Emijx
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
4h 0m
Days in Journal
1 day
Last played
January 30, 2024
Platforms Played
Currently at time of writing, Sonic Colors: Ultimate is very difficult to recommend. Is it a port of a good Sonic game? Yeah, it sure is. But hooo boy does this rerelease have it's problems.
Let's start with the deal breakers and work our way down.
- There's an obscene amount of bloom on every light source and object, including Sonic himself. Some areas this is passable, but for worlds such as Starlight Carnival, which is almost entirely neon lights on a pitch black background, it can render the game uncomfortable to play to near unplayable. Potentially able to be modded out.
- There's an obscene amount of stutter during active gameplay. I don't think it's because of my machine, I've got a 3070 and it's held up incredibly well on other games that, believe it or not, aren't ports of Wii games. Heck, it even runs games on Dolphin like a fucking champ. So I can't tell if it's an optimization error or if the game is struggling under these very lenient conditions. But for a Sonic game, it can be absolutely unbearable to deal with.
- The cutscenes are fucking strange to me as someone who's played the Wii version before. They're clearly upscaled, but to a really weird and disgusting degree. Character edges shake like a mess and lips desync easily. It's honestly a little hard to watch Sonic and Tails interact in them, although most of Eggman's are okay.
- The customizations seem to be a last minute duct tape addition with how aggressive they are with the currency needed to get them. It doesn't help that all of them can be boiled down to "Neat, but you'll never be able to tell you have them on in actual gameplay." Not a deal breaker, but certainly annoying.
- Extra Lives are replaced with Tails Pickups (as an aside it's fucked up that you pick up his disembodied head as a life) where if you fall down a pit then he'll help you back up, saving you your rings in exchange for a life. Neat for a Sonic game where 1 hit loses all of your rings, but the put down animation takes an eternity and a half.
- The remixed music for a Sonic game is profoundly bad. I'm sorry if it's not awful to you, but when most of the remixes sound like a group of elementary school students copying the tracks with Kazoos, Vuvuzelas, and Otomatones. In comparison to the original tracks you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel calling these inferior versions "Remixes". It's this low on the list because unlike everything else listed here you can actually turn it off.
The rest of the problems lie with the original too. It's oddly too floaty, it's hard to get into a flow state, the red rings are remarkably annoying, sometimes the game just breaks going from 2D to 3D or from a scripted sequence to a nonscripted sequence or vice versa. But at the very least I didn't have the displeasure of being blinded while playing it. If you do pick it up, try to find some sort of mod that cuts the bloom and fixes the stuttering issues. Otherwise you're in for a bad time instead of just a time.
Let's start with the deal breakers and work our way down.
- There's an obscene amount of bloom on every light source and object, including Sonic himself. Some areas this is passable, but for worlds such as Starlight Carnival, which is almost entirely neon lights on a pitch black background, it can render the game uncomfortable to play to near unplayable. Potentially able to be modded out.
- There's an obscene amount of stutter during active gameplay. I don't think it's because of my machine, I've got a 3070 and it's held up incredibly well on other games that, believe it or not, aren't ports of Wii games. Heck, it even runs games on Dolphin like a fucking champ. So I can't tell if it's an optimization error or if the game is struggling under these very lenient conditions. But for a Sonic game, it can be absolutely unbearable to deal with.
- The cutscenes are fucking strange to me as someone who's played the Wii version before. They're clearly upscaled, but to a really weird and disgusting degree. Character edges shake like a mess and lips desync easily. It's honestly a little hard to watch Sonic and Tails interact in them, although most of Eggman's are okay.
- The customizations seem to be a last minute duct tape addition with how aggressive they are with the currency needed to get them. It doesn't help that all of them can be boiled down to "Neat, but you'll never be able to tell you have them on in actual gameplay." Not a deal breaker, but certainly annoying.
- Extra Lives are replaced with Tails Pickups (as an aside it's fucked up that you pick up his disembodied head as a life) where if you fall down a pit then he'll help you back up, saving you your rings in exchange for a life. Neat for a Sonic game where 1 hit loses all of your rings, but the put down animation takes an eternity and a half.
- The remixed music for a Sonic game is profoundly bad. I'm sorry if it's not awful to you, but when most of the remixes sound like a group of elementary school students copying the tracks with Kazoos, Vuvuzelas, and Otomatones. In comparison to the original tracks you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel calling these inferior versions "Remixes". It's this low on the list because unlike everything else listed here you can actually turn it off.
The rest of the problems lie with the original too. It's oddly too floaty, it's hard to get into a flow state, the red rings are remarkably annoying, sometimes the game just breaks going from 2D to 3D or from a scripted sequence to a nonscripted sequence or vice versa. But at the very least I didn't have the displeasure of being blinded while playing it. If you do pick it up, try to find some sort of mod that cuts the bloom and fixes the stuttering issues. Otherwise you're in for a bad time instead of just a time.