SonicN Game Review

SonicN marks the debut of Sonic Team's ever-popular Sonic the Hedgehog on Nokia's N-Gage. The game is actually a port of the slightly more than a year old Sonic Advance for the Game Boy Advance. The game has multiple playable characters and a time attack mode. These additions to the standard Sonic formula are certainly welcome, but in general, they only serve to erase something that is otherwise a pretty impressive impression that suffers a lot from translation between formats.

If you've played Sonic Advance for the GBA, you know pretty much what to expect to go to SonicN. The game has 12 primary levels, each divided into six different zones. The levels are designed around the age-old concept of fast-paced gameplay in Sonic style, which includes many jumps, loops, and similar platform mechanics, in addition to a healthy dose or collection of rings and the appearance of an occasional villain - who to blunt. Each zone is booked by a final boss against the long-standing opponent of Sonic. Eggman, who wants to take over the world again by gaining control of a number of precious gems, called chaos-emeralds. The N-Gage game also contains the same series of characters. Sonic is clearly playable. Of course, there are also his always spicy sidekick Tails, his sometimes hostile / sometimes ally Knuckles and his girlfriend Rose. Each character has his or her own unique skills. Tails, for example, can actually fly over short distances, while Knokkels can slide over mild openings and also climb certain surfaces. The extra characters add some repeat value to the game because you have to continue playing the game with all four to unlock the final zone. Unfortunately, that will not last very long, and apart from the time attack mode, that is really all the game has to offer.

In general, SonicN controls reasonably responsively and generally plays well. Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw in the design of the game, which unfortunately comes from the design of the N-Gage itself. Because the system uses a vertically designed screen, the Full-Screen mode or SonicN itself does not get terribly good for productive results when accelerating through the levels of the game. This is because the full-screen mode basically brings the screen to the point where you can't actually control what you can expect. There is absolutely no margin for error when approaching danger, and unless you have superhuman reflexes, it is unlikely that you can approach pitfalls or enemies. The game offers a letterbox mode, which uses a large blue border to surround the action on the screen and to force it into the pure aspect ratio. This helps to somewhat alleviate the above problem, but it also creates a new one because this way is much heavier for the eyes, because everything is basically reduced by half. This loss/loss situation really kills a lot of the appeal of the game.

SonicN is also plagued by a number of technical issues that interfere with graphics and sound. The intrinsic design of the game is almost an exact copy of Sonic Advance, but with just a little bit more detail in the characters and levels. The character animation is also essentially the same as from Sonic Advance, and it all looks pretty good. Unfortunately, the frame rate of the game suffers quite a bit, especially in areas where the speed of the game really increases. The game also just seems a lot more nervous and completely over when it comes to camera movement. Sometimes the inconsistent frame rate, in combination with the camera, can even lead to a somewhat nauseating feeling when playing the game for longer periods. The complementary or sound effects and music of the game are all almost exactly as it should be for a Sonic game, although everything definitely has a thin and unpleasant sound.

Somewhere deep inside there is a good game buried under the multiple technical yokes of SonicN, but it is buried too deep to find. Given that there is a much better version of the exact same game elsewhere, there is no real reason that you should suffer from the poor frame speed, sound quality and the annoying display modes of SonicN. Unless you are an absolute diehard Sonic fan who does not have a GBA, there is absolutely no reason to play SonicN.