This review contains spoilers
Sonic Frontiers came out and everyone was like "It's a bit flawed, but really good!". To me it was kinda "It's pretty fun, but kind of mid".
Sonic Superstars came out and everyone was like "It's pretty fun, but kind of mid". To me it's more "It's a bit flawed, but really good!"
For real, the things I heard the most complaints about were the physics and the bosses. The physics were actually completely fine to me, with one minor exception I'll get to later. Bosses were hit or miss. Some of them I really liked, others were a pain in the ass. The biggest issue with bosses was that they had large periods of being invulnerable, which I suppose was to make the avatar emerald power not able to insta-win boss fights. But what that means is the more you have to replay a boss, the more frustrating it becomes. I think as long as you can do a boss in one or two attempts, they were mostly engaging and way more creative than the Genesis-era bosses.
I've always thought Sonic was much more interesting with its level themes than say Mario. So many great selection of brand new levels, some of which take inspiration from some classic Sonic staples like casinos, but many felt completely original.
The fact you unlock a new power with each emerald unlocked is a great way to make collecting them more fun, and gives purpose to each individual one whereas before they were an all or nothing kind of thing. The powers aren't all equal, like there's one that only works in water which is fantastic for one stage, but pretty useless on any other stage. I never found much use for the vine power. But the avatar power, and the rocket powers were incredibly good for the boss fights and general platforming respectively.
Once you beat the game you unlock a new character, which always a nice reward. Trip has her own unique super form too. It's not just a faster, invincible version of herself; Trip turns into a golden dragon that can fly freely through the stage. That sounds absolutely incredible, the problem is this dragon controls like utter shit. I swear to God it is so unresponsive, and it just gets stuck on the floor sometimes so you have to jump to get her off it. She can breath fire but it's range is so pathetic that you're better off just slamming your invincible body into everything instead. I can't believe they gave you a post-game super form that can fly and breath fire and it's literally worse than using the basic characters.
Unlocking Trip also unlocks "Trip's Story", which is just the whole game again except the levels are slightly altered to be harder with sections designed around her wall-sticking abilities, and bosses take a few more hits. There's also a brand new final boss for her which is utter bullshit, takes 5+ minutes to complete and has multiple OHKO attacks no matter how many rings you have.
I wouldn't mind Trip's story too much, but she's also playable in the basic main game after beating the story, so it's like "Here's a brand new mode! Levels are a bit harder, and you're limited to only one character that you can already use in the main game anyway". If you wanted a hard mode that's fine, but I feel like you could have either made Trip exclusive to this mode, or made all characters playable in hard mode, doing it this way just feels messy to me.
Beating Trip's story unlocks the true ultra final boss. The obligatory Super Sonic boss. It has probably the tighest ring limit of any Super Sonic boss in the series. There are entire phases of this boss fight where the boss can't be hit, but it still tries to attack you...but you are invincible because you are Super Sonic. So you literally have zero reason to ever dodge anything in these phases. It's very weirdly designed. It's full of RNG since you have to collect rings that fall from the sky, and sometimes Sonic's friends will show up to offer more rings, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when they show up, and sometimes they pop up just as the boss enters a new attack phase which shifts the camera, and when that happens Sonic's friend will just disappear...
So a few BS post-game stuff aside, I think it's a really great Sonic adventure. I feel like if this came out before Sonic 4 it would have been seen as absolutely incredible and a true successor to S3&K. Coming out after 4 and before Mania would have probably made it look like "Finally a good return to form for 2D Sonic after the mess of Sonic 4". But coming out after Mania, not to mention other iterations of classic Sonic in games like Generations, it's just, yeah it's a good game, but 2D Sonic has already had a few good games in not-too-distance past so it doesn't stand out as much.
The multiplayer mode seemed like short bursts of fun I wouldn't spend long on, but the game didn't even let me try since matchmaking is literally dead. I went into 3 games and each one was just full of bots. This makes not only multiplayer pointless, but even some elements of single player since the medals you can collect in bonus stages, or in hidden areas, serve only to buy customisation for your multiplayer avatar. There is one boss fight that uses your multiplayer avatar though, so I gotta admit that as a really cool surprise - you can pretty much customisation the appearance of an entire boss.
Sonic Superstars came out and everyone was like "It's pretty fun, but kind of mid". To me it's more "It's a bit flawed, but really good!"
For real, the things I heard the most complaints about were the physics and the bosses. The physics were actually completely fine to me, with one minor exception I'll get to later. Bosses were hit or miss. Some of them I really liked, others were a pain in the ass. The biggest issue with bosses was that they had large periods of being invulnerable, which I suppose was to make the avatar emerald power not able to insta-win boss fights. But what that means is the more you have to replay a boss, the more frustrating it becomes. I think as long as you can do a boss in one or two attempts, they were mostly engaging and way more creative than the Genesis-era bosses.
I've always thought Sonic was much more interesting with its level themes than say Mario. So many great selection of brand new levels, some of which take inspiration from some classic Sonic staples like casinos, but many felt completely original.
The fact you unlock a new power with each emerald unlocked is a great way to make collecting them more fun, and gives purpose to each individual one whereas before they were an all or nothing kind of thing. The powers aren't all equal, like there's one that only works in water which is fantastic for one stage, but pretty useless on any other stage. I never found much use for the vine power. But the avatar power, and the rocket powers were incredibly good for the boss fights and general platforming respectively.
Once you beat the game you unlock a new character, which always a nice reward. Trip has her own unique super form too. It's not just a faster, invincible version of herself; Trip turns into a golden dragon that can fly freely through the stage. That sounds absolutely incredible, the problem is this dragon controls like utter shit. I swear to God it is so unresponsive, and it just gets stuck on the floor sometimes so you have to jump to get her off it. She can breath fire but it's range is so pathetic that you're better off just slamming your invincible body into everything instead. I can't believe they gave you a post-game super form that can fly and breath fire and it's literally worse than using the basic characters.
Unlocking Trip also unlocks "Trip's Story", which is just the whole game again except the levels are slightly altered to be harder with sections designed around her wall-sticking abilities, and bosses take a few more hits. There's also a brand new final boss for her which is utter bullshit, takes 5+ minutes to complete and has multiple OHKO attacks no matter how many rings you have.
I wouldn't mind Trip's story too much, but she's also playable in the basic main game after beating the story, so it's like "Here's a brand new mode! Levels are a bit harder, and you're limited to only one character that you can already use in the main game anyway". If you wanted a hard mode that's fine, but I feel like you could have either made Trip exclusive to this mode, or made all characters playable in hard mode, doing it this way just feels messy to me.
Beating Trip's story unlocks the true ultra final boss. The obligatory Super Sonic boss. It has probably the tighest ring limit of any Super Sonic boss in the series. There are entire phases of this boss fight where the boss can't be hit, but it still tries to attack you...but you are invincible because you are Super Sonic. So you literally have zero reason to ever dodge anything in these phases. It's very weirdly designed. It's full of RNG since you have to collect rings that fall from the sky, and sometimes Sonic's friends will show up to offer more rings, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when they show up, and sometimes they pop up just as the boss enters a new attack phase which shifts the camera, and when that happens Sonic's friend will just disappear...
So a few BS post-game stuff aside, I think it's a really great Sonic adventure. I feel like if this came out before Sonic 4 it would have been seen as absolutely incredible and a true successor to S3&K. Coming out after 4 and before Mania would have probably made it look like "Finally a good return to form for 2D Sonic after the mess of Sonic 4". But coming out after Mania, not to mention other iterations of classic Sonic in games like Generations, it's just, yeah it's a good game, but 2D Sonic has already had a few good games in not-too-distance past so it doesn't stand out as much.
The multiplayer mode seemed like short bursts of fun I wouldn't spend long on, but the game didn't even let me try since matchmaking is literally dead. I went into 3 games and each one was just full of bots. This makes not only multiplayer pointless, but even some elements of single player since the medals you can collect in bonus stages, or in hidden areas, serve only to buy customisation for your multiplayer avatar. There is one boss fight that uses your multiplayer avatar though, so I gotta admit that as a really cool surprise - you can pretty much customisation the appearance of an entire boss.