A fine enough start for like the 9th "revival of Sonic" 3D game but it's mostly a really bland, boring platformer that doesn't play to the series' strengths. Any sense of momentum and inertia that made previous Sonic games feel satisfying to play is gone and replaced with a physics system that fights the player to pin them to the ground at all times until you hit a pebble and send Sonic flying. Amusingly, this is one of the only times you'll ever experience any form of freedom with your movement as whatever ruleset Sonic Team applied to the ground clearly does not function the same way as the air. This means ledges you can shoot yourself off of and grindrails are the only parts of the game that elicit any form of positive response from me in terms of the movement.

Fortunately, grindrails and pebbles are plentiful in the Starfall Islands as the map design is also tragically repetitive. The amount of times I ran around just to find an open field scattered with enemies made Genshin Impact's world feel rich and full of life. There's 4 (technically 5 as one island is a transition into the last stage) islands. Grass, Sand, Lava, and Grass again, and yet the gameplay between these 4 islands is so staggeringly similar that it feels worthless whenever you transition over to the next island.

I do genuinely find this game somewhat joyless which is a shame because I definitely see the potential in an "open-world Sonic game". I can only hope this games' success means Sega will put more money into the Sonic series, because currently the 40 or so people they have trying to make a game of this scale just isn't working.