Let’s start with the good: a lot of the acts are a fun ride, even though the later levels start to drag on for too long. They have the usual Sonic trappings, but nothing I can’t deal with. As a Sonic fan, I appreciate the new zones after seeing Green Hill Zone regurgitated countless times, even if they’re sometimes just recolours or combinations of older stages for the most part. The emerald powers were a surprisingly nice addition, especially avatar and bullet were great fun to use. Sadly, the rest of the emerald powers kind of fell flat, and they lack a sort of snappiness to them which makes them feel a tad clunky. I didn’t mind the special stages too much, they’re inoffensive, pretty much.

The rest goes from inconsistent, to bad to worse. The music goes all over the place: from bops, to forgettable to kind of annoying to listen to. The multiplayer just straight up doesn’t work, it all moves too fast so most of the squad is stuck being teleported to where the fastest player is at. The battle mode is more chaotic than fun, and the parts to customise your robot cost way too many medals for the amount you get through naturally playing. I found out the hard way that for some reason the paintjob is a one-use item, which makes it even more pricy. It just takes the fun out of collecting medals when you need so many for even basic stuff.

Now, the elephant in the room: those S&+§@# bosses. Some of them are fine, mostly when you can use the emerald powers to make them go by quicker. When you can’t use these powers, however, which happens a lot in the later stages, they become a slogfest. It’s a waiting game of when the enemy shows off their weak point, get one hit in, and then wait a bunch more until you can hit them again. They’re often not even that difficult pattern-wise, they just take ages, or have RNG elements that make the fight drag on even longer. My frustration truly started to ramp up with the Fang fight and the final boss. The final zone even has a pretty cool gimmick that legitimately impressed me, but those two fights just dragged on for what felt like ages, and my goodwill for the rest of the game steadily dropped with every failed attempt. For a game all about speed, it does feel like a lot of it is rather slow. Boss animations take just a bit too long, auto-scroller segments are a problem as usual when you’ve already done that segment a few times, I felt myself often thinking ‘Get a move on!’.

The extra story adds difficulty in the way of more enemies and more spikes, but since some of those enemies were already pretty annoying and putting spikes everywhere with a camera that’s too zoomed in to tell what’s coming… well, it just underlined the game’s shortcomings even more, and I decided I had enough. At least the new character, Trip, is very nicely designed and her moveset is quite unique, but that wasn’t enough to make me trudge through a worse version of an already occasionally very tedious game.

I don’t regret playing through sonic superstars, but after the fun I had with mania, this is decidedly a huge step down.