Open Sonic

Open Sonic is a free fan-made recreation of the legendary side-scrolling platforming game Sonic the Hedgehog that was originally developed by Sega and released on market on their retro home consoles. Developed from the ground up by a single developer Alexandre Martins, this freeware title has managed to retain all the aspects of the original game, but with numerous addons that make this release quite unique and worth playing even though it only features two finished levels.

Main features

The core new feature present in Open Sonic game is the full integration of cooperative play, enabling up to 3 users to simultaneously explore, speed through puzzle-like environments full of ramps and jump points, collect gold rings, and fight against AI opponents in an attractive style that only Sonic games can offer. The game also boosts the core gameplay capabilities of the original game by adding new interactive elements between players and the environment, pushing gamers to discover new ways to reach previously inaccessible level areas.

The visual style of the game respects the original design choices from the console game, introducing stylized retro visuals, fast-paced action, a large number of sprites on screen, and interactive elements that simply push players to play more quickly and precisely. While the game lacks a fully featured campaign (the original developer has only managed to produce two full levels with some brand-new unique gameplay items), the game also features an extensive level editor that can be used to create stylish and attractive levels in mere minutes.

More enthusiastic and capable fans can also use provided tools to create brand new items, animated characters, enemies, and even bosses and integrated them into the levels using a simple object scripting system! These community levels can then be easily shared online among the fans of the Sonic franchise.

Development status

Sadly, the active development of this title has been stopped, and the latest official version of this title was released to the public in now very distant 2010. The game is today distributed online as a portable compressed archive, enabling users to manually unpack it anywhere on their local storage.

Overall

Open Sonic is 100% FREE and can be easily played on all modern versions of Windows OS. In addition to English, the game has also received a translation into 8 other international languages.