Sonic Colors was originally released on the Nintendo Wii a great many years ago, and is widely considered among fans to be one of the great 3D Sonic titles. How does it hold up today?

Included in this “Ultimate” port of the game are a handful of new features such as the new Jade Wisp power, Rival Race challenges, unlockable cosmetic options for Sonic, and a brand new soundtrack. (The original soundtrack is still used along with the new one by alternating between stages.)

There are just six Rival Race challenges in total, and the new Jade Wisp and its power are very much just a gimmick. It was not used to any great effect in any stage except for the purpose of traversing through walls to find hidden Red Rings or Park Tokens (used to purchase cosmetics). Speaking of cosmetics...

The cosmetic options allow you to customize Sonic’s gloves, shoes, and give your dash a different visual effect. Being completely honest, none of them look good. In fact, I would go so far as to say they all look very tacky and unappealing. Not to mention, you can also purchase custom Player Icons for your save file with Park Tokens. There are no online features to speak of, so why would you do this? You can spend hundreds of Park Tokens unlocking Player Icons, but why? I have no idea. Park Tokens as a whole feel like a meaningless waste of time, and this is not helped by the fact that the place where you can use them requires you to quit the game to the Main Menu in order to access. It’s a mess.

Having said all of this, it would appear that I have a negative opinion of the game, but this is not the case! The gameplay holds up, and stages are (mostly) a blast to play through. Sonic has access to a wide variety of unique abilities via Wisp powers, which allow for engaging puzzles or alternate ways to approach certain terrain or obstacles. However, the end of world bosses can feel like a chore, especially once you notice that they simply reused the same three boss encounters for the second half of the game.

The story and dialogue are nothing to write home about. This is made worse by the fact that the cutscenes have not been remade for modern consoles, and so what you get here is the same grainy 480p that you did on the Wii. It really took me out of the experience, personally, as the rest of the game has been properly remastered and runs in smooth 60fps.

The game itself is mostly a fun experience, but it’s really hard for me to give much praise to this “Ultimate” port. If anything, you can now play Sonic Colors on modern hardware in 60fps. That’s worth something, I suppose!

I bought this yesterday and I’m returning it today, because this is just insulting.

Yes, this is technically still Sonic Colors, so the level design is still good and I like the new ghost Wisp thingy. Yes, it’s technically playable, even on Switch.

It’s still an abomination when compared to the original, though.

The Wii version of Sonic Colors is fantastic. Fast-paced gameplay, great controls, and beautiful visuals that still look great to this day. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel and the story is kinda cringe, but who cares? It’s fun!

Sonic Colors Ultimate is a bastardization of that game. The lighting is horrendous, making the game far too bright and overexposed to the point that it destroys much of the atmosphere that the original provided.

The game is also buggy as hell, with some small portions of level design that worked perfectly and smoothly in the original being completely non-functional. There was this one loop that I tried running through for like a minute before giving up because it simply wasn’t working. When I booted up Starlight Carnival Act 4, I was greeted with an empty, white, untextured void that was simultaneously extremely funny and deeply unsettling. A similar thing happened somewhere in Aquarium Park, where Sonic began in a dark purple aether.

I’m sorry, but none of this is the Switch’s fault. The Switch can at the very least run games at 720p and 30 fps on a consistent basis. The Wii version was on a 480p console that was basically 2 GameCubes smashed together. It should run perfectly, regardless of console, but it just doesn’t. You know why? Because Blind Squirrel Games didn’t care. SEGA didn’t care. They all just wanted a quick cash grab by repurposing an old game without actually polishing it up or testing it. A simple port of the original game would’ve been acceptable in my opinion, but no. They just HAD to make it worse. They just HAD to shit on one of the best Sonic games.

After playing this, I have extremely low hopes for Sonic X Shadow Generations. It’ll probably suck, but at least it’ll be cool to see the Devil (y’know, from the Bible) again.

A very disappointing remaster of one of my favorite Sonic games. The new features I like quite a bit, such as the perfect homing attack and customization, as well as the Jade Ghost fitting right in with the gameplay experience. However, this game doesn't really add much else, featuring a bare-bones rival rush mode that's a glorified time trial, to a new lighting engine that's questionable in execution, and quite frankly, awful load times and many odd new glitches not present in the original game. Also sucks that the switch port got the short end of the stick despite the original game being on the Nintendo Wii. Why this port of an over 10 year old Wii game runs so poorly is beyond me. I'd suggest playing the original on Dolphin Emulator for a better experience if you don't care for the new content (which there isn't much).

Primero voy a decir que la gente es muy llorona con respecto a esta versión, y ahora si comienzo con la review, Sonic Colors me sorprendió que dejara de intentar cosas nuevas como las entregas anteriores y se fuera por el Sonic más clásico, un poco llevando el mismo estilo que Sonic Generations, ya que tenemos secciones en los niveles las cuales son de alta velocidad teniendo la cámara detrás nuestra, y secciones en donde pasa a ser un sidescroller como los juegos antiguos.

En temas de historia es bastante simple por lo mismo que dije anteriormente, trata de volver a las raíces del erizo, y lo hace bastante bien, eggman tiene otra estación espacial y está usando a aliens y sus mundos para llevar a cabo sus planes, entonces debemos recorrer estos desligando la máquina de eggman y finalmente acabar con esto.

Me gusta que en parte no sea tan lineal, si bien los "actos" dentro de los mundo van en orden, hay veces que no se nos desbloquea 1 solo mundo para visitar, si no que 2, entonces podemos ir eligiendo como queremos jugar. Aparte, amo los controles de este juego, son muy responsivos, se siente dinámico, nunca tuve problemas con que alguno no funcionara, y las mecánicas nuevas (que algunas se vuelven a ver en lost world o Generations) son muy entretenidas de usar y, si bien cambian un poco el ritmo de los niveles, no hace que se sienta pesado. Los jefes si pecan de repetirse y no volverse tan interesantes (aparte de que son muy sencillos), pero no siento que esa un problema tan grande.

Tengo que destacar que este juego es muy bonito, como dice su nombre, es muy colorido, los stages son increíbles visualmente, y hay que tener en cuenta que el juego original es de la wii, y con el lavado de cara se ve espectacular, hay un par de cambios de iluminaciones mayoritariamente, pero de nuevo, no es un problema que arruine la experiencia.

Con la música si tengo sentimientos encontrados, si bien es buena, acompaña muy bien y tiene un estilo muy marcado queriendo ser como los Sonic clásicos, ninguna se me hizo recordable, más allá de la que pondré abajo, creo que se centraron mucho en hacer música buena, pero sin ser pegajosa.

Finalmente quiero decir que a pesar de que este juego sea corto (dura al rededor de 3 horas), se me hizo muy entretenido, lo pasé muy bien jugándolo, y siento que (junto a Generations) si quieren seguir haciendo juegos de Sonic con esta mezcla en los gameplays, este es el camino correcto.

Canción Favorita: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eUswq5owJk

It feels insincere to say I've "played" Sonic Colours: Ultimate, because I backseated my best friend playing it. The controller never touched my hands, but we streamed it together on Twitch and completed the game together. So everything other than the experience of interacting with the gameplay mechanics, I was an active gamer! The sound track in Sonic Colours is one of my favourite parts. The music is wonderful. Additionally, the art direction is colourful and fun, and the introduction of the Wisps as power ups is great. The story itself is pretty simple, but for a sonic game that's not the most important ingredient. What I want are fun levels and quick cut scenes that move the plot along with memorable one liners and great character interactions. I got those in this game so I was happy. The Ultimate "face lift" makes Sonic Colours look nice and HD, but most importantly I'm glad this game remains accessible for today's gamers to play.

Currently at time of writing, Sonic Colors: Ultimate is very difficult to recommend. Is it a port of a good Sonic game? Yeah, it sure is. But hooo boy does this rerelease have it's problems.

Let's start with the deal breakers and work our way down.
- There's an obscene amount of bloom on every light source and object, including Sonic himself. Some areas this is passable, but for worlds such as Starlight Carnival, which is almost entirely neon lights on a pitch black background, it can render the game uncomfortable to play to near unplayable. Potentially able to be modded out.
- There's an obscene amount of stutter during active gameplay. I don't think it's because of my machine, I've got a 3070 and it's held up incredibly well on other games that, believe it or not, aren't ports of Wii games. Heck, it even runs games on Dolphin like a fucking champ. So I can't tell if it's an optimization error or if the game is struggling under these very lenient conditions. But for a Sonic game, it can be absolutely unbearable to deal with.
- The cutscenes are fucking strange to me as someone who's played the Wii version before. They're clearly upscaled, but to a really weird and disgusting degree. Character edges shake like a mess and lips desync easily. It's honestly a little hard to watch Sonic and Tails interact in them, although most of Eggman's are okay.
- The customizations seem to be a last minute duct tape addition with how aggressive they are with the currency needed to get them. It doesn't help that all of them can be boiled down to "Neat, but you'll never be able to tell you have them on in actual gameplay." Not a deal breaker, but certainly annoying.
- Extra Lives are replaced with Tails Pickups (as an aside it's fucked up that you pick up his disembodied head as a life) where if you fall down a pit then he'll help you back up, saving you your rings in exchange for a life. Neat for a Sonic game where 1 hit loses all of your rings, but the put down animation takes an eternity and a half.
- The remixed music for a Sonic game is profoundly bad. I'm sorry if it's not awful to you, but when most of the remixes sound like a group of elementary school students copying the tracks with Kazoos, Vuvuzelas, and Otomatones. In comparison to the original tracks you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel calling these inferior versions "Remixes". It's this low on the list because unlike everything else listed here you can actually turn it off.

The rest of the problems lie with the original too. It's oddly too floaty, it's hard to get into a flow state, the red rings are remarkably annoying, sometimes the game just breaks going from 2D to 3D or from a scripted sequence to a nonscripted sequence or vice versa. But at the very least I didn't have the displeasure of being blinded while playing it. If you do pick it up, try to find some sort of mod that cuts the bloom and fixes the stuttering issues. Otherwise you're in for a bad time instead of just a time.