Not sure why they're charging £55 for this when it's a pretty bog standard 2D Sonic game, with no real identity of its own besides small little bits and pieces.
The game itself is fine, it controls well, looks nice enough and I really like Trip as a character, but it just has nothing over something like Mania which oozes style and personality, whilst Superstars honestly just feels like a new 2D Sonic game and not much else, with a lot of elements ripped straight out of Sonic Triple Trouble on the Gamegear.
The momentum is great, it's pretty much 1:1 with the original games, and the level design can be good... in the first half of the game. While not as bad as in the games developed by Dimps, the level design in the second half takes a nose dive and quickly becomes incredibly frustrating with a lot of questionable choices in how the layouts are approached.
There's a strong focus on 4-player co-op in Superstars and that's great, it could be the main thing carrying and excusing some of the lesser parts of the game, but I guess somebody at Sega decided online co-op would make too much sense for this game and threw it in the trash. Why? Why did they take the most defining element of the game, the thing they keep highlighting in the promotional material and relegate it to local only in a post-covid world? What was going through their mind when they made that decision? I'm just baffled by it.
With that said, probably the most disappointing aspect of the game would be the music. Some of it is genuinely nice to the ears but isn't all that memorable, and then there's the songs that sound as if they're ripped straight out of Sonic 4, that awful sound font and all. It isn't a great soundtrack, and that's probably the biggest sin you can commit in a Sonic The Hedgehog game.
Sonic Superstars can be easily described in one sentence and I mean this in the nicest of ways; This is the New Super Mario Bros of the Sonic franchise.
The game itself is fine, it controls well, looks nice enough and I really like Trip as a character, but it just has nothing over something like Mania which oozes style and personality, whilst Superstars honestly just feels like a new 2D Sonic game and not much else, with a lot of elements ripped straight out of Sonic Triple Trouble on the Gamegear.
The momentum is great, it's pretty much 1:1 with the original games, and the level design can be good... in the first half of the game. While not as bad as in the games developed by Dimps, the level design in the second half takes a nose dive and quickly becomes incredibly frustrating with a lot of questionable choices in how the layouts are approached.
There's a strong focus on 4-player co-op in Superstars and that's great, it could be the main thing carrying and excusing some of the lesser parts of the game, but I guess somebody at Sega decided online co-op would make too much sense for this game and threw it in the trash. Why? Why did they take the most defining element of the game, the thing they keep highlighting in the promotional material and relegate it to local only in a post-covid world? What was going through their mind when they made that decision? I'm just baffled by it.
With that said, probably the most disappointing aspect of the game would be the music. Some of it is genuinely nice to the ears but isn't all that memorable, and then there's the songs that sound as if they're ripped straight out of Sonic 4, that awful sound font and all. It isn't a great soundtrack, and that's probably the biggest sin you can commit in a Sonic The Hedgehog game.
Sonic Superstars can be easily described in one sentence and I mean this in the nicest of ways; This is the New Super Mario Bros of the Sonic franchise.