Instead of fixing some of the many major flaws that the base game had, Sonic Team instead decided to make a small story addition with 3 completely new playable characters. The result is a vastly more varied game than the original release, at the cost of breaking the game in half. To be blunt, this trade off is awful. Don't get me wrong, I love breaking games in half, but there is a big difference between a well designed game with a high skill ceiling (Sonic Adventure 2 for example) and a game so utterly dysfunctional that doing anything in the game feels unintentionally broken and manipulatable.
The broken physics are made even more apparent with the addition of the spin dash. I love that you can hold LT to keep the move going, unlike the boost which loves to stop working even though you never let go of RT. However, if you launch off of a slope the right way (and it's way too easy to do so) you can launch yourself so high and far that it's almost disorientating. That part is not fun. In my opinion, it isn't restricted enough.
The other characters are just as janky to control as Sonic, and even more broken. All 3 of them have some way to just float or fly for a long time which defeats any incentive to do the mini challenges spread across the island when you can just fly to the end of all of them. It feels like they did too much with the new characters and not enough at the same time.
The traditional levels suck. Each of them has a gimmick that hypocritically restricts the explorative nature of the new spin dash. They also never fixed the bug that doesn't carry your custom controls into the levels. I didn't feel remotely bothered to do all of them.
The "challenges" are hard, but not actually challenging. Instead of testing your skill, they test your patience and input latency. You have to have superhuman speed to do any of them above normal difficulty or you have to replay each one dozens of times until you memorize every aspect of the challenge.
There is nothing to talk about in regards to the story as it is barely present and what is there is confusing and uninteresting. Don't even get me started on the final boss.
I think my disappointment comes from a desire to see this game in a good state. Instead of that, I got something new that exaggerates the issues that I wanted to see fixed by now. The spin dash is merely a bandage on top of the horrible boost and the new characters remove all incentive and fun from the game. Everything outside of the open zone is dysfunctional and not worth the time.
The broken physics are made even more apparent with the addition of the spin dash. I love that you can hold LT to keep the move going, unlike the boost which loves to stop working even though you never let go of RT. However, if you launch off of a slope the right way (and it's way too easy to do so) you can launch yourself so high and far that it's almost disorientating. That part is not fun. In my opinion, it isn't restricted enough.
The other characters are just as janky to control as Sonic, and even more broken. All 3 of them have some way to just float or fly for a long time which defeats any incentive to do the mini challenges spread across the island when you can just fly to the end of all of them. It feels like they did too much with the new characters and not enough at the same time.
The traditional levels suck. Each of them has a gimmick that hypocritically restricts the explorative nature of the new spin dash. They also never fixed the bug that doesn't carry your custom controls into the levels. I didn't feel remotely bothered to do all of them.
The "challenges" are hard, but not actually challenging. Instead of testing your skill, they test your patience and input latency. You have to have superhuman speed to do any of them above normal difficulty or you have to replay each one dozens of times until you memorize every aspect of the challenge.
There is nothing to talk about in regards to the story as it is barely present and what is there is confusing and uninteresting. Don't even get me started on the final boss.
I think my disappointment comes from a desire to see this game in a good state. Instead of that, I got something new that exaggerates the issues that I wanted to see fixed by now. The spin dash is merely a bandage on top of the horrible boost and the new characters remove all incentive and fun from the game. Everything outside of the open zone is dysfunctional and not worth the time.