A follow-up to my last review

Update: They did not.

To the surprise of no one, Sonic Team found a way to fuck up their momentum again. I think I've realized during my post-06 marathon that their biggest problem is they overcorrect everything involving the criticisms they receive and it ends up doing far more damage to their games than fix. Having new playable characters (although the time you spend with them is short), flashy sequences, and brief moments of good ideas is cool, but having insane difficult spikes out of nowhere with some involving level design that look like it was made by a 10-year-old's first level creator idea is not the way to go about addressing the game's difficulty. So much of Frontiers' strengths gets stripped away and its flaws is out in full display because Sonic Team still can't seem to figure out how to do a challenging game without it devolving into bad level design and artificial bullshit. The final boss really doesn't help when the game does the usual thing Sonic games tend to do where it will just be extremely vague on what to do so you're just bashing your head at a wall for however long you're at it. Just an overall underwhelming experience and a mess, man.

The main game is great and improves on the first game a lot but the unorthodox post-game kinda messes with the flow of it when the RNG cave difficulty can range from "challenging but fun" to "do you know what suffering is?"

Sucks because there's (some) good ideas for some of the subfloors, but the randomization of the caves basically leaves everything up to God on if the execution will be good or will you just cheese your way out the floor so you don't end up losing 75% of your squad because of bad enemy or hazard placement. I just hope Pikmin 4 doesn't have this bad of a problem with how it handles caves/dungeons.