Recent reviews by Jenonen

I can't praise this game enough. Despite the controversies of the first game, the dev team did a complete 180° and are on their way to making one of the best Crash Team Racing-esque kart racers of all time.


The controls in this game are buttery smooth and feel amazing. The physics are very free-flowing and encourage players to drive off ramps and walls to find crazy shortcuts, but the game also using a checkpoint system to ensure players can't cheat the course by finding a shortcut that bypasses the whole track.

The music matches the clichés of the levels and starts weak, but sounds better as the song goes on. Nothing really stands out, except maybe 'Don't Look Downtown', 'Mythic Moonlight', 'Rooftop Rumble', and 'Twilight Grove'. Those are really good. The title screen music might get on your nerves after a while.

Like CTR, the game has expected modes like Race, Time Trial, Arena, but also features unique modes like Duo Time Trials where you can have multiple people do time trials with each other. I haven't touched it because I can't access it due to having no friends that play this with me. Elimination is just racing except players in last place will get eliminated each lap. Road Breaker is unique where all racers start in a layered arena, and parts of the arena will crumble as you drive over them. The last one to stay in the arena wins. My favorite is Quick Cut where the track is a curvy straight line, but you gather platforms that you drive into and use them to drive on top of pitfalls to make your own paths. Also, if you're looking to improve, the Time Trials mode also saves your best times so you look back on them to see where you can improve.

While mods act as a band-aid for this issue, I really hope they plan to add more characters, vehicles, and wheels to the roster. The game lacks a strong core identity besides being, "the really cool kart racer with every mod under the sun". There's only four characters right now, with half of the roster being token furry characters, and the other half being half-Rayman where they're just straight up missing arms. They also talk way too much and it detracts from the race. There's two other characters in the guide (Matt & Max; Zig, Zag, Zoom) that aren't playable. There's also a character from the first game, Laika, that currently isn't present in the sequel, so we can expect them to appear in the future. There's also only six vehicles and four wheel types, all with multiple palettes. Despite this, the characters currently have tons of unlockable costumes and they're very well designed.

If you're looking to compete, online is cool too. You can race people online and challenge time trial ghosts from around the world on vanilla and modded tracks. There's also Track of the Day (TOTD) that you can challenge and try to get the best time for the day. The Karters 2 discord is a great way to make friends and rematch people you enjoy being around.

Graphics wise, this looks incredibly polished compared to the first game. That said, I don't really care about graphics because games use pretty visuals and pre-rendered trailers to hide bad code and bad gameplay.


I personally have... Jesus 900+ mods. And that's without any Mario characters, vehicles, wheels, or tracks.

Think of anything and it's probably a mod. If not, it's not too difficult to make one yourself. I made a mod for Absa from Rivals of Aether II, and I will probably make more characters from Rivals of Aether because it only took a few hours to figure out how to get it in the game. The modding tool created by the community is incredibly robust and easily accessible so you can mod this game to your wildest dreams.

This will easily be a game I will clock 1,000+ hours into. Absolutely essential game for a kart racer's library.

Like with most of my reviews, I will always say wait for a sale. Never buy a game at full price. Especially since this is still early access and there is clearly tons of features still missing. It's not a complete experience and you shouldn't pay $30. Wait for a sale.

I was really afraid we were going to have another Team Sonic Racing, but this game defied all my expectations for a Sonic game. I can't believe how fun this game is.


Alright, let's start with the good:


It takes almost all the good features from Team Sonic Racing: The cool cars, custom paint kits, custom horns, characters, certain tracks, and trashed bad features like the awful story mode, always being on a forced team, and abusing Team Ultimates by constantly swapping items with your team, or locking paint kits behind awful mini-games that require an absolutely perfect performance or you don't get anything. This is very refreshing and shows that the dev team clearly understood what was good and bad about Team Sonic Racing. One of the most important things I look for in games these days is recognizing a development team wants to ACTUALLY make a game and not corporate slop, cutscene slop, nostalgia slop, etc.

Right from the start, we have a lengthy timeline of free content. They are communicating to the player-base that there will be plenty of content to keep players coming back and they are trying their best to convince consumers to accept the steep price of $70 for a base game. There's also lots to do in the game like the Grand Prix, but no terrible story mode this time. Then there's the Race Park, where you have a lot of modes to choose from that provides variety. My favorite from Race Park is Extreme Match, where all items on the track are the most powerful items in the game and since everyone has crazy items, there's less of a chance that you'll get bagged by the CPU. The race park also features the team racing from Team Sonic Racing and solo racing events. And of course there's time trials, and they are super challenging this time around. It's very satisfying to break records.

The character rival interactions are very charming and add depth to characters that haven't seen exploration in decades.

The gadget system is outstanding. The way it works is that you have a plate that you can upgrade over time to put more gadgets into to give yourself extra abilities during races. There's all sorts of combinations of upgrades you can pick from and it is clearly fine-tuned to ensure that there is not a superior strategy that would cause every other gadget set to be inferior and not worth trying out. However, there is a specific set I see being used online quite a lot used by top players, but that gadget set and vehicle loadout doesn't guarantee you'll win races. If you're curious, the loadout gives you invulnerability for a few seconds if you're able to get your drift meter to level 4, but other players can SEE your loadout and vehicle before a race and they will bum-rush you because they know what you're trying to do.

Then they replaced the in-game currency of Mod Pods with Donpa Tickets. In my opinion, you unlock every part in Team Sonic Racing way too fast because the game overrewarded you and it doesn't feel satisfying to get all the parts. Donpa Tickets elongate this process and make it feel rewarding to unlock things, but I'll expound on this later when I start talking about the bad parts of the game.

There's also the festivals that occur every two or three weeks where you can race online to unlock more free content. Unlike the Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled events, you simply unlock things from playing. You don't need Donpa Tickets for unlocking Festival items, but the Festivals ARE time-limited. I'm unsure what the dev team will do for people that missed Festivals, but I really hope it's not future microtransactions to purchase things you missed. That's what most games would do. Oh yeah, there's absolutely NO monetization. Yet.

The modding community is bustling and incredible. While there are no plans I've heard for official extensive skin customization, like in CTR:NF, there are so many great skin mods to customize your characters, music, and even track pallettes with.


Now unfortunately, this is a Sonic game, so here's the bad:


My main concern, and I'm sure most of the player-base agrees, is that the grind for Donpa Tickets is absurd. Most races you'll get about 14-16 tickets, and the parts can go up to 200 tickets. Doesn't sound too bad, right? But then each decal is 200 tickets and there's 30+ purchasable decals, each individual horn this time are 500 tickets, and there's 20+ horns. The auras for cars are 2000 tickets, but thankfully there's only just a few. After you finish the entirety of the base game Grand Prix, you get access to a friendship menu where you can get cool titles, decals for your car, and AI skins. But this is where you start realizing you're gonna need to grind tickets for DAYS. There's seven tiers for each character, and to max out friendship for just one character you need 50,000 tickets. This virtually impossible goal clearly looks like a scheme for the game to introduce real-life currency purchasing in the future, and are not being upfront about it to keep people from abandoning the game.

While the base game character interactions clearly have a ton of love put into them, almost all extra and future characters have absolutely no interactions and they don't even have voices. It's really lazy.

If you're on the grind for Donpa Tickets, you'll quickly find out that you're finishing most of the in-game achievements from constantly doing Grand Prix, Race Park, Time Trials, etc. Before you know it, the ticket grind becomes fake longevity where you're mindlessly grinding Donpa tickets because of the crazy high ticket prices, starved for content and waiting for the next Festival to occur.

Online connectivity is relatively fine, but online is really unstable at times and you'll get booted out of races for all sorts of reasons and that can be really frustrating at times. Speaking of online frustrations, festivals are exclusively online so the pro of free content becomes a con to people with unstable internet. Furthermore, certain auras and gadgets, AKA more free content, is locked behind an online ranking system. I understand that this is a way to encourage players to play online to get cool stuff, but again - what if someone just doesn't have internet? What if someone was barely able to download the game and has terrible internet connectivity? This puts these players at an unfair disadvantage that they can't control. What's worse is that some of the best gadgets come from online play.

Well I'm looking back at my review and I see I put more good than bad, so this game is probably worth your time. But please wait for a sale. This game is NOT worth $70.

For Christ's sake, SEGA, the Sonic Frontiers SOAP Shoes DLC was free for subscribing to the newsletter, and is STILL free even now!

You really had to charge an extra $1.50 for people who don't subscribe to your newsletter? Seriously?

How come all of Sonic Frontiers DLC is free, while all the classic Sonic games like Origins, Mania, and even this one get loaded with little payments for a small cup of DLC?

Sonic Frontiers offers entire EXPANSIONS of gameplay for completely free. And they don't do the "extra little payment" garbage with the skins you can get.

This game was a blast.
You can get through it real fast.
You have a choice to be Blaze's spouse.
This game does not take place in a house.
It's snowing on Mt. Fuji.

First off, like everybody else reviewing this probably, I grew up with Oddysee and Exoddus on the PS1. Loved the aesthetics, narrative theme, music, and gameplay of the originals. Wonderful package of a game.

I also really enjoyed New n' Tasty, despite how bright and HDR BLOOM the game was - it wasn't using the intended aesthetic of dark and gloomy that tied in the narrative and made the original such a stand-out compared to other games on the PS1.

That said, I got so frustrated with this entry I had to remove it from my library.

Visuals. Of course, like every other game being developed by a company, the graphics look absolutely astonishing. But what's really impressive is the camera work. The camera smartly pans around the entirety of the level to introduce itself, let you plan ahead, or to show the player just how incredibly far they are from their destination. Immersion through visual storytelling is the highlight of this game.

Musical cues. Mwah! Chef's kiss. Every enemy encounter sound cue, ambience, cutscene musical cues, etc. are masterfully executed and successfully fill the caves with dread and large open areas with caution, and sheer dreariness from how arduous Abe's trek is. Although... the bgm seems to cut in and out abruptly with the Metal Gear Solid-esque alert system this game uses. Running back and forth between areas seems to cut music off abruptly as well as another track slowly starts and replaces it. It's akin to the sound a record failing to play a song and restarting itself over and over.

Story. It was... not that compelling. There's a moment early on of in-game cutscenes where there's nothing happening and characters are just shouting to each other for way too long without movement. The game is slowed down by how slow the characters talk too. Also it seems that the writing team think that having weird voice acting counts as a personality. But it doesn't. Characters talk too slowly and explain themselves for too long using plain and bland vocabulary that denotes that there are no unique mudokons. However, while there's too much telling, there is actually a lot of moments of genius where the camera will pan smartly to show the entirety of a level and you see how you're really far away from where you need to go and that's awesome. Someone on the team made sure that the camera work was amazing in this game and does a fine job showcasing and immersing you with the environment.

Gameplay:

>The controls. THE CONTROLS. Using analog stick as a PRECISE movement option is a NO-NO. I can't tell you how many times I failed to make it up or down a ledge in time because the analog stick with always SLIGHTLY curve so the game doesn't quite register that you want to move vertically. I'd get many occasions where Abe would just walk left/right AWAY from the ledge because the analog stick isn't as precise as the D-Pad, which the aforementioned title before this game did. Controls seem delayed too. You'll be making an input, like pressing up, the game not doing the input, and then pressing a different input, like pressing down, and THEN the game does the previous one and you get killed because you didn't want the first input. However, double jump is instantly the best thing about this game gameplay-wise. Making mistakes doesn't mean you immediately die because you can save yourself with a well-timed double jump.

>Crafting. Crafting system is cool. It implies there are different ways to get around each area and gives you a variety of tools to overcome your obstacles. The problem with crafting is that it actually doesn't guarantee there's variety to your gameplay. I can count on one hand the times where there was multiple ways to use different items to clear an area. The game resets your inventory each level so you are forced to play the way it was intended with each level having a gimmick of "Use this item to make fire, then use this to put it out." or "Use this to knock out sligs." and ruins the creativity of having items leftover from a previous area.

>Gamespeak. Using the d-pad for gamespeak isn't a bad idea by itself, but it is terrible solely because it sacrifices the tight controls of using the d-pad for movement. Holding sneak and whispering to mudokons to not alert guards without the game TELLING YOU OVER AND OVER you could do that and figuring it out on your own was something I really appreciated. I figure they just forgot to tell you, but I hope they actually intentionally wanted players to figure that out. While that's cool and all, telling mudokons to wait gets really aggravating. They complain, which is cute, but only using the same dialogue... EVERY TIME. It's good and honestly funny dialogue, but it loses charm after 47 times of repetition. They say it the same way literally every time I can't believe this was play-tested and completely overlooked.

>Checkpoints... DUDE SERIOUSLY. After slowly looting 17 lockers, bins, etc. and getting a key from a slig you knocked out to slowly open MORE LOCKERS, then slowly and carefully taking out more sligs and, again, carefully timing jumps to not instantly die for 15 minutes... then suddenly dying due to a nervous finger slip or a badly designed "gotcha' moment you didn't see coming feels so awful, because then you have to do all that slow, tedious monotomy ALL OVER AGAIN. As a designer, what is the player learning doing the same thing over and over? They're memorizing a specific section but that doesn't necessarily mean they're getting better at the overall game. Especially if the player has PROVEN they can accomplish the previously easy part over and over only to continuously die in "hot foot" section due to bad camera angles (when the game has you in the most upper corners of a screen and you can't really tell how far away Abe is from a platform due to the angle), frustrating analog stick movement that slows you down, gets you killed, which means you have to... LOOT THE LOCKERS AND TIE THE SLIGS AGAIN for the 13th time. Thankfully after the third level it mostly stops and there's waaaay more checkpoints. Even a checkpoint that goes... into another checkpoint with no hazards in-between in the mine level...

Difficulty. I am 100% on-board with the idea that, because this game is a direct sequel from the New n' Tasty, it ups the ante and provides an unexpectedly harder challenge right at the start with Abe unable to possess Sligs as the VERY FIRST challenge. It was a very smart way of showcasing how badly Molluck wanted to capture Abe, who destroyed Molluck's entire factory, without having to explicitly say it... until he literally did and it lost its narrative impact. And the game stayed true to that design. This game is quite harder but more satisfying to conquer.

THE ISSUE IS

There are still tutorials for obvious gameplay mechanics that say "DUUUUUUUUH PRESS X TO JUMP" paradox-ally assuming you don't know what you're doing even though this game is designed for veterans. Mixed with clumsy controls, unfortunately the difficulty becomes frustrating when you realize that the game is buggy and it's not your fault when you die sometimes.

Speaking of bugs...

The game would hard-lock in a variety of ways. Such as:

Pressing Y too fast after leaving the crafting screen.
Alt-tabbing out of the game.
Moving to another area.
Randomly.
When you're really far in a level so you lose a ton of progress.

Toby's Escape is a notorious example. Sometimes reloading the levels don't reload actors and the levels will be barren but the traps are still there. So when you hit fire, Toby will stop and then it softlocks the game.

Because this game takes at least an hour per level because dying is just fake longevity, I couldn't refund it because I played for too long so ♥♥♥♥ you Steam.

Games like these are why I wish there was a neutral thumb-up. But I suppose I’m 63% thumbs down.

When this was first announced I was like, "haha okay yeah sure make me buy the classics again, Sega."

And then I did.


Some Good things:

>Intros/Outros are absolutely phenomenal and are nice addition next to Sonic CD usually only having the only intro/outro.

>There's new custom sprites in some games. I was overjoyed when Super Sonic sprites weren’t just recolored regular Sonic sprites anymore.

>All games come with drop dash and spin dash (I realize the spin dash isn’t such a big deal as most Sonic hacks have these, but the features are nice.)

>The debug menu is actually fully incorporated and there's no buggy sprites or missing objects/things. Weird controls though.

>The mission mode? FANTASTIC. Probably my favorite thing about this collection. The missions were really creative and they just work perfect with the gameplay of classic sonic. And the hard ones never felt unfair. Tornado Flyby is cancer though. I hardly got frustrated because 95% of the missions is testing your ability and control to accomplish a small task and not relying on a gimmick you just got introduced to.

>Coin system is great for newcomers. They can play the game without having to worry about being sent back to the title screen and you can redo special stages if you happen to spill spaghetti on your hands while Blue Sphere is at max speed. And if you do all the missions and get S ranks you can buy all the things in the museum and still have a ton of coins leftover. It's a really nice reward for sticking your neck out and trying your best on the missions.

>If somehow you didn't have internet to scour the internet for classic sonic music, you could extract them all from this game.

And then there is the obviously bad stuff:

>No Knuckles for Sonic CD. C'mon dude...

>DLC content is so minuscule that it should've just been included. DLC should warrant, "Playable Mighty/Ray/Amy, completely new original zones as secrets, etc." Smash puts out a completely new character for $6.

>Sonic Origins music pack is just listening to an extra sound test of games they didn’t bother putting in the Origins collection (Chaotix/3D Blast/Spinball). Kind of a slap in the face when a sound test is a FREE feature in each of these games.

>The fun pack? It’s just little things like some extra music, harder missions, more models on the islands, and new borders for your screen. What does that sound like to you? “Unlockable content through completing certain parts of the collection” is the first thing that comes to mind. But in this day and age, instead it’s “pay for it”. For Christ’s sake...

>Should be waaaaay cheaper. By comparison, Crash N. Sane Trilogy, CTR Nitro-Fueled, and Spyro Reignited are inspired by previous content but *completely rework* the content, while Sonic Origins just straight up uses old content with slight modifications — and all of them are the same price on launch. Mission mode, animations, and everything else new doesn't mean it's the same level of dedication that went into the previously mentioned games.

>Achievements are hilariously easy. The game’s like, "Congratulations! You opened the game here's an achievement. Oh? You used the level select to go to the final stage and cheated? No problem! Here's another achievement for beating the whole game! Now destroy 10 moto bugs! You can just use debug to spawn them." It took me only 8.7 hours to get every achievement. And that’s because Sonic CD was the only game you had to play through because it doesn’t have access to debug mode from the start. That’s a good thing though! You have to play the game to unlock the achievement, which is what it should be for each game!

>Removing the MJ tracks and, pfffft, on top of that, replacing the already really good sonic 3 beta music with worse versions was baffling. And I really respect MJ’s music outside of Sonic, so it hurts even more they’d disrespect him like that.

Overall, this was an okay package, but it pales in comparison to Sonic GEMS Collection/Sonic Mega Collection Plus. These games were top-notch and had scanned original instruction manuals to read through, hundreds of comic covers, the sheer number of games AND unlockable games, developmental cut-scene videos — all freely included in the package and the point of extra content was that you, the player, had to work for it.

UPDATE: Well we got Sonic Origins Plus. And SEGA handled in the most typical, money-grubbing way possible.

>Amy is now playable.

Cool.

>Knuckles is in Sonic CD.

Pretty cool.

>All game gear titles were added.

Ahh, taking a page from Sonic GEMS collection and Sonic Mega Collection Plus, I see. Nice.

>Because I was a loyal fan that purchased the original game for $39.99... if I want these features, I need to spend the $10 for the upgrade resulting in a total purchase of $49.99?

WAIT NOT COOL.

So get this - Sonic Origins Plus is $39.99, meaning that people who didn't pay into it previously are getting a better deal. Plus, it includes all the previous DLC, saving you $16 if you only bought Sonic Origins Plus.

Here's a breakdown of price differences:
-------------------------------------------------------------
>Sonic Origins was originally $39.99.

>Premium Fun Pack was $3.99.
>Classic Music Pack was $3.99.

>Sonic Origins is now $29.99. The other packs have been removed from the store page.

>The Plus Upgrade is $9.99.

>Sonic Origins Plus all together is $39.99.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Worse, if you paid $46 to get all the extra features, now you're paying $56. Almost retail price...

Are you kidding me? Because we believed in your product, you're making US pay more than people who didn't originally buy it?

Not like it's a ridiculous price increase, but c'mon, it just shows how much they don't care about treating fans with respect.

This is a wonderful top-down battle royale. I haven't had this much fun in a while. I would recommend this to almost every single person in the world. It's adorable when you hear quiet "nyas", sneakily rolling as you blow the head off of some fool getting in the way of your minigun.

You can play as 48+ different races of creatures; foxes, cats, dogs, hyenas, wolves, birds, seals, raccoons, you name it. To compliment the number of playable races, there's also hundreds of cosmetics to unlock and they all look so cute.

Not only is it a really fun sugar apocalypse, it loads a surprising amount of subtle lore and creates a need to uncover all the game's dark secrets...

BUT

One thing that keeps me from giving a 10/10? It seems the devs think Australia doesn't exist.

I went into every server available and recorded the average ping. It's a little insane.

NA - 246 ping
EU - 371 ping
AS - 284 ping
SA - 394 ping

But even then, it's still an amazing game. The longest session I've had was 17 hours when on vacation. And those hours are just going to keep growing.

Why would you play anything else?

Needs mod support.

If you're new to Magic and you want to learn how to play, this game is fantastic on teaching you the ways of the basics and explaining what all the enchantments, auras, abilities, and everything else mean. This is coming from someone who had no idea what Magic really was until I played this game. Now I feel like an expert. The game runs you through every element (White, Blue, Green, Red, and Black) to make sure you get a feel for what each color specializes in. Then once you're about to complete the tutorial, it lets you choose what kind of deck you want to run with. And it's already pre-built, just for you, to ensure that you at least stand somewhat of a chance against the computer that knows what it's doing. Most of the time...

BUT

If you're an experienced player and you want to play it with your friends and see what kind of awesome deck you can make with the newly-implemented pre-built decks, look the other way. The pre-built deck system is not quite what everyone else was hoping it would be as every deck combination you could possibly use starts you with a vast number of inferior cards. Of course, there's supposed to be weak cards in every deck, but these decks are built with cards that don't have a fine and polished pattern that work efficiently. I guess that makes sense knowing that every card combination, whether it be Red and Blue, Green and White, or Black and Blue, has many ways for you to customize them to your own liking and build your own kind of strategy.

But here's the kicker; the way you get cards is by beating people with a very unefficient deck. If you don't go with white, you're likely going to lose a lot. And the designers planned that. Because once you beat Avacyn, if you can because she's the final boss of the first plane in the campaign, there's an option for you to BUY CARDS. Seriously. I'm not kidding. You can waste $35 of your hard-earned money to get every card IN THE GAME. NOT in as every card in existence. Every card that was PUT INTO THE GAME. And it doesn't bother telling you that either.

Now there's two things that aggravates me about this: First, people who have a lot of money now have the ability to create a terrifying-powerful deck just because they have money. That ruins the experience of learning how to use what you're limited to and formulating your own unique strategy. Now they can use all the best cards and get bored with the challenges and regret their purchase because they wasted their money on a game they'll never play again. Secondly, for the people who don't have money all over their floors, they have to constantly beat annoying people with annoyingly polished decks that crush you if you don't draw all your good cards early in the game. Constantly. And even then, the best card they could get is something that doesn't fit well in any of their decks. The booster packs you earn for beating the snot out of the computer will ALWAYS give you defective cards that don't help your weak deck. And the worst thing about it, is that if you can't do anything but lose and you think you made the wrong choice for what deck you thought would be suitable for your playing style, guess what? You can't change it until you unlock all the cards that would be in the other pre-built decks, or if you reset your profile and risk losing all the cards you so painfully earned.

This game is almost able to classify itself as a pay to win game. You know, like those games on the iPod Touch where you have to pay to unlock certain things that you need in order to progress in the game. Now I haven't spent thirty-five dollars, but just because others fell for it, that upsets me. You're stuck, so you have to pay. Unless you have a lot of free-time at home, which I doubt, or you have the patience of a god.

So in conclusion, only buy this if you have no idea how to play Magic and are interested in learning the fundamental concepts of Magic. Otherwise don't buy this friggin' game.