Sonic 3D Blast

Sonic 3D Blast was the last major solo entry in the Sonic series on the Sega Mega Drive and also one of its most unusual – instead of traditional high-speed side-scrolling, it builds on an isometric top-down view more reminiscent of older action-adventures than fast platformers. Sonic makes his way through six worlds divided into shorter sections, and his task is to find and free groups of enchanted Flicky birds, which must be herded and directed into a portable ring before the level's time limit runs out.

The game was made by the British studio Traveller's Tales, which briefly moved the Sonic series into a completely different genre than players had been used to up to that point. The pace is markedly slower and more deliberate, with the emphasis on route planning, finding the birds, and collecting items instead of a pure sprint through the level, setting the game apart not only from earlier Mega Drive entries but from most of Sonic's other output of the time. Visually, the game relies on pre-rendered graphics in isometric perspective, which gave the Mega Drive's then-modest hardware an unusually detailed, almost three-dimensional-looking environment full of colorful scenery and elaborate backgrounds, something rarely seen on a console of that generation.

Sonic 3D Blast also came out that same year in a different, adapted form on the competing Sega Saturn, but it's the Mega Drive version that remains the one most associated with the title – the last major solo outing for Sonic on Sega's 16-bit console before the whole series moved definitively to newer hardware, leaving this isometric experiment behind for good.

Why play it: Sonic 3D Blast is interesting more as a detour from the established formula than as a typical Sonic title – it will appeal to players who want to see how Sega's mascot coped with an isometric perspective right at the tail end of the Mega Drive era, just before the generation of 3D consoles arrived.