Masterpiece, Zenith of the medium. Everyone agrees the day time levels are superb, with tight platforming, speed, difficulty and length. Everyone agrees the graphics are far ahead of it's time. Everyone agrees the story is at least great. Everyone agrees the music is incredible and everyone agree this game has massive scope.

I may need a thesaurus, but I know this game has a lot to love. But what about the Werehog? This is where the split begins, do I like it? No. I love it. This may be controversial, but I think this is some of the best combat I've ever played. The amount of combos and strategy involved is insane, you can kill enemies incredibly fast if you know what you are doing. It's some of the most fun I've ever had. However, the Achilles heel is that you need to level up the "combat" skill to unlock the combos. The base werehog is boring, most people wouldn't invest into the combat since most would want to invest into daytime Sonic which is more fun at the start. Without investing into combat, most people resort to spamming Y, which can get you through the game but it's incredibly slow and tedious. I did the same as a child and I hated the Werehog. So if you play this game, invest into the Werehogs skills, especially combat, it makes it a lot better. Is this bad design? Yes, it's one minor slipup which can make or break playthroughs. But this is my subjective review of the game, I'm judging how much fun I had with it, and I had a lot of fun.

There are some criticisms I have though, the performance is pretty abysmal, it is playable but dipping to 15fps is not acceptable, but I look past it most of the time. Some of the Werehogs puzzles like the block pulling puzzles are slow and boring, but these dont take up too much time. Finally, in general, the camera could be better, sometimes mainly during the Werehog the camera can get obscured so it's hard to see anything, it's a minor annoyance.

To go back to positives, the story is fantastic, it's not too lighthearted like the meta era but not super serious, it's the perfect tone, amazing character development, stakes, etc. The voice acting is also peak. The difficulty of this game is also great, it's surprisingly hard which I like, even the daytime levels can be hard to master all these years later unlike Generations. I love the final stage Eggmanland which challenges you in every area with one giant gauntlet. Levels are decently long compared to Generations too, it never ends before it begins to get good, perfect stage lengths.

The final section of this review I want to spend time talking about is the budget and ambition here. The amount of budget in those CGI cutscenes alone must've been insane, it's crazy how much content is in this game and how quality it is. They really gave their all here, didn't cut any corners, and you can tell. It has a lot of heart compared to something like Forces.

To conclude, I didn't go into big depth about the Modern Sonic levels or other obvious positives because most people know about this, I felt like this review's main point was to defend the Werehog and to make others aware how to easily "fix" it. In future, if this gets remastered, the XP should be automatically added instead of manually to make it impossible for the Werehog to be boring to play as. One minor gameplay flaw really did ruin the game for a lot of people, including critics which is unfortunate.

Thanks for reading folks