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Sonic Blast Game Review

Sonic Blast is a 1996 platform video game developed by Aspect and published by Sega for the Game Gear. It’s a very weak installment in this series.

When this game was released in 1996, it was the beginning of the 3D era, so it must have been dated even then to have not just a 2D game, but one for an aging handheld console. Nowadays it is regarded as one of the worst in the series. I do agree with this sentiment, though I would contend that ‘Sonic Chaos’ is even worse.

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The plot is nothing to write home about. You can either play as Sonic or Knuckles. I chose Sonic as I prefer him personally. Sonic has all the same abilities retained from the previous entries in the series with one new addition – the double-jump. This second jump mid-air is a platformer staple, but it was only introduced in this Sonic game first. I enjoyed this addition as it complemented rather well the game’s level design consisting of so many steep platform tiles.

Every other element is repeated from before, including how rings work, the level structure, power-ups and speed boosts. There are special stages here that you unlock when you find a giant ring hidden within each level. They were well hidden and the stages resembled the ones from ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’, making for the best parts of this entire game.

Sonic Blast has fifteen levels in total. There are five zones with three acts each. Every final act is a smaller level with a boss fight. The bosses are standard. They aren’t as easy as in some of the previous games, but they aren’t terribly difficult either, mostly being disposable. Some levels are fairly well designed, but there are others that were quite mediocre.

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Green Hill Zone is your typical first Sonic zone with green landscapes and overly easy levels. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either. Yellow Desert Zone is another standard second zone set in Ancient Egypt. It’s visually the best zone of the bunch and the most enjoyable, but way too short. Similarly, Red Volcano Zone is quite fun and solid, but too easy and short.

These levels represented the shorter and less elaborate part of the game while the final two were exactly the opposite. These final zones were quite labyrinthine for better and for worse. I appreciated the exploration elements, but I found myself lost too often than not. Silver Castle Zone was at least somewhat enjoyable in its mazes, but Blue Marine Zone was horrendous. These were your typical aquatic platformer levels that were not only too hard due to time limits, but also difficult to control and just plain insufferable to go through.

Sonic Blast features very mediocre graphics. This was a Game Gear game after all, but one released very late in the console’s lifespan. The pre-rendered visuals made for an overly big strain on this console, which resulted in a lot of slowdown. The game lagged for me and it was just not a fun experience when it felt so slow, clumsy and awkward. Sonic games need to be fast, but this one felt too snaillike. The level design could be good here, but the visuals overall were subpar. As for the score and sound, both are only serviceable.

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