Bosses pose a creative challenge for game developers. A great boss battle has to find common ground between familiarity and creating surprising challenges to keep us on our toes. If a boss battle only replicates obstacles from previous levels, there will be no new challenge, but if a boss battle throws too many curveballs, it can discourage us completely. These grueling encounters are supposed to get our heart rates going, keep us determined to try, try, try again, and offer the thrill of victory once we best them.
That’s what made the bosses inSonic Superstarssuch a great gaming experience for me. They provide just the right level of difficulty and sprang surprises from every direction.
Side-Scroller Surprises
The arenas for every boss battle against Dr. Eggman and his evil ensemble shocked me with sudden background-to-foreground tricks, as introduced with Dr. Eggman’s giant fish robot, or floor foolery, with the timed platform bounce in the Press Factory. These battles not only test the skills that you have learned from the past levels, but have you seeing the Emerald Powers or world-specific speed attacks in a new light of possibilities.
The boss battles throw that one big wrench into your study guide, requiring you to think on your feet.
One of the boss battles that best exemplifiesSega’s ingenuity is the showdown against Dr. Eggmanin the Sky Temple Zone. Throughout the zone before the fight, you learn how to control Sonic and his friends by jumping across floating platforms, dodging laser beams, running across breaking floors, and if you take the time to go through one of the portals, you will learn how to maneuver Sonic during a freefall to collect precious Rings.
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All of this training during the level comes in handy to beat Dr. Eggman and his floating buzzsaw machine awaiting you at the level’s finish line, but it wouldn’t be a boss battle without a major twist, and the Sky Temple Zone does just that. The moment that you cross into the boss battle, the ground beneath you collapses, and instead of collecting Rings in a free fall, you now have to avoid Eggman’s glowing buzzsaws instead. From there when you land onto the broken platform, the battle has you jumping up, left, and right across a dismantled ground floor to avoid the giant buzzsaw and make a perfect hit against Dr. Eggman.
Sonic Superstars takes the time to prepare you for the end battle during the main level course. The game even gives you the opportunity to collect a handful of Rings right at the start of a boss level to load up on health, but as I progressed further into the game, the later boss battles still had me desperately clinging to my last Ring Gollum-style.
The boss battles throw that one big wrench into your study guide, requiring you to think on your feet. In the Sky Temple Zone, that wrench was Dr. Eggman’s shooting buzzsaws and his ability to destroy a platform square. In Pinball Carnival Part 1, it’s the battle’s spinning pinball feature that I had to learn how to aim with to make my strike against Dr. Eggman.
Boss battles are at their best if you feel that you’ve earned the victory through mastery, and Superstars had me feeling as boastful as Sonic when I took down Eggman across the several different Zone types.
Sonic Suit-Up
Every Sonic game straps you into a rollercoaster ride of super speed. It may be Sonic tradition at this point to have players mimic Sonic’s mouse-versus-elephant tactics, but Sonic Superstars takes the hedgehog immersion a bit further by having players learn Sonic’s trademark lesson themselves: knowing when to go fast and when to take your time.
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While it is a blast in Sonic Superstars to just zoom through every level course as fast as you can not knowing where the next turn may take you, there is a big benefit to taking your time and exploring the entirety of a zone level to find the giant Rings. These giant Rings give you the opportunity to grab more Emerald Powers, but they are very easy to pass right by if you just go full speed ahead. If you don’t take the time to unlock all the Emerald Powers, then the game forces you to battle the bosses with justSonic’s inherent weaknesses and speed strength.
Regardless of whether you use the Emerald Powers or not, each boss had me thinking like the blue hero in a different way than the prior battle. But the zone that taught me the importance of slowing it down was the Sand Sanctuary. In addition to timing out when to bop the scorpion-style robots, I couldn’t help but smile realizing that, just like in most Sonic moments, if you stop to spot the mole-like robot in the sand, and if you time it just right, you can damage Dr. Eggman by using his own weapons against him to win the battle.
Sonic Superstars’ bosses ask us players to think and learn the same lessons that Sonic values in every adventure, making the bosses of his latest side-scroller as much of a treat as Sonic’s favorite chilly dogs.
