This is a sampling of Sonic games as scored by Backloggd. Backloggd is like Metacritic in that it lets people submit a score (0.5-5.0) and lists the average of those scores, but Backloggd has a lot more people submitting scores, giving a bigger sample size than Metacritic. This isn't to like, "objectively" prove if X Sonic game is good or bad or whatever, I just like looking at data, and maybe it'd spark interesting discussion. THE CREAM OF THE CROP Sonic 3K - 4.2 Sonic Mania - 4.0 THE GOODIES Adventure 2 Battle - 3.8 Generations - 3.8 Sonic 2 (16-bit) - 3.7 The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog - 3.7 Frontiers - 3.6 Colors (Wii) - 3.5 Adventure - 3.5 NOT QUITE AS GOODIES CD - 3.4 Unleashed (PS3/360) - 3.3 Unleashed (Wii/PS2) - 3.1 Sonic 1 (16-bit) - 3.1 Sonic Heroes - 3.0 BAD Lost World (Wii U) - 2.5 Shadow the Hedgehog - 2.4 3D Blast - 2.3 4 Episode 2 - 2.3 THE TIER WITH SONIC 06 Forces - 1.9 06 - 1.8 4 Episode 1 - 1.6 FANGAMES FOR FUN Sonic P-06 - 4.0 (the fan remake, not the OG 0.6) Sonic Robo Blast 2 - 4.0 Omens - 1.6 One obvious problem with this is sampling bias. Fangames have less people that play them, so reviews for them tend to be polarized. I can't find any hard statistics on this but it does seem that Backloggd's userbase skews a bit younger, considering how a lot of 8-bit games get middling scores (in general, not just the Sonic ones :P).
Yeah, I imagine it's the fangame bias I mentioned. Less people play them, so scores for them swing wildly in one direction or the other. And I imagine if a fangame is good, people are extra nice about it because, well, a fan did it, for free.
The main problem with this is that not many people actually use Backloggd. This is literally the first time I have ever heard of it.
I saw how high P-06 got and wanted to show it to others to gawk at, which is clearly working :P That's fair, though I can't think of any site that has a larger amount of aggregated user scores. Metacritic is the only other one that comes close
Fangame bias sounds like a pretty understandable phenomenon. Smaller audience + mainly played because of word-of-mouth within niche communities. Almost everyone else would be disinterested, and fan games will only draw attention for being especially good or especially bad. Omens is a relatively unremarkable game that drew attention all the wrong reasons, including sketchy developers and being inspired by some of the least popular aspects of the wider Sonic franchise. It's mostly just bile fascination. Then on the flipside, SRB2 is a special little relic of the past in its own right, whilst P06 being so competent makes the whole thing look incredible. I'm simply going to ignore the fact that any fan games were included in this list. Anyway, if you'd asked me to rank the "main" Sonic games by what I thought the general consensus was, I'd have come up with something with about the same beats. We know which games are popular and which aren't. Unleashed Wii seems surprisingly high though. It's interesting how much people really, really dislike Forces and S4. The games just hit so many wrong notes. They're not broken messes ala 06, but they're utterly hated. And I agree with that. 06 is by far the worst Sonic game by what i think are the most objective metrics, managing to be dogshit in just about every category. At the very least it's just a completely unfinished product. But if we're talking about games that just piss me off by their very existence, Forces and S4 blow 06 out of the water. 06 confidently took the series in a direction I didn't want to see. SEGA was able to say "Sonic has changed and we don't care if we're not making the games that appeal to you anymore". If the series continued down that road, I could have just written Sonic off. Forces and S4 on the other hand claim to be designed for people who have been with the franchise for a long time, and really try to tantalise fans with surface level appeal and nothing else. They're cynical products that make no effort to actually deliver on their promises. SEGA had so many changes to learn their lesson with all of the following to consider: S4E1 being delayed due to negative reception Generations coming out between the two S4 episodes Mania being developed at the same time as Forces Forces was something of a back-pedalling towards Generations after Lost World and Boom flopped, but they couldn't even copy their own product right. The fact that S4 was announced in 2009 and Forces in 2016, giving them roughly 7 years to get their shit together. Forces and S4 deserve to dragged. Even if they're not the "worst" games on an individual level, looked through the lens of the series as a whole they are indefensible. In my own version of this list, I'd bump Generations, Colours & Frontiers down a tier each, and knock Unleashed Wii to the way down to the 06 where it belongs. Unleashed HD could come up a tier too. That's pretty much it, although maybe 3D Blast should be taken out of the list altogether as I think it's too much of an outlier to really liken to the rest.
Hot Take: Sonic games are Sonic games. Good games are good games. I don't care who developed them. SRB2 has as much right to be there as Sonic 3K.
I think that's an aside, and kind of missing the point. The key subject here is the audience. Official Sonic games are played by hundreds of thousands to millions of people with varying interests in games and Sonic. Fan games are played a few hundred, maybe a few thousand for the most popular. And those players will almost exclusively be a niche subset of some of the most dedicated Sonic fans. Comparing the reception of fan games to the reception of official games is a bit of a folly. But for the record, the games selected were just picked by OP.
That's one thing I like about Backloggd, since it does include fangames, but yeah, I should've given them their own separate section I always felt the hate against Forces was overblown (though it's certainly not good), but I was very distant from the fandom at the time so maybe I just wouldn't get it.
People didn't want to hate Forces. After Lost World's rather mixed reception, people were happy to see the return of the boost formula (if I remember right most fans figured they might as well go back to something that worked even if it wasn't their favorite Sonic gameplay style), as well as having a more serious story and the inclusion of the avatar. Classic Sonic's very shoehorned appearance wasn't received as well, but people were looking forward to Forces early on. It only became very clear later, as we got to see more of the game and eventually play it ourselves, that Forces didn't include all of these elements because the developers wanted to, but because someone thought this is what'd make people happy. The game itself is so unambitious and by the numbers that I'm sure nobody involved wanted to actually make it. To jump forward in time a little bit, Frontiers got a lot better reception from critics and fans as while it has its share of flaws, it at least feels like a game the developers wanted to make, and that comes across when you play it. Forces feels like a cynical low budget cash-grab because that is exactly what it is. Thus the hate.
You're right... all those people who only play ""Official"" Sonic Games are muddying the statistics. Okay, okay. Jokes aside, fair enough. Fan Games have an unfair advantage in the ratings when stacked against official games. Only the most devoted Sonic Fans are rating them.
I think Forces and Sonic 4 are interesting in that they are both detested in the sense they are both cynical. However, they are cynical specifically in their laziness and zero creativity. I think that makes the games more detestable than Sonic 06 and Shadow which were much worse games but did have some creativity, if misplaced. I think Sonic 4 is uneven. I think they tried at points. They tried new gimmicks like swinging veins, the flipping cards, the rolling boulder. Hardly great stuff but some thought. The silly torch level. But the lack of creativity far outweighs any of this. They were unbelievably lazy with the physics, aesthetic, and level design in (Splash Hill Zone often copies Green Hill Zone's layout unthinkingly resulting in Green Hill Zone 3's checkpoint and area layout before the boss lazily copied to a Splash Hill Zone non boss act clear. Lol). But I do think they tried. At least a little. Incompetent and largely lazy, but with some ideas. Sonic Forces is creatively bankrupt to a staggering extent. I'd say worse than Sonic 4. It does have good ideas, like the Avatar, the plot set up, and Infinite. But then it creates the laziest levels and bosses known to man. There is nothing creative in the gameplay whatsoever. It is almost artistic in its inadequacy. Like avant garde. Just straight lines, springs, grind rails, and homing chains. Parody level.
There's definitely both a fangame and recency bias, but I should note that there is now a small but growing core audience that actually finds P-06 quite impressive, much in the same way many people gave Sonic CD a second look after the 2011 fan remaster made it more accessible. (I know, I know, Sonic CD was already considered good by many before the remaster, but it was still arguably much more niche and controversial...) Obviously, I still see a lot of the flaws that made me dislike the original game, and 06 was the game that made me almost walk away from the brand entirely, but it's a truly impressive fan remaster that is worthy of anything we've accomplished in the classic side of the community and should be praised and recognized for such an effort.
It's just one of those games that I don't want to boot up Everything is fucked, Sonic Team just sucks I don't really know why, but I want to justify Scratchin' someone's disc up P-06 just makes the obnoxious level designs stick out even more than the original. I played Sonic Blast as a kid on the Game Gear, and even rebought it on the 3DS eShop. S4 is mundane and boring, but mildly okay as a downloadable thing. All three games are frickin' wonky as hell. I totally get why they're at the bottom of the totem poll. At that point it's just different bits for different gits.
