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Playing through the first half of an apparently recently recovered 2022 build--version 1.6.16--of unfinished Sonic fan game Sonic Classic 2, by @HezMan2000 !
I found Sonic Classic 2 thanks to YT's algorithm showing me a recent playthrough of an older version ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pTaCY_zzNo ). Sonic Classic 2 is a fan game started by author Hez way back in 2011 https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?threads/sonic-classic-2.25938/ and is still in progress; four months ago they showed off the re-creation of another classic Sonic stage on their channel. This recently unearthed version 1.6.16 build--the most recent available, dating to 2022 it seems--is way bigger (~900 MB) than the other, older builds that have been archived so far by a user at https://gamejolt.com/games/SonicClassic2/842625 . It seems to have at a whole 'nother long game's worth of unlockable stages in it? = o And three soundtracks! There's a Sonic-y one, a techno funk one, and a chiptune one--I went with the techno funk OST, and it RULES. Like, really hard. Hard rules.
I'm pretty sure the pixel art is the most beautiful I've seen in a Sonic game. It is incredibly layered and put together; just thinking about all the sprites and parallax layers and stuff involved is kind of mind-boggling. And somehow it's actually cohesive and gorgeously composed, with lovely and varied palettes. Stunning work.
The layout of the initial stage--a Green Hill Zone type affair, of course 'p'--or so felt slightly mundane in spots, but I stopped get that feeling about 1.5 stages in--and I think the stages have actually been getting better and better as I've got further. Aside from a water-freezing insta-kill thing that isn't really explained to the player well at all, they manage mostly to avoid cheap hits and kills, even in boss fights; one of the boss fights, vs a giant spider-legged drill robot, was amazing looking, very well directed, and actually quite fun! Is that even allowed in a Sonic game??? = D Like, the author has actually tuned these stages and made them actually fun to play through, something very few amateur or professional Sonic designers seem able to do consistently.
The bonus stages are the rotate-around-ball-Sonic vertical maze type; one of the better classic Sonic bonus stage styles--which isn't saying much and they still make me a bit nauseous, but they're more forgiving here than in other Sonics.
There's time attack, a challenge mode I haven't tried yet, apparently loads of stages and other stuff to unlock (like, so much I still can't quite trust it = ooo), even what looks like a maybe still-in-progress multiplayer mode.
It falls down A LITTLE on the technical side of things; having gone through 13 years of development so far now, maybe the code is getting a bit creaky. I had it crash when going from one menu to another and one stage to another early on; fortunately that seemed to stop. Menus are somewhat awkward to navigate and I'm not even sure how the keyboard control mapping WORKS. (On the plus side, the game supports my DualSense just dandy.) Most awkwardly, once you've started playing, there doesn't seem to be a way to quit back to the menus aside from pressing F2, which simply restarts the whole game. Fortunately, it saves progress per zone (but not per act), but still.
Oh and it runs kinda chuggy in a lot of stages. Not horribly, but not quite Sonic-smooth. And a couple gameplay things feel broken, for instance you can't crouch on certain terrain, or while you have certain shields on (and you can have multiple shields stocked up, which is rather unique but also a pain to manage); and sometimes Sonic can barely move up a very mild slope, or will suddenly flip straight up a sheer wall.
The person archiving the builds on GameJolt said ominously of this circa 2022 build "don't know if the final boss softlock is still in there" so I guess we'll see how that goes. = oo
But technical quirks aside, it's an incredible game so far, and I'm kind of scared thinking about how many more stages there are apparently waiting to be unlocked! = o Is this the true behemoth of Sonic fan games?? |
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It becomes clear in the second half that this is still very much a work-in-progress as the stages do start to get rougher and rougher, with more and more cheap deaths (hopefully these are things the author is still working on and not how they think they have to ramp up difficulty!); Flying Fortress Zone doesn't have the game's usual meticulously parallaxed layer upon layer of gorgeous pixel art background detail, and dumps you right into a big pit that does not feel like the start of a level; and the final or some final boss fight anyway lurches very slowly through a cycle of clunky attack patterns, that aren't actually very dangerous because a glitch lets you keep re-activating your shield--but once in a while it does a sorta insta-kill attack and bah, I couldn't deal.
So hopefully this stuff IS still being worked on, along with the meandering performance level and so forth. I'm following the author on YT so I'll just have to check in every once in a...while. ^ _^ |
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