Sonic the Hedgehog used to be king of the platforming castle, but the blue blur's long since fallen from grace. There have been some decent recent titles in SEGA's flagship series – the excellent Sonic Generations immediately springs to mind – but there's also been some trash. Perhaps the financially challenged firm needs to take the character back to basics, then – and what better way than reviving the original two-dimensional classics with an added layer of depth.
This amazing video demo by pipocaVFX shows how Green Hill Zone could look in 2.5D. It's not the first time that we've seen the anthropomorphised avatar appear in a game with this type of graphical style, but we reckon that the fusion of sprites with simple geometric shapes works well – even if the physics do still look funky. Would you play a game like this on the PlayStation 4? Spin dash into the comments section below.
[source youtube.com, via kotaku.com, nintendolife.com]
Comments 7
Sonic Generations was a good game, but not the open world parts. Sonic is meant to be a 2D platformer and not the 3D Mario kind. I did not play Sonic Boom yet (after hearing all of the horrible reviews) but I'm not saying that I won't if I find it for $5. I've played every other sonic title...some good, some not, but I still love the Sonic games...guess I'll just bust out my Genesis though when I want to play the excellent ones.
Call me naive, but I still think there's another good Sonic game to be made. I'm hoping once the Nintendo exclusivity deal is over, and once they've found someone who can point the project in the right direction, we might seem his little blue much on PS4.
As for this video, it's pretty fun - I like the addition of special effects. The mix of 3D and 2D makes my eyes hurt though.
A 2.5d Sonic game like this would be good. panning the camera to help keep the player in speed is probably the best addition.
There are a lot of concepts that would work with sonic but they usually arent fully realized and the sonic team usually isnt involved any way. just look at rayman legends and the loads of successful autorunner games with unique ideas for examples.
The series honestly wouldn't be so bad if the formula didn't get changed after two games or so. The Adventure games were fine for the most part, but instead of improving on that, they switched to Heroes and Shadow (which were decent and awful respectively). Colors and Generations had an upward trend going but then Lost World happened (haven't played it yet). Sonic Boom I don't even consider a true Sonic game since it's with the cartoon and not the games themselves. I'm hoping we can get something like Generations or Colors on PS4 and hopefully the devs stick with the formula, because honestly there was no excuse to change what wasn't broken.
@JLPick
Generations had no open world on it, that's one of the reasons it was good
@RawShark Nintendo deal is already over, hence Sonic Runners on mobile (doing rather well in Japan and Canada).
I'd enjoy a new Sonic game but not if it looked like the concept in the video. To me that was a visual nightmare, with the ever changing angles needed to make the concept work. Since the whole platform gaming scene has become popular again why on earth would you create an awful, blocky 2.5D environment? When instead you could create a beautifully rendered, ultra smooth flowing and fast 2D environment. Although it's not a platformer 'Child of Light' showed how a 2D environment can be truly stunning.
Show Comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...