Uploaded September 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
So i'm a couple of days late but I've decided to continue the tradition I've had over the last couple of years of playing a few of fangames from SAGE and giving my thoughts on them, with the first one this time around being Sonic Encore.
Overall it's...not a bad game, but i feel it ultimately succumbs to a lot of the same issues most Bumper/Hedgephysics games suffer from. Level design-wise it's somewhat of a cut above the usual stuff, with the Angel Island stages actually managing to have focused and coherent layout design for once (although i did find myself getting flipped around and lost on a couple of occasions in my first playthrough). With Ice Cap however the stage design begins to degrade into the "aimless sprawl of empty roads and paths" design philosophy many 3D fangames tend to have. Act 2 in particular felt rather monotonous with much of the level consisting of running on wide empty roads and doing repetitive platforming on floating icicles, along with the fact that if you fall or make a mistake you'll frequently find yourself going back through the same sections over and over again.
The bosses are... not great, with fighting them largely consisting of throwing yourself into them repeatedly, getting hit, and then cheesing them with hit invincibility (which in all fairness is how basically all of the fights in classic Sonic games tend to go down) Graphics-wise the game looks quite good and does a very good job at translating the art from the original games into 3D (although the game tends to be a bit laggy at times). Overall i think it's not a bad game but it really needs to stick with the design mentality of Angel Island and not go into the usual overly open nonsense we see with the majority of 3D fangames.
So i'm a couple of days late but I've decided to continue the tradition I've had over the last couple of years of playing a few of fangames from SAGE and giving my thoughts on them, with the first one this time around being Sonic Encore.
Overall it's...not a bad game, but i feel it ultimately succumbs to a lot of the same issues most Bumper/Hedgephysics games suffer from. Level design-wise it's somewhat of a cut above the usual stuff, with the Angel Island stages actually managing to have focused and coherent layout design for once (although i did find myself getting flipped around and lost on a couple of occasions in my first playthrough). With Ice Cap however the stage design begins to degrade into the "aimless sprawl of empty roads and paths" design philosophy many 3D fangames tend to have. Act 2 in particular felt rather monotonous with much of the level consisting of running on wide empty roads and doing repetitive platforming on floating icicles, along with the fact that if you fall or make a mistake you'll frequently find yourself going back through the same sections over and over again.
The bosses are... not great, with fighting them largely consisting of throwing yourself into them repeatedly, getting hit, and then cheesing them with hit invincibility (which in all fairness is how basically all of the fights in classic Sonic games tend to go down) Graphics-wise the game looks quite good and does a very good job at translating the art from the original games into 3D (although the game tends to be a bit laggy at times). Overall i think it's not a bad game but it really needs to stick with the design mentality of Angel Island and not go into the usual overly open nonsense we see with the majority of 3D fangames.
