You’ve seen my take on the best zones the Megadrive/Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games had to offer — now it’s time to look at what I believe are the worst five zones of the series! I’m sure I may tread on a few toes by doing this, but such is the nature of blogging, and as before, I’m always interested in hearing what my readers think on the topic. So without further ado, here’s my bottom five, the most loathed of all:

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#5: Flying Battery Zone (Sonic & Knuckles)

I’m going to get flak for this, but hear me out. What do you get if you combine Wing Fortress Zone with Metropolis Zone, and add a few smatterings of Scrap Brain Zone? That sounds like the recipe for one of the best zones in Sonic history, and while Flying Battery Zone has a great theme and possibly one of my favourite musical scores of the entire series (the Sonic series has great music, but this one truly stands head and shoulders above the rest), it all falls flat on its face for one big reason: It’s far, far too cruel.

Between switches that spew fire, spike-lined tunnels with screw-like elevators which can easily crush an unfortunate hedgehog, rotating tunnels which must be exited with precision lest you fall off the bottom of the screen and die, spikes, electricity, and many, many things which can crush and kill you instantly, Flying Battery Zone is an excercise in controller-snapping frustration. There’s simply no relenting moment in the constant stream of stressful assaults — it even employs tricks as dirty as containment pods that spew out enemies, and run-or-die hedgehog-crushing action as the level collapses at the end. This is truly an experiment in sadism, and if that’s the case, it was a roaring success.

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#4: Aquatic Ruin Zone (Sonic 2)

This was actually quite a difficult choice to make — while I adore the visual style and theme of the Aquatic Ruin Zone and it has a fantastic soundtrack and even a great boss battle at the end, it’s all let down by one fatal flaw: It’s fucking annoying to play. Between the arrow-chucking pillars, hidden enemies that burst out of walls, collapsing floors, falling pillars, precision jumps, and frequent underwater segments complete with drowning, this zone is just a massive pain in the ass.

It’s mostly a shame due to wasted potential; this could easily have been the successor and redeemer of the Labyrinth Zone, but instead Sega went down the route of making a “challenging” (which usually translates to “irritating”) experience, and the choice of being chased by arrows or forced underwater is hardly a pleasant one to make. It’s certainly not the worst zone of the series and I will concede that the boss fight at the end with the totem poles is actually a hell of a lot of fun (if too easy), but I’m afraid that’s not enough to redeem the rest of this miserable experience.

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#3: Hydrocity Zone (Sonic 3)

I think it’s an unwritten law of video games that every platformer must feature at least one water-based level, and with but a few exceptions, these levels tend to be universally-hated. Hydrocity Zone is no exception to that rule, and as well as the typical annoyances of water-based levels — drowning being the prime offender here — a number of other obnoxious features are added to make the experience all the more annoying. Piranha Badniks that latch on and prevent Sonic from jumping, spikes that appear out of nowhere, fans and water currents that force the poor hedgehog around, all while accompanied by a jazzy and meh soundtrack that sounds like upbeat elevator music.

The bosses are hit-and-miss in this zone — the act 1 miniboss is frankly nothing short of annoying, though the act 2 boss is actually quite unique and interesting, offering multiple ways to provide his demise. Nontheless, it can’t change the fact that Hydrocity Zone is a pain to play, and one of those zones that I dread having to trawl through at all.

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#2: Marble Garden Zone (Sonic 3)

The best way to describe this sprawling tedium of a zone is “boring”. The zone is frankly obscene in its size — likely one of the largest in the series — though much of it consists of running up and down slopes, being propelled along by gyroscopes at top speed, and impaling your skull on a dozen razor-sharp steel spikes that you swear weren’t there a second ago. Or at least you would, if you weren’t so busy bleeding like a burst soda can.

Marble Garden Zone isn’t even so much hard as it is a mind-numbing slog, spattered with the occasional flecks of bullshit, and including both immensely annoying boss battles and one of those all-so-fun sections where you’re fleeing through a collapsing level, trying to avoid being crushed into paste at every turn while racing against the clock and dodging falling debris. There are simply no redeeming qualities about this train-wreck of a zone — even the music is decidedly meh — though it can only be beaten in terms of terribleness by…

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#1: Labyrinth Zone (Sonic 1)

Nothing says “I wish I was dead” like the Labyrinth Zone. Waterfalls, precision jumping, drowning, crushing, spikes, hidden switches, hidden enemies, obnoxious boss battles, and all manner of other nasties combine to make this the single most abhorrent zone of the series. What were they thinking? Worse, still, is that the final Scrap Brain Zone act is an albino clone of Labyrinth Zone, bringing us back once more to the nightmare.

This is not only one of the hardest zones in the first Sonic game — if not the hardest — but it’s also the one that’s most likely to have you throwing your controller at the screen in frustration, after dying in a thoroughly humiliating and unfair fashion for the twentieth time. Whatever masterful skill went into crafting most of the Sonic zones has seemingly been lost with this disgrace of a zone, not helped much by its thoroughly mediocre soundtrack and weak graphic design. Sega, you have shamed yourselves.

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