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Sonic Chaos Game Review

Sonic Chaos is a 1993 platform video game published by Sega for the Master System and Game Gear. It’s one of the weaker 2D Sonic games.

When this platformer was first released, it actually garnered mostly positive reviews from the critics. But today however, the game has been reevaluated as a middling installment in the series. I wholeheartedly agree with the latter assessment as it is very mediocre through and through.

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Sonic Chaos operates as pretty much every game in this series functioned in the early nineties. You go through each act of each zone collecting rings. If you collect 100 of them, you get a bonus stage. There are your regular power-ups that are repeated from previous games and the overall design of the levels was clearly influenced by ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’.

But gone is the authenticity and high speed of that classic platformer and instead what we got is this lazy, clumsy and slow platformer that just did not play well at any time. Yes, Sonic can go fast with the power-ups and boosts, but not nearly as fast as he should be going. The framerate was particularly atrocious, thus slowing the game even more.

There are only six zones in this overly short game that can be beaten in just an hour or so. The zones are as always divided into three acts with the last one ending in a boss fight. Every single boss was ridiculously easy to kill as they all have weaknesses that are obvious to spot and way too easy to abuse. The six zones obviously vary in quality, but there is not a single one zone that is truly remarkable at anything that it does. Mecha Green Hill Zone was uninteresting and just a mechanized version of the first zone that is itself your standard hill zone, but with somewhat changed visuals.

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Aqua Planet Zone is your typical water Sonic stage that this time around wasn’t all that difficult to beat. Electric Egg Zone is a solid final stage that is well designed and Gigalopolis Zone is even better as the fastest zone of the bunch. Sleeping Egg Zone was clearly the best one as it featured these blocks that you have to destroy to get through the levels, making the playthrough at least somewhat original. So, there are solid zones present here, but again nothing to truly impress players.

There are, though, some positives to be found here. One is the level design of a couple of levels that was quite solid and inventive. But the best thing about Chaos is the addition of Tails as a playable character. I personally prefer him over Sonic, so I played as Tails for the entirety of this game. Sonic is faster as always, but Tails uses his tails to fly, making it easier to navigate certain obstacles. It was a great added element that really worked.

But other than that, the sound is just okay and the soundtrack is very forgettable. It’s not bad or anything, but it’s far from the classic Sonic bangers of the period. The world building is quite inferior and the visuals are very mediocre with some levels looking rough and unfinished. It had a very cheap, simplistic aesthetic with weak patchy backgrounds that simply did not appeal to me. The game controls well, but it was so easy that it was not a challenge whatsoever, which was unfortunate.

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