Alright here's the deal. I've played a shit ton of the original release. I love it to bits, I've got a whole thing about saying that people who give the game flak aren't giving the game the credit it deserves. I have a lot of adoration for the original game, and I can take my rose tinted glasses off of it and also say that man there are some parts that are aggressively rough around the edges. There are things that absolutely can be fixed and I fully concede that.
With that out of the way, if you think that getting this mod will fix every issue that the original had, you are dead wrong. After playing through all the levels, beating the final story, and beating expert mode, I walked away wondering who in the world this is for. And then it hit me. It's for people like me who want Shadow the Hedgehog to be a better game, and goes in and files down those sharp corners to something a bit more palatable...only to then feed you the shavings again after a little bit of time.
Some of the changes made here are absurd. Removing the key doors? Great! Those don't need to exist since most of them are useless anyways! But then you change the keys to red rings and put them in the most cryptic nonsensical locations possible, to the point where the only ones I found were either the ones that stuck out like a sore thumb, or the ones that were unchanged from the original.
Stage re-balancing fluctuates from "We removed a few enemies so now you only have to go through most of the level instead of all of it!" to "We didn't touch this stage sorry" to "Yeah we made this stage intentionally more difficult by changing it in a negatively balanced way that does nothing but make the stage worse to play!" and it's frustrating. Most of the additions play off as someone messing around with a stage editor and either saying this is great and keeping it all in or just not remembering to revert their changes before putting the stages out.
Expert mode in particular is absolutely a guilty offender of the latter of the above statement. A majority of the difficulty comes in either flooding enemies or removing jumping platforms and not providing replacements, requiring a spin dash jump. Something you'll run into and have to repeat for around 60% of the expert mode playthrough. It's evident that the people making this just wanted something that felt hard and not something that felt particularly rewarding to beat or was well designed while being difficult when you realize that they took the most annoying and difficult segments of the original expert layouts and adjust them to be even more annoying in a "Let me copy your homework, don't worry I'll change it a little" type beat way.
Now look, this adds in a lot of changes that I do like. Little tweaks here and there, and some stages play incredibly fluid and well for them. It's just a shame that if you're not a Shadow the Hedgehog super fan and think that this is your big chance to cross that black sheep off your list that this is somehow worse in some cases, and chooses to wear those poor adjustments on it's sleeve. Alas.
With that out of the way, if you think that getting this mod will fix every issue that the original had, you are dead wrong. After playing through all the levels, beating the final story, and beating expert mode, I walked away wondering who in the world this is for. And then it hit me. It's for people like me who want Shadow the Hedgehog to be a better game, and goes in and files down those sharp corners to something a bit more palatable...only to then feed you the shavings again after a little bit of time.
Some of the changes made here are absurd. Removing the key doors? Great! Those don't need to exist since most of them are useless anyways! But then you change the keys to red rings and put them in the most cryptic nonsensical locations possible, to the point where the only ones I found were either the ones that stuck out like a sore thumb, or the ones that were unchanged from the original.
Stage re-balancing fluctuates from "We removed a few enemies so now you only have to go through most of the level instead of all of it!" to "We didn't touch this stage sorry" to "Yeah we made this stage intentionally more difficult by changing it in a negatively balanced way that does nothing but make the stage worse to play!" and it's frustrating. Most of the additions play off as someone messing around with a stage editor and either saying this is great and keeping it all in or just not remembering to revert their changes before putting the stages out.
Expert mode in particular is absolutely a guilty offender of the latter of the above statement. A majority of the difficulty comes in either flooding enemies or removing jumping platforms and not providing replacements, requiring a spin dash jump. Something you'll run into and have to repeat for around 60% of the expert mode playthrough. It's evident that the people making this just wanted something that felt hard and not something that felt particularly rewarding to beat or was well designed while being difficult when you realize that they took the most annoying and difficult segments of the original expert layouts and adjust them to be even more annoying in a "Let me copy your homework, don't worry I'll change it a little" type beat way.
Now look, this adds in a lot of changes that I do like. Little tweaks here and there, and some stages play incredibly fluid and well for them. It's just a shame that if you're not a Shadow the Hedgehog super fan and think that this is your big chance to cross that black sheep off your list that this is somehow worse in some cases, and chooses to wear those poor adjustments on it's sleeve. Alas.