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I can remember when a new Sonic the Hedgehog game was the biggest story around. I remember live-action adverts, Sonic 2s-day, the disbelief at those first magazine photos of the Sonic & Knuckles cart. "Among Mario's clones," Shigeru Miyamoto told Edge magazine in the late 1990s, "Sonic is a good one." Originality was never the hedgehog's strong point. Even so, copying Temple Run seems a long way to fall from Super Mario.Viewed from a more optimistic angle, at least the endless running genre's a good match - indeed, Sega's investors may well wonder why it's taken so long. And I mention the moneymen because, while there's good stuff to talk about with Sonic Dash, the entire game is framed and ultimately spoiled by in-app purchases. Sonic Dash costs £1.49 upfront and uses rings and red stars as currencies - the former picked up and banked in-game, the latter awarded rarely and used to unlock new characters and buy continues. The standard ring-doubling booster will set you back £2.49 - pretty cheeky, I thought - but even with this you'll acquire upgrades at a snail's pace, and without additional purchases or some pretty dedicated play it won't unlock more than one character, if that. So: £4 for an endless runner, and a few more quid each if you fancy playing as Knuckles or Tails.
This probably wouldn't annoy me so much if Sonic Dash didn't have a habit of telling you to buy £19.99 packs of rings and stars after a game over. It asks directly for more money multiple times during every session in a manner so brazen and intrusive, it feels shoddy. Sonic is first and foremost a children's character, one that specifically appeals to young boys; I know this, so Sega knows it a hundred times over, and yet it has decided to release a product that demands cash from players again and again for things like power-ups. Honestly, when did three lives get replaced with purchasable revive tokens? Just because you can do something, as the saying goes, doesn't mean you should.
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