Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal

Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal
more like Sonic Bust: Shattered Potential.
Genre(s): Action-adventure Platform Platform(s): Nintendo 3DS Release Date: NA: November 11, 2014 JP: December 18, 2014 EU: November 21, 2014 AU: November 20, 2014 Developer(s): Sanzaru Games Publisher(s): Sega Country: United States Series: Sonic the Hedgehog Successor: Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice Sonic Runners (by release date)

Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal is an action-adventure platform video game developed by Sanzaru Games and published by Sega for the Nintendo 3DS. The game was released in the same days as its Wii U sibling Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (2014). Shattered Crystal is a spin-off of Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and like Rise of Lyric, it is a prequel to the animated series Sonic Boom.

Why It Must Be Shattered

1. The game has several of the same flaws as Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, such as sluggish pace, slow frame rate, cheesy dialogue and unfunny "jokes," outdated graphics, forgettable and unimpressive music, camera issues, and a boring and tedious combat.
2. It's not possible to just jump and run around like you can in any other Sonic game. This is just pretty confusing, especially for a Sonic game, as in the other Sonic games, you can jump and run around. Shattered Crystal, however, doesn't belong to that category.
3. No character development. For instance, Knuckles is still an idiot and Shadow is still an edgelordy jerk-like loner, like if the writers just decided to keep them like this instead of improving their characters.
4. Mediocre story that's on par with Sonic Labyrinth. It even looks like it doesn't want to be an improvement over the other games' stories, like Outlaw Chopper for example.
5. Mediocre graphics that are very outdated for 2014 standards, even when compared to the 3DS port of Sonic Lost World, in fact that game on 3DS look better than this despite being downgraded from the Wii U version.
6. Poor controls.
7. Slow-moving, unskippable text boxes during story scenes. This is just made to waste more of your time, and you have to watch the cutscenes, without even making the text boxes during story scenes faster, or even try to skip them. No matter what you will do, you won't speed up or skip the text boxes during story scenes at all.
8. The slow pacing in these levels are so tedious that it will take you ages to complete these levels (around 10 minutes for the regular platforming levels), and even by looking at the timer, it's quite obvious. Even the Nintendo 3DS eShop demo of all things suffered from these issues.
9. In order to make any real progress, you have to search tirelessly for tons of objects on each level rather than enjoy the level for what it is.
10. Levels are purposefully designed to have points of no return, forcing you to replay them at least twice to find everything. Just like the text boxes during story cutscenes, this is just a waste of time, like you would actually attempt to fall asleep during gameplay.
11. Every level feels like direct copy-and-paste jobs, just like many games from the Genesis version of Action 52, which is just feeling pretty lazy. This is also pretty weird for a Sonic game.
12. The map system is useless. This might be confusing, like if you would wonder why they added the map system, despite being useless.
13. Bland bosses, in all four bosses, three of them are just races. This is just another lazy thing, like the levels.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Good quality cutscenes.
2. Like Tails Adventure, it does take a lot of inspiration to Metroidvania.
3. The game isn't as glitchy as Rise of Lyric, despite sharing the same problems.

Reception

Although Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal received slightly more favorable reviews than the Wii U game, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (2014), the game received 47/100 on Metacritic, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.

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