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Mention Sonic The Hedgehog 4 to fans of the fastest thing alive and the response is often a wretch, followed by a scowl, and some comment about how it doesn’t deserve to bear the Sonic name. Fandoms can be protective, and cruel, but these reactions of such disgust are often unwarranted...aren’t they?
Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode I was released in 2010 for consoles and mobile devices. SEGA had spent a couple of years developing the game with a view to bring the series back to its genesis. Sonic’s brand manager Ken Balough understood there was a divide between the OG fans, and the new generation of players, so the idea was to produce a game which appealed to both sides of the ring (rings have sides don’t they?). Upon release, Sonic 4 was met with praise from critics, and was a commercial success, selling over 1 million copies within the first few months. So why the negativity from fans today?
Time hasn’t been kind to Sonic 4. Since its release we’ve seen Sonic Generations and Sonic Mania both achieve what 4 wanted so badly, and then some, with Mania leaning hardest into the nostalgia and classic gameplay by essentially being a modern Genesis/Mega Drive game top to bottom. With those games now in the Blue Hedgehog Pantheon, how does this make Sonic 4 feel in 2022? It’s a mixed bag. A bag which when you first open, has a top layer of joyful treats from your childhood, like your favourite pic’n’mix, or that toy from Christmas which you played with until it broke, but the deeper you delve, your fingers are met by thorns, confusion, and the dampness of rotten food with a stench similar to roadkill (don’t worry, Tails is safe, ...for now).
Sonic 4 sets the scene well enough, with visuals and sound which transported me right back to the early 90s as the smile of nostalgia assuredly spreads its way across my face. Then once I got moving, and something felt, off. Controls are straightforward, but the movement is alien. The homing attack feels unrefined and adds a strange dynamic which oddly brought me to a stop more often than it allows for progressing forward. The weight behind jumps feels unbalanced and you seem to hit invisible walls before momentum has been allowed to peak. It can be frustrating, and wasn’t a feeling I found myself ever getting used to.
Strange physics aside, the game does wear Sonic on its sleeve, which has to win it one or two emeralds. It works hard to balance the 2D world with 3D elements, but it all feels futile when you consider how well it was done just a year later with Generations. Sonic 4 is not a challenging game, but its by no means free of struggle. Most retries come from the battle against the movement. I spent a lot of time trying to compensate for the weirdness, which often means I ended up dead in a way that feels unfair more than “oh I made a mistake and I’ll learn from that”.
There is a stand out stage - the very final boss. Robotnik’s Death Egg Robot is top tier Sonic boss design, which could proudly sit alongside some of the best in the series. It’s difficult, and as angry as the game made me up to that point with all its clunkiness, there was a huge sense of accomplishment in learning the moveset, and finally taking Ro-butt-nik down with what turned out to be the very last of my 19 lives (yes, it took me 19 attempts!). It’s a tantalising glimpse at the potential the rest of the game didn’t match up to.
A sigh of relief came once I rolled credits. Though a brief affair, much of it felt like a slog, which is the last thing Sonic The Hedgehog should be. Even with moments of charm, and a few spins of nostalgia, Sonic 4 in 2022 feels more like a proof of concept, or an exploratory exercise by SEGA as they attempted to nail down a route for the hog’s future. It’s a swing and a miss for the most part, but the main reason this has been cast aside by most fans is probably the name. Call this Sonic Portable (as was originally intended), and it could have sat in a quiet corner of the SEGA museum, but with that mainline ‘4’ over its head, this feels like an imposter on a podium that it pre-emptively stole from Sonic Mania.
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