Sonic Twilight Rush

== Introduction ==
Sonic Twilight Rush (ソニックトワイライトラッシュ [Sonikku-towairait-orasshu]) was a Sonic game serving as a continuation of the Sonic Rush series developed by Dimps, THQNORDIC (One of the publishers of the Sonic Advance series of games) and Sonic Team, released in 13 October 2021. The game featured a darker mood than the positive/funky mood the Sonic Rush series had up to that point, as the game featured a darker story and mystical/fantasy environments. The game was critically acclaimed, and popularized the Sonic Rush series from it's sales.
== Story ==
The story features a darker tone where Sonic finds the mystical lands of "the twilight forest" with mystical trees and small star fairies and Eggpawns which Sonic was confused about why they were there, but Sonic finds something that was odd to be in the forest, a small green (non-liquid) asteroid that disappeared when Sonic came closer to it, and when Sonic goes away from the crash without looking at it, a phantom version of Sonic appears perfectly in the middle of the crash site, where he holds Sonic up with his telekinesis powers, but Sonic easily outran him as he earned a strange boost effect named "Twilight Boost" as it's powered by Twilight fairies, and Sonic uses it's powers to run past the forest to a beach with normal trees. But suddenly, out of nowhere, one of Eggman's small carriers crashes into the beach, and Eggman with an army of eggpawns surrounding him comes out of the ship's gate to "help him out", because it appeared that the egg pawns in the twilight forest were "eating misinformation" from a strange mystical creature named "The Red Shadow" which aims to take control of the twilight island and the eastern Adabat island. Despite his proof, Sonic didn't believe him, as the red shadow was a weird name for what was a creator of phantom copies of known heroes across mobius, as Sonic was the most popular and most recognizable hero in the entire planet, and that the Eggman-controlled egg-pawns just stared at Sonic, but Sonic agreed to continue on with Eggman since Tails was nowhere to be found. After boosting past the beach, Sonic reached a desert with lightning storm which seemed weird, since deserts very rarely get storms, especially a lightning storm with rain, but ignored it as a very rare natural occasion. After a bit of time spent in the desert, Sonic sees a small castle and rushes to it, but he noticed something familiar, a person was screaming "SONIIIIIIC!" the entire time, and that sounded eerily familiar to what sounded like Tails. Without hesitation, Sonic comes in and ends all the robots which were in the castle, and the guards that were protecting the cage. After Sonic cleared out the cage, he found someone he didn't expect to find, and that was Amy without her hammer, that was taken out by a guard who left the castle. After that, Sonic, Eggman and Amy left the small castle and enter the river ruins, a place full of ancient ruins from an echidna clan that was going to take over the world but was invaded by the bigger echidna clan that was in angel island. And they find... Knuckles out of the sudden, who was finding ancient artifacts to connect the pieces together for a bigger meaning of echidnas back then. But then, out of nowhere again, Tails comes to Sonic with his new Tornado 4 that has an artillery attached in it's middle that Sonic can jump on and fire, after the "fun" tornado ride, the crew arrive to the Phantom Town, which is inhabited by phantoms of Egg pawns and zombies of mobians, Sonic can't even express his feelings at that point as he blasts through the action and finishing the inhabitants up. After the chaotic fighting, Sonic finds a mine named "Dark Underground", but the mine was darker than normal mines, but luckily, flashlights were still there to light up the place. After Sonic rushed through the phantom egg-pawns, he noticed a group of actual egg-pawns going onto him and Eggman. And he realized that Eggman wasn't lying, he was right, and his robots were actually controlled by the evil. But then, Tails spots a small gate, leading to a HUGE evil lair, Sonic was surprised about how much the thing was big, it went down all the way to where it's very hot. As Sonic rushes through the evil, he looks at a staircase, leading to what looks like the throne of the "Red Shadow". And then, he arrives to the lair. To his shock, he finds Shadow the Hedgehog, or what seems like Shadow. Shadow starts running to Sonic and fighting him a lot, and then Shadow is revealed to be the "Dark Transformer" who can transform into anything, and wasn't the "Red Shadow" Eggman was talking about, that was just a phantom egg-pawn general's nickname. After Eggman found out the reality, he decided to team up with the evil "Dark Transformer", but not to worry, because Tails has all the emeralds in his Tornado 4, so Sonic uses the 7 emeralds to transform to super sonic and take on the "Dark Transformer" and Eggman, which succeeded in a win for Super Sonic as always, but Sonic got out of the stone beneath and rose to the sky, while giving a smile in the process, then Tails picks him up and flies him around, to prove that they won, and that wraps up the story.
== Gameplay ==
The game contained the same Sonic Rush gameplay the fans were used to, with newer improvements and gimmicks; The game had the Sonic Colors DS control layouts with a few refinements, Sonic has his iconic Sonic Rush boost with a new aura similar to that of Sonic Forces', the homing attack and the slide were still in the game, but the stomp was replaced with the spinkick instead. The game also had the light-speed dash and a brand new ability named the "Momentum Dash" which is very helpful if rolling off hills in the first level where you don't earn a boost. Super Sonic also makes an appearance in gameplay form and can fly, which was a feature that was not seen in any sonic game that made super sonic playable in stages. Sonic's trick system from rush and rush adventure are back, this time with a "Trick Combo" that differs when you press a specific button after another. When there is a sequence where Sonic has to defeat a specific amount of enemies to continue, you can use combos by mixing any ability that Sonic has together, like using the slide and jumping to use the spin-kick at another enemy, which also could help in safety. The game has 6 levels, each with 3 acts in total. Every level has a unique gimmick that makes it stand out from the other, for example; Twilight Forest has "Twilight Egg-pawns" which are friendly, but they can be destroyed, destroying them gives you a lot more boost than what the normal enemy gives.
== Modes ==
Sonic Twilight Rush has a unique selection of modes; The story mode, which is pretty obvious that it is the main mode of the game, the challenge mode which is basically the story mode levels but with certain goals for the player to do in them, like collecting this amount of rings, or getting this amount of speed, or defeating a specific number of enemies, and even going through the level as fast as the player can, think of these as the Sonic Colors DS mission levels except it's the normal acts, the race mode which supports local multiplayer where you'll find Sonic and Shadow racing together to see who can win first, the mode would be cool to impress your local friends of winning by using shortcuts you have learnt, the same thing goes to the online version of that mode, except you'd be racing your online friend and a bunch of other people, as it is more chaotic and poses less of a challenge in level design to ensure that it doesn't get pure chaotic.
== Development ==
Sonic Twilight Rush started development in 2018, originally as a Switch exclusive, but that plan was cancelled after SEGA saw the PS4's big success and wanted to focus on multi-platform releases. Believe it or not, but the mobile version began development before the console/PC versions, the mobile version was handled by Hard-light at first, but was moved to THQNORDIC instead, as they did publish the Sonic Advance games once along with SEGA. After that, Dimps and some members at Sonic Team began developing the console/PC version. The game was going to accept a lot of ideas from Sonic fans, such as returning to SA1/SA2 style of writing, making a newer Sonic Rush game which was what they're going for before they even heard the fan outcry, and to bring an online mode to a sonic game. The team at Dimps then started making the game carefully and avoided a lot of bugs, that means they were playing it safe. While doing that, Dimps realized that the level design wasn't challenging at all, Dimps wanted to give the game challenge so they started to improve on the level design concepts to make the experience feel more challenging. After that, they started working on the actual gameplay engine, which only took 3 weeks, the UI was also hand-crafted but felt wrong to a lot of artists working on the game's artstyle, it was changed multiple times and had different iterations that they found a perfect UI at the end of the day. While the artists were making the UIs, Dimps was trying to put the level design concepts into the game with a few tweaks, and made multiple mechanics for the objects and enemies to function properly, while THQNORDIC was having a struggle to port it to mobile after what Dimps did that "overcomplicated" the original touch controls, which were deemed to only have a small touch analog to having buttons to just move left or right, and they also had a struggle to import the graphics as the game looked too good to run on inferior hardware. THQNORDIC spent weeks and weeks, it turned into months, and then, a year later, they finally finished the important stuff in the mobile port. Because of the development hell THQNORDIC had, the game was delayed to 2021 instead, which made them finally announce it in the same year it would release. Then, after fixing all the bugs needed to finish, the game was complete, and released to the public, except the mobile version wasn't released until next month in November.
== Critical Reception ==
When the game was announced in E3 Nintendo Direct, the fans were excited for the new game, in a series that had it's last original concept in 2007, even more than 13 years ago at the time, and the game's level design looked good according to the fanbase. But other fans weren't too fond of the announced product. Despite that, the game came out and was praised by most critics and fans alike, except one critic. IGN gave the game a 4.7/10, saying the game is "too frustrating" and is "too dark" to even fit in the sonic series, but that review was quickly bashed by fans since the game wasn't even that hard, Gamespot later gave it a 7.7/10, the critic at gamespot calling it "Not usually my thing but it's still fun nonetheless", later gamesradar+ gave it a perfect 10/10, calling it "The true potential of 2.5D sonic", gameinformer gave it a solid 8/10, by saying it is one of the best platformers for android, and recommends it pretty hard. Fans were also grateful that another Sonic Rush game finally came to be after the outrage of many Sonic fans across the globe that the "underrated" series finally made it's comeback since Sonic Generations 3DS 9 and a half years ago.
== Trivia ==
* Sonic Twilight Rush was the first rush game in the series to feature full cutscenes with all the voice acting
* Sonic Twilight Rush was the Sonic game to be deemed canon that was released on mobile
* Sonic Twilight Rush was the first sonic rush game to be released on PlayStation, Xbox and PC
* Sonic Twilight Rush's Steam version is the only Sonic game (yet) to feature full modding support
* Sonic Twilight Rush was called "Sonic Rush Twilight" sometimes in marketing
* A marathon celebrating Sonic Twilight Rush's 5th anniversary was held by SEGA
* Sonic Twilight Rush was officially confirmed to be not related to the mainline game Sonic Machines in any way
Category:Video Games