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Sonic Dash Review

Sonic Dash is a 2013 endless runner mobile game developed by Hardlight and published by Sega. It’s a solid, but disappointing game.

As is the case with all endless runners, you are tasked with running, avoiding obstacles and enemies and you have to do that until you can. It becomes faster and faster and eventually you are bound to make a mistake and die. The ultimate goal here is to beat your previous record and get on the leaderboard while also unlocking other stages in the game.

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Collecting rings definitely is a good choice for the progression inside the game as it lets you buy upgrades that help you a lot with running faster etc. However, even though that was very well incorporated, it can become rather tedious as it takes you sweet time before you accumulate enough coins to be able to buy anything. Even worse is the game’s incredibly annoying freemium approach. Basically, it is free to play, but it has so many microtransactions that are distracting from the overall experience, especially the advertisements that you are forced to play if you want to continue playing after dying.

You have a very limited possibility of moves in Sonic Dash. Running is most of it, but you can also bounce on the fish, which was cool, and naturally you can boost at appropriate times. The rolling is also done well for the elimination of enemies. Speaking of enemies, I found them far from exciting. The spiky enemies aren’t particularly difficult to beat and again their variety left a lot to be desired.

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Let’s talk about the boss battles. After a while, the player will encounter the famous villains from Sonic lore and if you beat them, you get a significant amount of coins. Doctor Eggman is very well utilized here. I liked his look, his voice and the overall gameplay was pretty good in this instance. However, he was still overly easy to finish off without ever posing genuine threat.

Sonic Dash presents you with a few tasks and goals to finish each day and you get some good prizes for doing those. This is the main reason why I played the game maybe longer than I should have. The tasks at hand are very well thought out and sometimes they were quite difficult, but most of the time their difficulty level was just right with the collecting part being particularly interesting and very easy to get lost in for hours.

But otherwise, the game is rather repetitive and rather empty unfortunately. Green Hills Zone and Aquatic Ruin Zone get uninteresting pretty quickly and it is very problematic that the game developers decided not to feature more stages, even after the game was a huge success as it apparently continues to gather momentum well after 2013. More variety is the name of the game when it comes to this endless runner.

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As for its technicalities, it’s pretty good, but again nothing truly special. The graphics are good for Android games, the game looks polished and the colors are pleasing. The score and sound are both pretty good and the game has no bugs to speak of, which is especially important for mobile games. But the level design should have been more creative at the end of the day. One of the highlights is the unlocking of new characters, which made the game fun to play.