animation that needed to be done every time a character was switched, and in general it felt like the mechanic was built with the speed-based gameplay in mind. In this game especially it just feels like an afterthought more than anything else.

But that isn’t my biggest criticism with Shattered Crystal. I mentioned that playing through the levels as a standard Sonic game is pretty fun, but… you can’t just do that. I also mentioned that exploration was a major element of the game, and it’s implemented in a way that feels… forced. Throughout the game, you’ll find you can’t access certain levels unless you have a certain number of ‘Sonic Badges’ - more than you can get just by beating each level normally. And the only way to get enough Sonic Badges is to find 6 ‘blueprints’ and/or 5 Crystal Shards scattered through each level. 

As such, the game practically forces you to explore each level. There aren’t very many levels in this game as it is, and as such, I definitely get the impression that this was done to basically pad the game out - making a game that would be a decent distraction turn into a slog with a monotonous gameplay loop. The levels are still fairly big at the end of the day, and trying to find all the blueprints and crystal shards can take upwards of 20 minutes. If you enjoy the exploration aspect of Sonic games to some extent, you might enjoy this game, but if you don’t… I can definitely understand why you wouldn’t enjoy this game. It does help somewhat that as you collect blueprints throughout the first few levels, you do get an upgrade that allows you to view them and crystal shards on the map, but it can still take a long time just figuring out how to get to those points.

Not only that, but you also don’t unlock all the characters right away. You still have to play through the first few levels in order to unlock Tails, Knuckles and Sticks, but there’s still those design elements that can only be accessed by those characters - so it’s basically impossible to get all the blueprints and crystal shards on your first try, and you’re basically forced to replay the levels in order to just beat the game. In fact, by the time you beat the game… you might as well just go ahead and 100% it. You need to have 30 Sonic Badges to unlock the final boss (which happens to be the only boss) out of 34 total, so you’ve basically completed over 90% of the game at that point, so replaying the game is basically pointless. 

You could also go for the tokens in which you need to hold a certain number of rings at the end of each level or beat the level in a certain amount of time, but all you really get out of that is the ability to use them at QNC’s Toy Shop which, spoiler alert, doesn’t really add anything to the actual gameplay and just allows you to see some models and logos. Neat, I guess.

The blueprints at least have some in-game use. I already mentioned that you can get upgrades for the map - in which once you have enough blueprints you can go to Tails’ Workshop for various upgrades, not only to the map, but new abilities as well - ring attraction similar to that of the electricity shield in Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Mania, an upgraded enerbeam which allows you to take out enemies with shields entirely, an upgrade that drops less rings when you get hint, and one that allows you to destroy enemies just by sprinting into them (basically just the Boost except you have to unlock it). So the game does at least give you some incentive to collect the blueprints outside of the main game.

The Crystal Shards can be used to rebuild the Lost Crystal of Power at Sticks’ Burrow, and your reward is… basically progress towards 100%. Oddly enough despite being titled ‘Shattered Crystal’ that doesn’t even really seem to be a very important part of the game outside of story context.

There’s also the Worm Tunnel levels in each area, which is basically just this game’s equivalent to quick step sections and… honestly all feel the same. You still get Sonic Badges for beating them, and you can get tokens by beating the levels in a certain amount of time or with a certain amount of rings, but they aren’t too interesting.

And your reward for 100%? A dance party where all the characters are doing the robot. I mean I guess it’s more than Super Mario Sunshine giving you a visual postcard but, come on.

Conclusion

And from there… I don’t have too much else to say. Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal is definitely better than Rise of Lyric, and playing the levels normally isn’t necessarily a substantial experience, but does make for at least a decent distraction. Unfortunately, this game’s further hampered by how it forces the player to explore each level in order to progress at all, making the gameplay loop feel like a complete slog.

All in all, this game’s still… just okay. I will admit I did have a slightly better time with it than the other 3DS Sonic games up to this point, but I’m still not sure if it’s a game I would recommend. I’d say it’s at least worth trying, maybe through the demo (while you can still access it since the eShop is going down), but unless you really enjoy exploration in Sonic games, you probably wouldn’t get much out of this title. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but it’s still not a game I would say is particularly great.