Tails Adventure
D rank
An ambitious game, kind of decent too, but afflicted by several major quality of life and design issues which completely ruin the experience. The issues are so many and so deep in the core of the game, that would be easier to redesign the game completely rather than fix them.
Where should I begin...
Menues are terrible, to the point that they ruin the game completely (I know that at the time there were manuals and all, but it's still bad design):
Spoiler
- If you enter the "continue" screen, you should just press start, if you accidentally change those numbers/letters without keepink track of how they were before, you are stuck in that screen until you reset the game or copy a code from Internet and cheat.
- Getting in and out from menues screens is also inconsistent: sometimes you select "back" and press start, other times you exit with the button 1, other times ("continue") there's an "exit" option but you can't select it, you can't exit at all unless you enter a code and press start.
- The "continue" menu is accessible from the "dock" screen, for some reason, almost as if it was a sort of trap intentionally placed to eat your progresses. You enter the dock, there's nothing you can do because you are in the first half of the game and the dock is useless, so you want to select "equip" or "ready" to see what they do in the "dock" screen, maybe a new option or something... they are green and look selectable, but they aren't: left+up+1 will turn into up+1 because "equip" and "ready" are locked and the left input is ignored, so... up+1 will enter... "continue"!
- The equipment menu is super unintuitive. It has a set of 4 slots where you are supposed to equip up to 4 items... the first item you find (if you search well enough) is the red chaos emerald, it can't be equipped. You enter the equipment screen, try to switch the remote robot and the bombs just to see how to interact with the menu, and nothing happens; you try to equip the chaos emerald, nothing happens, you convince yourself that the game is not working properly because the menu doesn't work, though that's the intended behavior.
- Selecting items in stages is super unintuitive, I had to search online in order to figure out how to rotate those 4 items; Take Psychic World (Game Gear) for example, it's another story completely, that's well designed.
- Menues are also terribly slow to navigate, as well as rotating the items in the stage, everything is super slow.
- The map is also a pain, the cursor never goes where you want.
The gameplay is janky and slow, the level design is bland and sometimes bad:
Spoiler
- Tails walks very slowly, it's annoying.
- Most weapons don't cover a good range and often even if you are close to an enemy you fail to attack it because the weapons work bad. Bombs don't have a shockwave so you can visually hit an enemy and still not damage it, by a pixel maybe.
- Throwing bombs during a jumps works the opposite as it should: throwing a bomb while ascending will throw it with a lower trajectory, throwing it while descending will throw it with an higher arc. The trajectory is fixed, it's not dynamically calculated, and the change between high and low arc happens all of a sudden, in a binary way.
- Moving Tails close to a ledge will automatically flip him to the opposite direction. This means that you can't throw bombs at enemies without fighting the game's jank and getting yourself at risk of falling/getting hit. Automatic grabbing and climbing can occasionally get in the way of your precision movements too and may cause unfair damage.
- The level design is very generic and not much interesting; sometimes it's unfair, there are a few places where it's almost impossible to pass without getting damage, at least with the initial equipment.
- Second level: thin platforms are solid and must be destroyed with remote bombs; thick platforms are semisolid and you can fly through them from below (though they crumble once you land on them). It makes very little sense and it's very unintuitive, especially since in the first level there are thin platforms that you can fly through. Uh and in the third level, thick platforms which are completely solid return, as well as breakable blocks which have the same tile as the ones you can break with the bombs, but don't break because require a stronger attack (there are also blocks which break with any bombs but not with the helmet, you never known what item is required for breaking stuff). Inconsistent visual language, other Sonic games have this issues though, especially the classics: Sonic 2, Sonic CD, Sonic 2 8 bit and others.
- Falling from an high platform makes you carry so much gravity momentum that it's impossible to stop even if you fly: this leads to a lot of unfair damage especially in the second stage. If you fly early in order to avoid this, you will consume all the stamina and fall anyway (at least at the beginning of the game when you don't have much of it). But there's an exploit, in the next point.
- Pressing up + flight multiple times can reset the stamina counter and make you fly infinitely. What's the point of increasing the stamina with the chaos emeralds then? Is it a glitch, a cheat or what?
- Lava deals damage over time without giving you an invincibility frame; enemies do 1 of damage and give you invincibility frames; in order to navigate the lava areas, sometimes it's better to get intentionally hit by an enemy or an hazard, then walk on lava by abusing of the invincibility frame. It's just bad designed in general
- You can't exit a level without backtracking to the beginning; super annoying
- Except at the beginning of the game when you don't have all the slots filled and the items are automatically equipped, each time you unlock a new item, you have to exit the level and visit Tails' House and equip them. This means backtracking offcourse, or reaching the end of the level without having the new item equipped (or just losing on purpose and continuing the game, it's faster and keeps the unlocked item... it's not exactly good game design though).
- Even if it keeps track of the unlocked items, every time you continue the game with a code, it will reset the equipped items back to the ones of the last cleared level, so it will unequip the items you had when you died and you have to equip them again. If you don't notice, you may realize that the item that you need is unequipped when you are half way through a level.
- Later in the game, you are required to continuously change equipment and keep visiting Tails' house because 4 slots are too few. Especially when you are exploring the levels in order to find stuff and you are not sure about what to pick... trial and error makes you waste a massive amount of time, especially considering that each time you crawl deep into a level, you have to backtrack in order to exit it.
- The speed button is an item that you find hidden in levels, and takes a slot. Obviously when you have the speed shoe equipped, you can't attack and are completely helpless.
- Bombs and remote bombs aren't an upgrade but they are a separated items and take another slot. They as well are hidden in a level.
- The remote robot can be disabled at distance, but you have to watch it very slowly return to Tails. The farther it is, the more boring it gets.
- A gameover (any time you lose, there are no lives) will kick you to the title screen, and if you aren't careful enough and get stuck in the "continue" screen by messing the code, you may lose all your progresses unless you previously wrote the code somewhere. As soon as you see that cursed screen, you have to carefully just press start and nothing else.
- Cleared puzzles aren't persistent. It means, for example, that in the second stage, if you want to reach the end, you have to bring the remote bombs with you every time because they are required in order to progress (so you just have 3 slots instead of 4).
- Piloting the Remote Robot makes both you and the robot invincible? What? So you can just break the game and stay invincible until you are safe. Tails Adventure has the helmet which does more or less the same thing and also damages enemies like Kirby's Stone/SMB3's Tanuki statue, though it's unlocked later, with the robot exploit you can have most of its benefits very early in the game. This is kind of fun actually, but it still happens out of poor game design and should be counted as a flaw.
- healing rings are deleted as soon as they go out of screen. Sometimes they are hidden in walls and you have to free them by breaking blocks while falling... as soon as you climb back to where the rings were, they will be disappeared already, offcourse.
I appreciate the attempt at doing a Sonic themed metroidvania, as well as a couple of things such as the way how Tails can grab the ledges or fly without bashing the jump button, but this game is just too flawed.
There's an interesting "wow" moment when you unlock the submarine, but as soon as you play for a while, it's evident that the underwater parts are just as slow, boring and weakly designed as the rest of the game. But at least there are some very creative ideas with it.
It hurts me to rate this game so low, since there's a lot of effort in it, but it's simply too bad designed for getting a better rating than this. I rated it lower than Sonic Spinball 8 bit, offcourse, because as janky and weird as that game is, at least it's decently fast paced and has a better sense of progression. "Sonic 2 8 bit: Screen Crunch edition, Prepare to Die Unfairly" is also above, because the gameplay itself is much more fun regardless of the problems.
I had to stop my playthrough of Tails Adventure at half game because it's too boring (I did a savestate though, might complete it in the future; I did already finish it once years ago).
Ranks given so far (in the spoiler):
Spoiler
S - Sonic 1 (16 bit)
A - Sonic 3 & Knuckles
A - Sonic 3
A - Sonic & Knuckles
A - Sonic 1 (8 bit) Master System
A - Sonic 1 (8 bit) Game Gear
B - Sonic CD
B - Tails' Skypatrol
C - Sonic 2 (16 bit)
C - Sonic Triple Trouble
C - Sonic 2 (8 bit) Master System
C - Sonic Chaos Master System
C - Sonic Chaos Game Gear
D - Sonic Spinball (16 bit)
D - Sonic Spinball (8 bit) Master System
D - Sonic Spinball (8 bit) Game Gear
D - Sonic 2 (8 bit) Game Gear
D - Tails Adventure
D - Knuckles' Chaotix
D - Sonic Eraser
E - Sonic Drift 2
E - Sonic Drift
Edited by Iko
