It’s kinda sad seeing that the Sonic Boom series is often not very well seen by fans (or the general public), personally I like the Sonic Boom cartoon, it’s clearly made for kids but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying it, and because of that it’s a shame that Rise of Lyric and Shattered Crystal are part of this series, which heavily damaged the reputation of both Sonic Boom and the main series.
I want to clarify that I’ve only played the demo of Shattered Crystal on the 3DS, while I liked the controls I had problems with the level design and I didn’t liked the mandatory nature of the collectibles and game’s diversions, like the submarine, the Sonic Dash-esque sections, etc.
Now that I stated that I’m glad to say that Fire & Ice fixes most of its predecessors problems, first of all, let’s start with the controls, which are the same from its predecesor, returning characters have the same abilities from last time, Sonic can do the spin dash and air dash, tails can hover and shoot lasers, Knuckles can dig and Sticks can throw a boomerang, and this time Amy joins the team and makes use of her hammer that can lower pillars that blocks the path, just like Shattered Crystal everybody can sprint, double jump, do the homing attack and use the enerbeam to swing across gaps, the new addition to Sonic & friends is the use of the Fire & Ice abilities, basically fire can melt ice and ice can freeze water, it may sound so simple but I liked the implementation of the Fire & Ice abilities, specially when I had to change between elements quickly, and fortunately you can easily change between elements by pressing the shoulder buttons.
One thing that they fixed with Fire & Ice is the level design, which is way better, instead of a metroidvania-esque design Fire & Ice balances very well fast platforming with exploration, thanks to that levels doesn’t take around 10-15 minutes to complete, on my playthrough levels took me around 2 minutes if I only wanted to reach the goal, and 6-7 minutes if I was looking the various collectibles each level has, speaking of collectibles, this time they’re completely optional, you can finish the game with collecting a single one of them, this can be applied for most of the game diversions, the only mandatory one are the Bot Races against Eggman robots, this are fine, I only wished this races took place on other environments, every Bot Race takes place on Thunder Island, and after a while it becomes mundane.
Going back to the stages each one of them contains Challenge Rooms, were the players tests their skills in order to get one of the game’s collectibles, trading cards, I find the challenge rooms pretty fun, unfortunately they can only be played one time, the game also contains a total of 4 bosses, this are fun, specially because they make use of both of the 3DS screens, something I haven’t seen in a Sonic game since the Rush series.
Sonic Boom Fire & Ice also contains a story, but compared to other Sonic titles here it’s almost not present, the writing is almost like the cartoon and when there’s a cutscene it can be funny, but overall the story can be summed up as fissures appear over the world and as Sonic team closes them they suspect this new robot called D-Fekt is related to the fissures and Eggman, so they chase him across many places in order to find the source, is a very simple story and like I said, it can be funny, but its almost not present.
Visually it’s not a pretty game, basically the same as Shattered Crystal, so yeah, Knuckles face still looks weird, and the environments looks pretty generic, the same can be applied to the soundtrack, which is a shame, because usually Sonic games contains really good music.
Visuals and music aside, I had a lot of fun with Sonic Boom Fire & Ice gameplay, thanks to the better designed levels and thankfully collectibles and most diversions aren't mandatory, I can easily say that I enjoyed this game a lot more than the demos of the other 2 Sonic Boom games, and also Sonic Lost Worlds. If you liked the control aspect of Shattered Crystal, this game might be for you. And hey, Sonic Boom finally has a good game.