Welcome to Sonic: Lock & Load!
Sonic: Lock & Load is a free/libre and open source stylish action first-person shooter Sonic the Hedgehog fan game.
It's heavily inspired by classic FPS games such as DOOM and Quake, modern "revival" FPSes like DOOM (2016) and Eternal, DUSK and ULTRAKILL, official and fan-made Sonic games like Sonic Adventure, Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Robo Blast 2 and Sonic Momentum and stylish action games such as Devil May Cry.
Sonic: Lock & Load is a project by Arsalan "Aeri" Kazmi (AeriaVelocity). Source code on Codeberg.
v2.0 "Rewind" coming SOON™
Foreseeably Anticipated Questions
- Q: What happened to the old Sonic: Lock & Load DOOM mod?
- A: Sunsetted it back in September 2025. I was getting sick of all the technical debt I was accumulating working within the constraints of GZDoom.
- Q: When is S:L&L v2.0 coming out?
- A: When it's done™
- Q: Is this a remake or a new game?
- A: It's a "Rewrite"! It's sort of like a cross between a full-on remake and a new game entirely. "Rewrite" doesn't just mean I'm rewriting the original mod in Godot, it also means I'm rewriting the ideal of the game to be more than what it was.
- Q: What about Sonic the Hedgehog in DOOM: Legacy Edition?
- A: Considered sunsetted as well. Honestly, I kind of got sick of updating it really quickly – especially alongside the main mod. It stopped being fun really quickly, so it's not even on indefinite hiatus anymore; I'm just going to stop working on it.
- Q: Why restart development in a new engine after investing over two years into the original?
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Multiple reasons, including but not limited to:
- Sonic: Lock & Load (Legacy)'s code is extremely tightly coupled, due to its incrementally added features and inorganically grown structure. It's worse than Milton Keynes.
- GZDoom's restrictions are far too limiting.
- There are things that you can't do in GZDoom, no matter what kind of hacks you throw its way.
- Godot is an actual game engine with actual game engine features, GZDoom is an advanced source port some people have been able to do black magic wizardry with.
- GZDoom mod development on Linux is a lot harder than on Windows.
- Controller support in GZDoom technically exists, but is cumbersome and unreliable... unless, of course, you're on Windows.
- GZDoom controller support is abysmal on Steam Deck, at least in my experience.
- Touchscreen support is practically nonexistent in GZDoom's base executable – you need a custom frontend like GenZD or Delta Touch.
- The way GZDoom handles saving makes it so save files for different S:L&L versions are incompatible with each other. (Persistent Storage was implemented to alleviate this, but it's not a proper solution)