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Sonic Nebulous (PC) Game Review

 

Sonic Nebulous is a free Sonic fan game that I discovered through a YouTube video featuring  such games. It is a side scrolling plat-former set in the SatAM universe, hence it’s darker visual style.

One of the first noticeable things about the game is that it features all hand-drawn characters, which definitely shows it to be a labor of love and help it stand out. The graphics overall, are quite nice, with only occasional animation issues. And speaking of characters, this game could put many fighting games to shame with its character roster! The game features a whopping 30 characters from various Sonic universes (games, Satam, Underground, Archie and possibly some fan-made characters too!) As a teenager I had started making my own Sonic comic series where I tried together all these different versions of Sonic into one universe, so I liked seeing this game do similar. Many of the characters have unique abilities which helped me a lot playing through the game - any time I’d find myself struggling on a given zone, I’d try out different characters til I found one that helped me get by whatever obstacle was bugging me. I also found it cool that you can even play as some older characters (Uncle Chuck and Rosie, specifically). The enemy designs were pretty cool, some pulled right from the SatAM show, with others being some very spooky boss monsters who often looked they might be old neglected robots Robotnik had left laying around,




The game’s soundtrack, while I’m pretty sure is all pulled from other sources, is a solid selection of tunes. I find it reminiscent of how SEGA did Sonic Adventure 2’s soundtrack, with some of its funky hip-hop tracks.  I recognized tunes from some electronic artists I really like such as Aphex Twin, The Prodigy and The KLF. These helped enhance the dark fantasy/steampunk feel of the world further.


The sound effects were also well-done, but I did have mixed feelings about the voice clips used in the game. It was cool to hear some characters talk, using audio clips from SatAM, but early on in the game I found some voices annoyingly repetitive and was glad I could turn them off (Antoine was the worst culprit for me).



Speaking of turning things on and off, the game thankfully does have a decent options menu, though I do wish it would save my settings so I didn’t have to re-set them each time I launched the game or got a game over. One of the game’s graphical features is screen-rotation when you go around loops and slopes, which is technically interesting, but I played with it turned off because it made me feel disoriented.


While I really dug all the nerdy Sonic love that was put into this game, it does have some technical issues that I hope will get ironed out in a future update. To get this game to run I had to launch it from steam, as the executable by itself  kept giving me an error message. While playing as the character “Honey The Cat”, I once had her freeze in place after doing an aerial dash attack  and was unable to move. The fact that some of the game’s controls require the use of F1-F12 keys was problematic for me as well, as my laptop has those set as system shortcut keys by default. I think it would help to add a controller configuration menu added to the options menu.



There were a couple of general design choices that troubled me as well. When you first start the game, you’re already being attacked by an enemy, which was stressful for me because I hadn’t even gotten to learn the controls yet. In the first zone there’s also a certain slope that is extremely difficult to get up over, unless you’re playing as someone who can fly or teleport. Lastly, I would occasionally experience frustration in enemy combat because the game lacks invincibility frames after taking damage (which were present in SEGA’s official 16-bit releases), and with the big boss enemies, I couldn’t always tell  what parts were and weren’t safe to touch.


I recommend this one, especially for any Sonic fans, or anyone who likes side-scrolling platformers with a badass soundtrack. It may have a few flaws, but nothing was game-breaking for me -  and there was so much love put into the game that I’d like to see it get more attention.If you’d like to give it a try, you can download the game here:
https://www.moddb.com/games/sonic-nebulous/downloads/sonic-nebulous-42

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