This game has me feeling the most hopeful for the series I have in a long time, but it's also "five steps forward, three steps back" for Sonic as a whole. The story was nice but much too focused on the past of the series, as if they were afraid to be too bold and defanged some intended darker elements or further character drama. I liked Sage's character but not that much, it was a very formulaic story that I think didn't differentiate itself enough from Shadow's original SA2 arc.

The open zone was the best part of the game by far, with lots of different small objectives and bosses giving a nice sense of exploration and a good sandbox for the movement. The freeform nature of it allowed for a lot of fun objective skipping and experimentation, though the physics were certainly wonky and restrictive a lot of the time as well. Given more time iterating, this style of gameplay could very well put Sonic back into the forefront of experimental and interesting platforming games.

The cyberspace levels were a nice concept, with some fantastic music and a good objective system. However, I feel the S rank times were too easy to achieve, a problem it shares with the many boost-era Sonic games it shares this design with. There also should have been a sort of special achievement for getting all the objectives in the same run to increase replay value. The level design was quite the disappointment as well, often reusing unedited chunks levels from Generations, Unleashed, and strangely enough Adventure 2.

Given the framework that this game set, I can see a true classic Sonic game coming out of Sonic Team again, which is something I haven't felt in a very long time. They just need to spend more time working out the kinks in the design, create more original content for the cyberspace stand-in, and write a bolder story with less talking and more actions from the characters.