by Sonic Runners is playable again! The download link is here.
But wait I hear some of you say. “I thought this game was dead” or “Wait what is Sonic Runners, I have never heard of it.” might be thoughts that are going through your head right now.
Lets start with a brief history recap and then I will explain why I would recommend this mobile game to any Sonic fan.
Sonic Runners was a 2015 side-scrolling endless running video game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise for Android and iOS. It was developed by Sonic Team as its first Sonic game exclusive to smartphones and published by Sega. In Sonic Runners, the player-character constantly ran forward, and players controlled their jumping using the touchscreen. The game featured a wide variety of playable characters from the Sonic series, and was free-to-play and received periodic updates. The game ran on servers so the player needed to have a stable internet connection at all times. Sega discontinued the game and shut the servers down in July 2016.
This meant that the game was not playable anymore. Until july 2019 a small group of fans started making the game playable again by hosting the game on their servers. They fortunately has backed up the game files and made it possible to be playable again. The game now goes under the name Sonic Runners Revival.
Revival went under big maintanance in the beginning of this year but at the time of writing this is playable again.
A great history video talking about the game before its revival has been made by the youtuber PatMac:
Simply said Sonic Runners is an infinite runner. And this might you ask what makes it different from Sonic Dash, Dash 2 and Sonic Forces Speed Battle which were also (in)finite runners. The main difference here lies that this game is 2D and doesn’t spawn obstacles randomly which the Dash games do when you get really far running.
In this game the player only needs to touch the screen to do actions. Jumping, air jumping, enabling items, using cannons and more is just done by a simple touch on the screen. The controls are simple but the game makes it more challenging by excellent level generation that by replaying can be rembered for optimal routes. The level generation have a certain pattern to it that make it almost a rythim game.
The goal of the game is to improve your highscore. This is done by running as far as possible ofcourse but also by banking rings at checkpoints, collecting crystals and flickies. These collectables can be found while running ofcourse but after running a certain distance a mini-boss battle with Eggman will start.
The goal of these mini-boss battles is not to defeat Eggman but to take as many as possible rings from him. (Comment down below if you reconize the character who is spin-dash in this picture)
After hitting the eggster he will drop rings and try to boost out of the way again but your character will soon catch up and you will be able to land multiple hits this way. After the timer runs out Eggman flees and the game speed gets turned up a rank. There are four ranks of speed so the game won’t get unfairly fast.
If the player gets hit by an obstacle with no rings or falls into a pit the run is over and the player gets send back to the results screen. My current high score is just below 10 million. Can you beat me?
With this the game is already pretty fun in my opinion but what keeps me going for beating my high score? The story mode and the different characters. Each score after you finish a run will be used to progress in the story mode.
There are 50 chapters in Sonic Runners where each chapter can have multiple sub-chapters. To finish each (sub-)chapter the player needs a certain total amount of score to progress. Each point on the story bar will give the player either a reward or a story event or both. The player doesn’t need to get the total required score of a chapter in one run to finish the chapter. The player can do multiple runs to get the total required score. This means that any player can finish the entire story mode regardless of skill.
At the end of most chapters there will be a boss fight against Eggman. In these fights the goal is to defeat Eggman. Eggman has different types of fights but all of them rely on the player jumping over moving obstacles and waiting to hit a yellow obstacle which will bounce back to Eggman
The player can also hit Eggman with certain items if the player decides to bring them to the fight. Some of these items are returning wisps. The returning wisps and the other items can also be used during runs.
Talking about returning wisps reminds of the multiple returning playable and non playable characters in this game.
The number of playable characters is 25+. The entire cast from Sonic Generations is playable plus some surprise characters. Characters that only appeared in one game and no one expected to return. And these surprise characters can also be found extensively in the buddy screen. (Command down below if you can recognize the silhouettes of the characters)
