SAGE 2023 - Demo Sonic Return of Fire Breath (SAGE '23)

A raaather fun Sonic fangame. The custom(?) engine works reeelatively well except for some corners, the upside down slope bits giving a speed boost was weird though, and I feel like custom Sonic sprites would add more to bring the game more of a custom vibe - the genesis sprites give the expectations of genesis physics. Doing the fast rolling down the halfpipe-like slopes to build speed was also very difficult in this, why doesn't holding down work? Needing to hit down right as you get back on the ground to keep rolling is annoooying, oof.

The first boss was amazing and hilarious for being so over the top, and properly hilarious when the boss started twisting and flying upside down. Damn does it take too many hits though, but oh, me and my bud had fun playing it. Took us 25 minutes to beat it.

The second boss though, god damn, that was too difficult, and way too much. We got 20-30 hits into the fight at times, but yeah never further than that, and we kept fighting him for an hour straight before quitting. The boss has attacks waaayyy toooo fast, especially everything that has it spawning boulders, and on the other hand has attacks way too lame, especially the small punches it uses before teleporting, and the "let me drop the big blob of black from the top of the screen" one, that one was just weird. While for a while we had fun and were addicted trying to beat it, even could deal the first 10 or so hits very reliably, ugh, yeah, it just doesn't give enough chances to attack it safely, the bounders mentioned were especially a huge challenge, those can bounce too high up and cover an area way too wide. Bouncing on it is dangerous too since Sonic doesn't bounce straight upwards - which I can get, but goddamn, the boss is already challenging enough already, and/or takes WAAAY too many hits to defeat. Trying to survive even with the ring boxes and all was just a goddamn gauntlet. A nice "Kaizo" boss yeah, but damn. It was way too much. The fire robot shooting the extra few upwards rockets before the boss again spawns boulders in the middle of the stage got us every time, we barely got past a single one of those attacks combos.

Oh and the Tutorial Zone could use some proper pointers for the gameplay, not just give a "just venture on your own and figure things out" sort of a thing, it especially took us a while to figure out what the health bar and rings do, and how they work together. A "just venture on your own and figure things out" is ofcourse fine too, but in that case you don't really need to call it a tutorial, just teach players through the gameplay, or maybe leave a single popup explaining it. Sonic fans won't be needing more.

Also pleeeaaase fix being able to spindash backwards. If you charge a spindash, hold the opposite direction, and then let go hitting down, you will roll backwards the opposite direction. I mean, neat, cool to be able to change the direction, but if you wanna keep it atleeeeast make the change of direction visual befooore letting go of Down.

This part. That part almost got us stuck for good. Well, the second boss did as mentioned, but yeah, that was weird. Also, at the end of the clip we restarted the stage for fun, since restarting sets your time back to 0:00 while keeping the last checkpoint. While that ended up not mattering, we got a good kick out of getting a "better time" by doing so.