Around a month ago, we brought you news of SEGA creating a new Sonic The Hedgehog game for mobiles, this time developed by Sonic Team themselves instead of SEGA’s usual stand-by developer Hardlight. The game’s title was announced as Sonic Runners, and that was basically all of the information we had at the time. Well, a lot more information came out today through Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, and we’ve even got a trailer with absolutely no footage whatsoever of the game. SEGA, you’re spoiling us here.
The information came in the form of an interview with current Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka, the man responsible for a few well-liked Sonic games and a lot of, er, less-well-liked ones. It’s quite a lengthy interview, and he went on in great detail about the game, but I’m just going to give you a few choice cuts here. It seems like it’s going to be a side-scrolling stage-based auto-runner, with each level (he calls them episodes) running about two minutes in length. Although the focus will initially be on Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Dr. Eggman will be in the game, along with special power-ups similar to those in Sonic Colors. He mentions that they’re shooting for a huge amount of content, throwing around numbers like 50 “episodes" or more. There will be hidden routes you can discover in each stage, and all the usual Sonic gimmicks like loop-de-loops, springs, and ramps should be expected.
The game is expected to release rather soon in Japan, and I suspect it should hit worldwide around the same time, since Japan really doesn’t care much about Sonic relative to the West. It will, of course, be free-to-play with IAP items you can buy. From the sounds of things, Sonic Runners is more or less exactly what we expected. As to whether that’s a good or bad thing, I suppose we’ll know soon enough.
Source: Famitsu Magazine
