What's the single most defining characteristic of a Sonic the Hedgehog game? If your answer is "speed," expect to feel cheated about three minutes into Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, when a high-velocity sprint through a linear jungle track suddenly gives way to repetitive robot-punching and plodding exploration. It's jarring, and it's an immediate reminder that Rise of Lyric isn’t a traditional Sonic game so much as it’s a licensed platformer based on the Cartoon Network show. Its gameplay more closely resembles an off-brand Ratchet & Clank – and while that doesn't automatically condemn it , Rise of Lyric is so aggressively mediocre that slowing Sonic down is really the least of its sins.

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It's still a pretty big sin, though. Rise of Lyric – which tasks Sonic, Knuckles, Amy Rose, and Tails with halting a robot apocalypse engineered by Lyric, a cackling and utterly forgettable cyborg snake – relegates high-speed running to just one of several gameplay types, and pares it down to mostly linear skyways where your input is limited to collecting rings, dodging hazards, and simply watching as you're bounced between jump pads or funneled through loops. These sequences can be awfully pretty (when they're not bogged down by choppy animation or visual clutter), and despite their lack of interactivity, they're a fun, breezy change of pace – as well as the only place Sonic's signature speed is on display.The rest of Rise of Lyric is split into simple brawling, open-world exploration, and linear puzzle-platforming stages that frequently shift to a 2D viewpoint. None of these move faster than jogging speed, but they do let you switch between the four protagonists at will, using their unique abilities to navigate character-specific obstacles. Amy, for example, has a triple-jump that makes her a more agile explorer than Sonic, and she can run and swing on glowing pink balancing beams. Knuckles can climb ruby-encrusted walls, Tails can float and send out little robots to shut down otherwise inaccessible machinery, and Sonic can spin-dash to zoom up curved ramps or bounce between hovering orbs. Rise of Lyric does a decent job of making sure you have plenty of opportunities to use these abilities.The heroes get a lot less distinct during Rise of Lyric's fights, however. Combat is simple; Everyone has a single attack combo, as well as a midair stomp, a charged attack, and an energy tether that can lasso and throw enemies around. The combat's simplicity wouldn't be so bad if it were woven more naturally into exploration; instead, most of it unfolds in Devil May Cry-esque arenas, meaning robots attack in waves and you can't move on until they're all in pieces. It quickly becomes a chore, and usually boils down to either frantically mashing a single button while dodging poorly telegraphed attacks, or laboriously dragging robots to you with the tether (which rarely targeted the enemies I wanted it to) and hurling them off cliffs.It's not particularly challenging, either. The heroes have a shared pool of rings that act as their collective health meter, and while these are capped at 100, every environment in Rise of Lyric is filled to bursting with the things. Should you actually die, you'll just respawn nearby, with your enemies just as weakened as you left them. This cuts down any potential frustration, but it also strips out any trace of actual difficulty, meaning you're free to simply hurl yourself against enemies until they're all dead.Finally, there’s the open-world gameplay, which consists of two huge hub-world villages. These are fun to explore at first, but apart from item-revealing construction projects and a handful of NPCs who want you to pursue inane side quests (like finding hidden herbs, or activating magical defense towers), they're pretty empty, and crossing their vast expanses of bland scenery quickly gets tedious. Being able to run fast would've been a big help here, but depressingly, it's not even an option.Bringing in a second player makes things a little more fun, and it's handled smartly; one player uses the GamePad's screen, the other gets the TV and a controller, and both players get separate stocks of rings. Interestingly, the two-screen approach lets you simultaneously play through areas where the heroes split up (with player two visible in the background of the GamePad screen), although it doesn't come into play at all during the Team Challenges, a set of separate, local-only multiplayer modes that confine up to four players to one fixed camera angle in enjoyably frantic, combat-focused minigames. These are a definite bright spot, and feature scenarios – like a battle on top of the engines of a continually digging subterranean drill – that are far more imaginative than anything in the story.Throughout its six-to-eight-hour runtime, Rise of Lyric is further dragged down by nearly every aspect of its presentation. Its heroes animate relatively well, but they also never shut up, continually tossing out banal one-liners that range from cheerful encouragements to excruciating "not!" jokes. The script is never ashamed to embrace drab clichés rehashed from seemingly every show aimed at kids ("I know your weakness, Sonic. It's your friends!" " They're not my weakness. They're my strength!"). It's also not short on technical issues, beginning with a finicky, sluggish camera and extending to frequently choppy animation, long load times, noticeable hangs during transitions between different areas of open environments, and even occasional crashes.