Back in the PlayStation 2 days, store shelves were practically drowning in mediocre 3D platforming games aimed at kids. It may be a 📖Wii U title that came out this year, but Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric would have fit in perfectly next to middling games starring The Incredibles or Spongebob Squarepants in 2006. Neither outstandingly good nor bad, and making the assumption that younger gamers are fundamentally less skilled, Sonic Boom seems doomed to fade into obscurity just like its spiritual predecessors.

The kid-filled toy and comic ads on the back of the manual should be a tip-off. If you miss those, the Saturday morning cartoon nature of Sonic Boom's introduction makes it quite obvious that this isn't a game for steely-eyed hedgehog veterans. On the run from the ever-present villain Eggman, Sonic and his buddies take a painfully easy trip through a jungle race track before accidentally unleashing an ancientಞ evil snake named Lyric. Lyric is mad at the world and obviously in need of hugs, so of course the answer to beating him involves demonstrating the power🎃 of friendship. Everybody in the cast is exuberantly child-friendly and far too willing to share obvious tips on what to do next. It's all perfectly great if you're eight years old, but pretty annoying if you're not.

Although it becomes increasingly complex and interesting later on, Sonic Boom is rarely challenging to play. Just as with the kid-frie𓂃ndly story, that's either a positive or negative depending on who is playing. This is more of a exploration-based adventure than the speed-based platformer that fans of classic Sonic games might expect. Most of the game is spent ambling along, exploring and solving simple puzzles rather than running through fast-paced mazes. While there are times when Sonic and company go fast, they're either non-inter꧋active moments or are segments that don't require much in the way of reflexes. Battles are separated out from most platforming segments and are marginally more difficult than normal gameplay, but still quite forgiving.

This lack of challenge is just as well, because th🧸e controls are slippery and the camera can be problematic. Sonic and friends move a bit like a car with an overactive accelerator, making it very easy to slip off platforms or overshoot targets. The camera, though far from the worst I've encountered, gets stuck at t🤡imes and doesn't show the entire battlefield during fixed-camera combat segments. It's no fun to fall off the stage because you can't see where you're going, and it's no fun to be shot by a robot that is standing off stage-right. At least Sonic's healthy life pool means that death in combat is rare, and frequent checkpoints help keep falling deaths from being terribly inconvenient.