Sonic Rush

Screenshots

Notes

Sonic Rush is a 2D Sonic game, completely original for the DS.

I'm not a massive fan of 2D Sonic games as a rule. A game where you're encouraged to zoom around as fast as possible with barely any horizontal field of view to see things coming is ok when it's stage 1 and there aren't really any penalties for messing up, but becomes obnoxious as soon as it starts to up the difficulty and put in things like bottomless death pits and water where you drown if you're slightly too slow.

Sonic Rush has some mechanics around doing tricks and boosting with some kind of meter and makes no attempt at all to tutorialise it in game aside from telling you you're garbage at the end of each stage.

By far the best parts of the Sonic Rush are the boss fights. The game takes on a 2.5D style with a dynamic camera, the bosses are giant 3D modelled mechs, and you dodge attacks and hit their big glowing weakpoints until they die. They are kind of hindered by Sonic's unescapable design choice to have you never die as long as you can keep picking up at least 1 ring after taking a hit, but what can you do?

Had some fun with it, did the minimum to just beat the game with Sonic and the other character or get extra secrets. Didn't hate it but it hasn't changed my views on 2D Sonic.