definitely a step in the right direction for the series! it's obviously nowhere near the originals, but it blew my expectations out of the water by being an improvement over the last two games, which i'm happy with.

gameplay wise, there's a lot more emphasis on precision here, and the control is a lot better, but man i have no idea why they just don't bring back the original physics. the floatiness is still very apparent in this one and the camera not even following your movement properly fucked me over in a lot of levels - i'd be fine with it if camera movement didn't feel stiff af.
obviously the star of the show here is the spindash ability and it's...... interesting to say the least. while it doesn't really hurt the game since there aren't a lot of instances where you have to use it, it just feels like an afterthought they added late into development, similar to sonic 2 - i'm not a big fan of adding an instant speed move in a game where momentum is key.
the level design sucks as well - while i'm very happy that staples like dynamic objects, switches (and just more terrain in general) have found their way back into the design, a lot of these levels involve waiting for platforms to come around, or rolling through a huge tower and it gets stale fast, until the later levels at least.

while there isn't too much stuff to keep you intrigued, it's most definitely a glimmer of hope and i'll be waiting in anticipation to see how they improve on this in the next one.
also removing monkey target is an unforgivable sin and somebody at rgg studio is going to pay