Game Review: Sonic the Fighters

 You've got to eat Rings and Crap Chaos Emeralds...

So Sonic the fighters is a thing.

So Sonic last I checked is a game about running real fast, and other characters with inferior gameplay messing up the whole thing, except in it's early days when characters Tails and Knuckles were really good extra characters allowing you to go through levels in different styles via flight for Tails and gliding and climbing with Knuckles and yes I am excited for the upcoming Sonic Mania.

But before Sonic Adventure gave us Big the fat retard cat and Adventure 2 gave us Bat Boobies...

And you thought I was joking...
Anyway, before all... those stupid characters we had a fighting game filled with made up animal characters to fill a bizarre roster for a fighting game since Tekken had a kangaroo.

Yes, I said fighting game because a super fast blue hedgehog totally screams Street Fighter.

I forgot that was a thing too... Sonic is fucking weird.

Anywho we of course have Sonic, Tails, Amy who was known as Rosy the Rascal back then and I think this game is where Amy got her hammer originally from and Knuckles. But then we have Espio the chameleon from Knuckles Chaotix on the game gear, again fair enough, Dr Robotnik, Super Sonic and Metal Sonic unlockable as well as Nack the wolf from the Game Gear Game Triple Trouble too. But then things a get bit more complicated:

Bean the Dynamite

 

Bean comes from another SEGA game called Dynamite Dux where a couple of ducks save a girl by blowing shit up and so in this game he hurls bombs at the opponent.

Bark the Polar Bear

Bean's sidekick who comes from nothing, that's right, Bark here was created for this game and nothing more.  I'm serious I searched far and wide, trying to find anything about this guy and other than appearing in the Sonic Archie comics after this game and fighters megamix and great big mash up of sega fighting games... nothing.

Guess the roster wasn't full enough huh, but there is one more character who you have to input a code to unlock.

Honey the Cat

Honey is a cat version of a character from a proper fighting game called Fighting Vipers. Here's how she looks in that game.

She fights exactly the same as she does in Fighting Vipers. Speaking of gameplay, the fighting system is similar to that of Virtua Fighter. And I have to say the fighting system is actually rather good, it comes with a blocking system made up of barriers which break after a few hits and after they're gone, they're gone and you can also burn these up doing super moves. And these do not carry over between rounds, so if you use them all in round 1, round 2 and 3 you're on your own. This is actually rather good as it stops people from cheating by doing one hit then blocking for the rest of the match. Each character feels different, Tails can grab opponents and fly up and drop them, Knuckles can dive on opponents from above and Bark can use his bulk to grab opponents by the arm and slam them against the ground.

Now the Story is about Dr. Robotnik who is up in his Death Egg and Tails building a spaceship called the Lunar Fox to fly up and stop him. Problem is, there's only one seat and all the other fighters have an emerald, so they all fight to see who will go up into space, but um... there's 8 emeralds. I'm sorry did somebody actually check Sonic's canon to see if that's right.

Oh right of course not. And yes I know in the game gear and master system games there's only six, but you never go Super Sonic in those so one of them just isn't found, case in point there ain't 7.

Anyway before I got distracted, there are 8 playable characters plus a hidden 9th, 10th and 11th character and for what they are, these 11 characters all have different fighting styles and play pretty decently.

Now let's play the achievement game. How long does it take to get these achievements, well time to find out, with thanks to Xboxachievements.com

So the first achievement you can get is Honey the cat right off the bat using the code which is easy to find and then fight up to round 7, you don't need to beat the game for the achievements and on the way you'll probably get a perfect match and a barrier set destroyed, which leaves 2 achievements and all of these done in 7 minutes. Fight Knuckles as he is your first enemy with Knuckles to get the enemy within and then stand around and let Amy pummel you in the second match until she does a certain move on you to get the achievement, so basically you can perfect score this game in roughly 15 minutes.

So this game's single player life is well non-existant, but as a fighting game, it's easily accessible for anyone of any age and in the end it'll get people to play fighting games and is a game that perfectly safe for young kids to play unlike say Mortal Kombat, I mean no parent is going to complain about this. Also it's really cheap too at less than £4.

So it's not really a Sonic game, rather than a family friendly fighter featuring Sonic characters and while it's no means the best fighting game, it 's not actually bad either, so do I recommend picking this up. Well it's really cheap to buy digitally and if you want to play against friends, yes pick it up for a good time, but for single player only types of people, don't bother, this isn't for you, as again you can complete it's single player in 7 minutes.

So overall it's far from perfect... but it's miles better than Sonic 06, I give this game 4 chaos emeralds out of 7.