Mania Mode is great but Encore Mode is totally about dalliance. Because;

-Re-palette of Mania Mode's levels. Although there are minor level design changes, there is not much difference and frankly they made it even more trash.

-Unnecessary difficult special stages. Also, Special Stage 7 in Encore Mode, almost impossible to get 7th Chaos Emerald because UFO is way too fast.

-Angel Island Zone is extremely short. Also Angel Island Zone Act 2 tilesets found in Sonic Mania's game files. And this is AIZ Act 2's file extension: "Data/Stages/AIZ/Scene2O.bin"

Only great thing about Plus DLC, Mighty and Ray, Casino Bonus Game.

Mighty: He has stomp feature. Also, Mighty's sprite sheet, looks like it was built on Sonic but still looks great.
Already in Knuckles Chaotix game Mighty was made on Sonic.

Ray: He has flying feature like Super Mario World's Cape mechanic. And to be honest, Ray's sprite sheet isn't that good. But also more useful than Mighty.

meh.

Best atmosphere in the franchise and that's my favorite part. Game was planned to be a GTAIII DLC. That's why they are similar to each other. But Vice City is better as you can imagine. Map option (thankfully), so much better mission design, just not like GTAIII's "go bring her/him from A to the B" boring af missions. But... the guns... guns are still so damn bad. Shooting is not a problem but to be shot? Oh that's so damn bad. Enemies, let's say so, can damage my health & armor completely like in 2 seconds. I hated that so much. Naval Engagement mission is an example for that. Except for the ice cream truck mission, 100% progress is actually fun. You must mod this game, I don't need to say that. After all I've said, I never get bored of this game actually. This is a surprising one because of game's progress is addictive. Missions are fun enough. Although there are some missions that break the game's addictive progress, like RC helicopter mission, that's not matter at all. Good old GTA VC, play it.

My favorite in franchise definitely. I've a lot to tell about this game actually. But I'll keep it as short as I can. First of all story and especially story-telling is god-tier. World map is well-designed. Musics, changing atmosphere from city to city, physics etc. everything is awesome. Missions are fine and way better than III & VC, imo. Especially, Las Venturas missions are best. So much fun in that missions... I still can not believe, this game is from 2004? Wow. Just wow. And it has more in beta versions actually. (Hot-coffee, skateboard etc.) BUT;

Steam version is not that good, you can watch VadimM's videos about that topic in YouTube. I always downgrade game's version to 1.0 and adding required mods. Way better gameplay experience.