Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was the flagship game of the multimedia brand Sonic Boom, which besides the game also included its own animated series and a range of toys with a different character design - Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy received a bulkier, more action-oriented look, new personalities matching the series' more comedic tone, and a new emphasis on combat with destructible gear instead of purely speed-based platforming action.

The game was released exclusively for Wii U and bet on an action-adventure with an emphasis on the combat system, exploration of larger levels, and switching between four playable characters, each with its own special ability needed to solve puzzles and progress through the story - Knuckles could break through walls, Amy used a hammer to activate mechanisms, and so on, so the game placed greater emphasis on switching characters according to the situation than on the pure speed the series is traditionally known for. The development studio Big Red Button Entertainment was largely made up of people with no previous experience with the series and had limited development time, which noticeably showed in the game's technical state - frequent frame-rate drops, freezing, collision bugs, and unfinished animations were apparent already at launch, placing the game among the worst-received entries in the entire Sonic brand. The Wii U version used the GamePad to display a map and supplementary character information, but that had no significant effect on the overall impression of a technically unfinished game. The game was released in the same period as the launch of the Sonic Boom television series, with which it shared character designs and the world, and was meant to serve as its interactive counterpart for the home console.

Why play: More of a curiosity for fans who want to get to know the most controversial chapter of the Sonic brand and see what an attempt to restart the series toward action-adventure looked like - but expect it to be rough, unstable, and unpolished as a playable experience.