Sonic Dream Team

Sonic Dream Team is an Apple Arcade Exclusive. You can only play it on Apple devices like the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, or Mac (Intel chip or Apple Silicon). You also have to pay for an Apple Arcade subscription. As such, most fans have never played this entry in the Sonic games. I think this is a real shame, because this is a delightful hidden gem. I will be writing here a review of the game and my observations on it.

How To Play For (Relatively) Cheap

If you have an Apple product and you haven’t signed up for Apple Arcade, you can get a trial subscription to Apple Arcade for a month.

If you don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for an iPhone or iPad, the next cheapest way to pay is using the Apple TV device. You can get them for $130 at retailers. You do not need an iPhone to use Apple TV or any subscriptions.

You can also sync up wireless controllers with your Apple devices.

While there are ways to emulate the game, all of them require that you already own an Apple device.

Let’s do a quick overview.

Gameplay

The gameplay is as such: you control Sonic as you race through a world. You have a boost gauge you can use to go faster (pressing Square), and you can collect blue lightning bolts to fill it up to keep your boost going on a long trek. You can jump, of course. You can also use homing attacks to autolock on to enemies and items like springs.

You don’t just play as Sonic - you can actually play as 6 characters in this game. Yes, it gave us all massive Sonic Adventure vibes! You have three types - Running, Flying, Gliding. Sonic and Amy are the Running types. This means they can use Light Dash to follow a path of rings to a new location.

Tails and Cream are Flying types, capable of flying for a short period of time by pressing and holding the jump button. They can fly higher by passing through yellow hoops that will refill their flying gauge and send them up.

Rouge and Knuckles are the gliding types, capable of gliding by pressing and holding the jump button. They can also climb up red walls by jumping or gliding at them.

There are no differences between the male and female characters in each pair.

Game Structure

The game has 4 levels: Scrambled Shores, Dream Factory, Nightmare Maze, and Ego City. Each level has 3 acts each, plus a final boss. Each act then has multiple missions within it. Before the new updates, it was 5 missions per act, but it’s been updated to 7 missions per act.

There are multiple goals: reach the end; collect multiple dream shards; reach each checkpoint before time runs out; reach the end in a certain amount of time. Completing a mission will give you a Dream Orb, which allows you to unlock new acts and levels.

The first mission of each act also has little secrets in it. Red stars, blue coins, and (in the latest update) music notes are hidden throughout the level. Collecting all red stars will also give you a dream star. Collecting the blue coins lets you buy power-ups. Collecting the music notes unlocks new music to listen to. These are not necessary to finish the game, but they encourage you to slow down and explore the level a little more, which is always fun.

You also have Tails’ Challenges, which are daily (previous weekly) challenges that provide you with a particular level to beat to get ‘XP.’ You can use XP to buy music, blue coins, or little statues of the characters.

How it feels

The main goal of the game is to keep momentum going, using boost to jump off ramps, run up walls, and do sick tricks on half-ramps like a skateboard. It’s about moving forward but being careful to keep your boost gauge up and aim your jumps. Like other Sonic games, this one also has a multi-tiered level where you get access to shortcuts if you can play well enough to get enough height. This, combined with the previously mentioned collectables, gives a lot of replayability and encourages you to try out new routes with different characters.

The movement feels pretty good! Because this is a phone game at heart, movement is not going to be super precise. There is a bit of floatiness in the movement of the characters, especially when boosting. This can be a little frustrating on the harder challenges. In general, the characters feel good, the boosting is satisfying, and controlling the characters is fun. The challenge comes in being able to maintain momentum without being hit and chaining together precisely-timed homing attacks. The developers said they were inspired by skateboarding games for this one, and I can really feel it on the jumps.

The non-Sonic characters are excellently integrated. Tails and Cream feel great. This is some of the best control 3D Tails has ever had. It’s similar to the movement in Adventure and Frontier. Unlike Adventure, there is no quick upward movement when you fly, but a gradual descent. It also beats both characters’ control in Heroes handily. Remember how in Heroes, if you ran out of your flying gauge, your characters would just immediately stop flying and fall straight down? In this game, when you run out of flying gauge, you start descending, but you of course keep the momentum you had previously. Depending on the stage you’re on, this means emptying your gauge isn’t a death sentence like it was in Heroes! The levels are also intelligently designed so that even though all the characters can play them, you can’t really cheese them with flying like you could with Tails in Sonic Adventure.

The gliding characters also have a great feel. You can’t glide as far as you can with them in Sonic Adventure 2, but that is to be expected. You were exploring some pretty wide fields in Adventure 2, while here you’re trying to reach a goal. It feels very fair, though. They don’t have a flying gauge since they immediately begin descending as soon as they start flying. However, your rate of descent increases as you keep flying, so if you try to cover a very long distance, you’ll find you run out of height more quickly near the end. This means you can’t cheese levels with them, either. They’re both also much better to control than in Frontiers, where Knuckles does this weird little hop before beginning gliding that makes him a pain to control.

Switching characters is not difficult - simply press the triangle button and select your character. There’s a lag when you enter the character select screen for some reason. There’s apparently a power-up in the game that makes character switching faster, but I haven’t tried it yet. In any case, you will probably want to stop when changing characters anyway. This makes it easy to try out different routes, experience different things, in a way unlike any other Sonic game. It reminds me of the Team Formation mechanic in Heroes, and I get the sense that Hardlight developers were really inspired by how the characters moved in that game.

I also have to say that I cannot imagine playing this game with touch screen. I played with a DualShock 4 and found it a lot of fun. I then tried playing on iPad and immediately gave up. I really think you need the physical sensation of knowing how far you have a joystick pressed to get a good sense of where you are in the game, and sliding your thumbs on a screen gives you no feedback. I can’t imagine doing some of the trickier parts of the game with a touch screen!

Aesthetics

The game looks beautiful. Yeah, it’s made to run on an iPhone, but they recognized their limitations and built a game around them. The 4 worlds each have a distinctive theme to them. Each character’s model looks pretty good, and their animations and poses are quite expressive.

The voice acting is alright, nothing to write home about. Unfortunately, I have to draw my attention to Rouge, who has gotten a new voice actor who voices her with a very uncharacteristic high-pitched voice. She sounds more similar to Amy or Cream than Rouge. I have no idea why this happened. Did they want this voice direction from the actress? Was it her choice? Whatever the case, it just doesn’t feel like Rouge at all.

The music is also pleasant, as you can expect from a Sonic game. The intro theme, menu theme, and Nightmare Eggman theme are my favorites.

The plot

Dr. Eggman has kidnapped Cream to test out a device called the Reverie. The Guardian of the Reverie, Ariem, warns Dr. Eggman to free Cream. He refuses, and they are sent into a deep sleep. Sonic and the rest of the team show up to investigate but are also forced alseep. Ariem tells Sonic that they are trapped in Dr. Eggman’s dreamscape, unable to get out. With enough Dream Orbs, she can weave a path between dreams to get them through the dreamscape and defeat Eggman.

Where to from here?

This game has already gotten its final updates, so this is the final form of the game for now. There’s a possibility it could eventually be ported to other consoles, though never to Android due to an exclusivity deal with Apple. I hope it does get that port, because this game is surprisingly well-executed for a mobile game. If you can play it on a normal TV screen with a real controller, you barely remember that it’s a mobile game at all. It’s only when the animations lag or you stop to think about how there’s only 4 worlds that you remember “oh yeah, this is meant for cell phones.” It’s a decent amount of content, in any case, and if you found the base game too unchallenging, the updates will certainly push you much farther.

I would really love to see Sega take concepts from this game into future Sonic games. In Frontiers, they dipped their toe into having Sonic’s friends back and playable in a post-game update. This game shows that Sonic’s friends can feel totally at home in the main game. Focus on keeping the base gameplay the same while taking advantage of their differences and it feels like an extension of the world! Imagine if the character-swapping were as easy as it is in Heroes. You could even bring back something similar to Heroes where you have 3 characters who swap out for each other, only instead of requiring them to change ‘formations’, you could just kind of have one front the other. In one fell swoop, we can bring back banter, conversations, relations. You could even have different levels have different ‘teams’ - since each member of the pair is interchangeable, you could have Sonic/Cream/Rouge or Amy/Tails/Rouge and it wouldn’t make a difference. Sega, talk to the people at Hardlight… imagine the greatness from Sonic Dream Team meeting Sonic Frontiers….

I also cannot stop pointing out how awesome it is we get to play as Rouge and Cream again. The last time both were playable in a 3D action game was in Heroes, where they were in the awkward position of being in the ‘Flying formation’ carrying a line of guys. Worse, Cream has been forgotten, having been ignored for years. This game doesn’t just bring her back, but makes her central to the story. I loved having Rouge and Cream back, and I loved all the playable characters.