Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode I is the first instalment of the 3 Episodes and its selling point is to be a successor of Sonic & Knuckles, it can also be seen as a nostalgia path for those wanting to bring back the genesis era in a modernised art style. This game is a hidden gem in Sega's Sonic The Hedgehog Library and people need to come to realise that it isn't about that 16bit gameplay anymore. Dimps (the creators of S4E1,2,M), knew exactly what they were doing with this game and they didn't fail to disappoint, the gameplay is an entire new experience as it abandons the genesis gameplay and uses it in a more modern way which we would've saw later in Sonic Generations. Dimps has a really good record of making good Sonic games such as 2005's Sonic Rush and 2010's Sonic Colours and they both manage to capture the feeling of the advance triology perfectly but put a spin on it just like Sonic 4 Episode I. The game consists of 5 zones which mimic older zones of the Genesis titles, those being; Splash Hill -> Green Hill, Casino Street -> Casino Night, Lost Labyrinth -> Labyrinth, Mad Gear -> Metropolis, and E.G.G Station -> Death Egg. These stages also come with a beautiful soundtrack which many may see as jarring due to the synth but their are many speculations to why the synth was overused and my one being that Jun Senoue wanted to reimagine the older soundtracks but not make them sound too modern for what the game is trying to be and he managed to capture that perfectly and you can really see it in Sunset Dash and Escape The Cop Trap. "The games physics are what bring the game down as they are sluggish and not well good enough" is what most people say when they have only played the demo and don't know about the game internally, this game was built on Java which is a complete different engine to what Sonic Team were using for the older titles and that meant physics would be harder to recreate. So instead, making sonic more slower and less representitive meaning a new speed of gameplay is a better choice than badly trying to replicate the originals. Overall, I give Sonic 4 Episode 1 a 4/5 as it a perfect nostalgia game and can bring the fun out of anyone, with it's janky bugs