Sonic Lost World on the Wii U really is the epitone of "I don't hate it but I also don't love it either." There's some interesting ideas here such as the parkour system, but it could have been integrated into the level design alot better. You can really tell how hard the devs were trying to copy Mario, from the Mario Galaxy-esque level design, the more cartoony artstyle, the same generic world themes for the most part and having a friggin run button for whatever reason. Wasn't one of the main appeals of Sonic to begin with is that he didn't have a run button and gained speed naturally? Yes, there's the boost but I feel like that's different in a way. Sometimes movement feels a bit awkward for the fact that when you turn, you lose some of your speed for whatever reason. Surely someone must have caught this during playtesting, right? Even more awkward is that doing the double jump kinda kills your momentum, which feels pretty awkward especially in 2D sections. In terms of the level design, I think it's just serviceable for the most part but easily the most offensive stages are the gimmickier ones, such as the snowball level in Frozen Factory, the rolling fruit that rips off Mario Sunshine in Tropical Coast, and the levitating Sonic autoscrolling level in Sky Road. Gimmicks like these either fall into the category of either having crappy controls, killing the pace of the game flow, or gets old really fast. Easily some of the worst levels in the game. The Wisps also make a return in this game from Colors but they're more shoehorned in than anything gameplay wise and narratively, compared to Colors where they actually felt like a natural part of the level design. Got nothing much to say as well for the boss fights as thanks to the charged homing attack, the bosses are literal jokes. As for the story to put it bluntly: it blows HARD. This is easily one of the worst narratives in the entire series, even worse than 06 I'd argue. Even though that story was a massive trainwreck at least it tried to do something interesting with its themes and whatnot, but Lost World has like absolutely nothing running for its money. The Deadly Six are up there as some of the worst villains in the series due to just how 1-dimensional the characters are from design to personality, and are just generally uninteresting as characters. The writing in general is just awful, with Sonic acting like an enormous prick towards Tails and how whenever the writing tries to be funny, I cringe due to how forced the humor is, and laugh at the serious moments because again it feels forced. There’s also Knuckles and Amy who are such nothingburgers, you could remove them from the story and nothing would really be lost. I’m went a bit harder on the story this time seeing as theres cutscenes before and after almost every level, which shows that the story is meant to have a bigger role, but alas there’s nothing. There’s a couple other aspects such as the Yoshi and Zelda themed DLC stages which are easily the best ones in the game, and the soundtrack is also great as per usual. Overall, I’d give the game about a 5, maybe a 6 out of 10 at best as that’s how I really feel after playing the game. I’d say maybe give it a shot but you wouldn’t lose much value giving this one a pass IMO.