Sonic The Fighters Review

Why? That’s pretty much all that goes through your mind when you play Sonic the Fighters on an Xbox 360 console. Why would anyone spend time and money to re-release an online HD port of a fighting game that barely anyone remembers and even less people like? Sega have been milking a lot of their back catalogue lately but surely they can’t be this desperate.

It’s hard to know where to start when listing reasons why you shouldn’t buy Sonic the Fighters. Let’s get the obvious points out of the way, this is an increasingly crowded genre especially in the online community. Literally every single Capcom 2D fighter that’s available on Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network is better than this game, if you want a new fighting game just write them all down on a wall and throw a dart at them and buy whatever it hits, whatever you get will be a better investment than this. Sonic the Fighters was also put on the Sonic Gems  Collection on the Playstation 2, so if you’re curious enough to try it just pick that up instead and at least you’ll be able to cleanse your palate with some good Sonic games.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty though, the fighting engine in Sonic the Fighters is so ridiculously simplistic it may as well not exist at all. The best way to describe it probably is it’s like Virtua Fighter but without the control, technique, combos, strategy or anything that makes Virtua Fighter any good whatsoever. Most of the arcade mode can be beaten by just wailing on an attack button of your choice, “button bashing” is often a derogatory term when referring to fighting games but at least in most other fighting games you need to bash more than one button.

The cast is made up of all your favourite Sonic characters, including Sonic himself, Tails, Knuckles the Echidna….Fang the Sniper. Okay most of the cast are worthless made up anthropomorphic piles of crap, other classics include Bean the Dynamite which sounds like a Mexican freedom fighter or something, and the wonderfully creative Bark the Polar Bear. Other ideas for characters included Quack the Penguin,  Suck the Anteater and HEUGH the Sloth, all of which were considered too imaginative for the final product. Stupidity aside the biggest problem with the cast from a fighting game point of view is they all play too similar. You have little differences like Sonic is faster than most of the cast, and Knuckles hits the hardest, but all in all the fighting engine is just way too simple to notice any major differences or have any variety in matchups.

There are some more technical and strategic parts to Sonic the Fighters, none of which you’re likely to use other than for the sake of curiousity or just showing off. You have a limited number of barriers which you can use to block attacks, you have a “hyper mode” where you can trade in one of said barriers to extend combos and you can sidestep incoming attacks Tekken style which is unnecessary awkward to do and also becomes mostly unused in battles. Really, any attempt to give Sonic the Fighters more depth feels pretty token when all the characters have pathetically low health and the default setting for match length is 30 seconds. It’s hard to feel that the game ever wanted to become more than a button basher to suck up quarters at the arcade with Sonic appeal.

So is there any reason to purchase Sonic the Fighters? Well, the art design and visual style isn’t entirely unappealing but every stage takes place in a wrestling ring floating through random landscapes that you definitely won’t remember from your favourite Sonic game which is pretty dumb. Also it’s a 3D model game from 1996 so even with the HD brush applied to it don’t expect to be blown away by the graphics anyway. If you like your Gamerscore then Sonics got you covered there too, Sega seem to have followed in the footsteps of EA with their Simpsons game which gave you an achievement for pressing the Start button. You can earn half the Gamerscore Sonic the Fighters has to offer by winning one match so go nuts achievement whores.

Really, it’s not even so much that Sonic the Fighters is a terrible game, it’s just pointless to the point where re-releasing it is borderline offensive. There’s dozens of better fighters out there, no-one is going to have a nostalgic breakdown for it, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to play it for more than an hour even with friends and any online community it has will be dead within a week. Even at the cheap price, there’s no reason for anyone to buy this. Give it a miss, or if you’re seriously that curious pick up the Sonic Gems Collection cheap somewhere, this is not worth it.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.