Sonic Boom - Fire and Ice: Nothing new under the sun

Let's get straight to the point for once: this game could as well have been subtitled "Shattered Crystal 2". It's a virtual copy-paste of the first Sonic Boom entry on the 3DS: it sports the same aesthetics, the same cast of characters, the same physics, the same gameplay, the same weirdly vague zone themes, the same lacklustre soundtrack and the same overall atmosphere. Everything I said about Shattered Crystal applies to that game to a T, and that's why I'm going to focus on the — very few — new features that Fire and Ice brings to the table.

Let's start with the game's main selling point, i.e. the fire and ice gimmick. It's actually quite good for what it's worth, and it completes nicely the already existing Sonic Boom mechanics; but unfortunately, it's also completely underexploited. I fully expected the world of Fire and Ice to be solely composed of fiery and wintery zones that would have pushed that new gameplay feature to its limits; but instead, we have a potpourri of very classic and cookie-cutter zones in which the fire and ice gimmick is used only sporadically. Not only is that poor use a missed opportunity, but it also dilutes the impact of the character-specific gameplay mechanics introduced in Shattered Crystal. Fire and Ice could as well have featured Sonic alone for all the use it makes of the rest of the crew's abilities — and in my opinion, it definitely should have featured the Blue Blur alone in a land of fire and ice so gorgeous it would have made Georges R. R. Martin green with envy.

Mind you, the fact that character-specific abilities take a backseat in F&I is not entirely negative. It does away with one of SC's most annoying elements, namely the obligation to clear levels over and over again with different characters in order to be able to progress at all. This infuriating display of fake longevity is absent from F&I, replaced by a fluid progression that lets you rush forward to your heart's content. That makes F&I more akin to a genuine Platformer, while SC felt and played more like some sort of weird mix of Platformer and Action-Adventure game.

F&I is also noticeably harder than SC, which really took me by surprise — before I started huffing and puffing about it, that is. This added difficulty doesn't please me in the slightest, all the more so as it destroys what was in my opinion the strongest point of the Boom series' gameplay: its very un-Sonic relaxing quality. SC's gameplay was casual and thus pleasantly soothing, in an oddly unexpected way; F&I's gameplay, on the other hand, is more demanding and ends up being quite irritating. I am not ashamed to admit that I ragequit a couple of times and that playing that game felt more often like a exercise in frustration than like a relaxing outlet. And mind you, the level of difficulty involved is as bad as it can be: it's high enough to get on one's nerves, yet not high enough to be challenging and thus genuinely thrilling. This becomes painfully obvious when considering the Challenge Rooms, which are small bonus stages featuring some really tricky platforming; said platforming is so well-crafted and demanding that clearing these stages is truly exhilarating, and that's all the difficulty that game needed in my opinion. Just give us those nerve-racking challenges in small doses and let us luxuriate in that mellow trademark Boom gameplay.

All in all, I really can't fathom why this sequel was released at all. It was delayed by a whole year, and one could have thought that Sanzaru Games put some major work into the project; instead, what we got is a copy-paste of the first game with an underused gimmick added. What's the point of even developing such a game? Mind you, I know what the point is: the target audience for the Boom subseries are kids, and kids have long forgotten everything about the first entry and are no doubt treating F&I as a totally new and fresh game. For those of us who have longer memory spans and still own Shattered Crystal, Fire and Ice is an entirely dispensable purchase. It brings too little to the Boom formula and takes away too much from it to be worth playing, and that's coming from someone who genuinely enjoyed Shattered Crystal. I'll probably sell my copy of F&I at some point and hold onto SC for future replays; because SC is really all I need if I want to get a fix of that soothing Boom signature gameplay. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!