wow, this game kinda sucks! they babyified one of my favorite racing games! manual tricks off ramps and normal drifting all gone. instead you get the gravity dive boost which is pretty situational and gets pretty damn annoying after using it two or three times. having to get rings to basically do ANYTHING in a race is so stupid. why do I need rings to grind rails? this game is so floaty and slow, it doesnt help that you control like shit too. the only good thing I can give it as that the levels feel a bit more unique visually and that opening cutscene is badass, honestly one of my biggest letdowns. at least the music is pretty great. free and catch me if you can are such underrated sonic tracks

i was 2 zones in before i so desperately wanted to alt-tab out and just play sonic mania instead.

seeing naoto oshima, the creator of sonic himself and being integral parts of many of my favorite sonic games such as cd and adventure gave me some type of optimism for this game, i wasnt expecting anything amazing but DAMN did they miss the mark so hard. the sonic staple of incredibly inconsistent presentation continues, its embarrassing down to its fucking launch.

- denuvo AND epic games launcher included despite being nowhere on the page
- dlc that was for the deluxe edition made temporarily free by accident (yes, really.)
- modern amy costume was said to be newsletter only is now dlc

in every aspect this game is extremely lazy, the physics are a lot better than sonic teams past attempts but they are still ever so slightly off. the level design is extremely fine, though the ring locations are barely even hidden most of the time. the quality of bosses tanked since frontiers and now take FOREVER between phases, usually ranging between 2-3 minutes. the new emerald powers are so annoying too, they're nothing more than gimmicks. theres not a single time they are ever utilized in a fun or unique way. they couldn't even get the damn sound mixing right, some sounds are too quiet and others blast your eardrums.

the music in this game just sucks too, why are there like 50 people working on it? and why do most of the tracks suck? jun sunoue is more than fully capable of making amazing genesis compositions (just check out his work on 3d blast!), and yet he still goes for that horrible synthy garbage that was also present in sonic 4.
instead of composing faster versions of tracks when you get the speed shoes like in gens, it sounds like they went in audacity and sped up the songs.

the art direction was one aspect i was so desperately wanting to be good, a return to form for sonic aesthetically was my biggest hope and frankly, it like shit. every zone is so generic or just worse versions of other zones, generic forest, ugly sand level, carnival night rip off, it doesnt help the game is on the same level graphically as a xbox live budget title. super low res textures, horrible rim lighting and dark shadows plague every part of this game.

even after beating this game im baffled by how boring and dull it is. $60 for this game is a scam, i shouldve seen it coming as that this is the same studio that made other middling, bland games such as yoshis new island and balan wonderworld. it sucks, everything sucks. if you want a good game, play mania..you can buy three copies for the same price as this. i want nothing more than sonic to succeed, its my favorite franchise of all time, but we are in this forever cycle of inconsistent, amateurish messes that never strive to be anything more than games to fill up spaces on store shelves. try next time, please.