Wow this overhate is insane

It is a good game
+ most of the gameplay changes are great, gameplay feels amazing
+ bp is surprisingly good
+ upgraded engine graphics are really good
+ junker queen is great, kiriko is good, new maps are really fun to play
+ junker mommy

- people who picked prices for skins should be sent to hell
- ui is clearly unfinished
- sojourn is so underwhelming
- push mode is not fun to play, and it must be really annoying for level designers to make mirrored maps
- removal of level system is... not good

NOTE: I know you hate the ABK, but if you didn't play the game don't write a review to mislead people. If you played it and didn't like it, I respect it, write all your rage and your problems with the game and ABK. But posting "reviews" without playing the game, that's just despicable.

Banjo is fun, and that's honestly not something I expected going into this game. After my experiences with super old early 3D games of this era ended up being mostly on the negative end, I was surprised at what a relaxing fun game this was. I ended up really enjoying my first experience with Banjo Kazooie, but it got me pondering: why did I have fun with this but didn't have fun at all with Mario 64? By design I prefer platformers where you can really mess around with their movement and experiment and Mario 64 has that on display ten fold while Banjo is super limited in this regard. So why did I end up not only hating that game but having fun with this one? After thinking it over I came up with a couple of explanations.

For one, the overall handling and ground control is LEAGUES better than 64's overly sluggish almost tank like base movement. Moving around was no problem at all and the levels were all small and compactly built around Banjo's overall relaxed easy going pace and speed, it felt great from the get go. It's simply fun to explore the stages and find collectibles without getting booted out of the stage the moment you collected them. There's overall a lot of fun silly charm the game has that definitely bolstered my enjoyment. Yeah the swimming controls aren't super ideal, it's often hard to tell what object is breakable (specifically windows and doors that lead to different rooms but most of them look like any flat uninteractive texture already in the game) and the final boss sucks, but I overall had a good time. It's not super amazing and didn't blow me away or anything, but it didn't need to. I feel not every game needs to be an 8-9/10 or bust, some games can just be simple and fun to play through and not much more than that, I can vibe with it.

Solid kart racer that’s lacking in quite a few key areas. People often say it’s a downgrade from Transformed and while it definitely is, I’d say what’s here is fun enough. The midair stunt system, drift chaining and continuous boost stacking system returns from Transformed, but the vehicle handling is floatier, the boosts are way less powerful and the track length from the recycled stages have been shortened from the previous games to give the illusion the cars are actually traveling faster. While it still handles well and the mechanics are solid, it’s still a downgrade nonetheless. Most of the tracks are also recycled from ASR and ASRT, with ASR getting the majority of tracks reused. ASRT has like one recycled track and it’s far less interesting when they took out the transformed mechanic, and that applies to all the stages overall. However, the new tracks constructed for this game are actually pretty well made for standard tracks. There are a plethora of shortcuts to take and fun ramps to jump and flip off of to get an advantage. For the most part all of the new tracks get a grade A in my book

The main gimmick this racer has to offer is the team mechanic. You race in a squad of 3, helping each other out and making sure all of you secure good positions in the race, not just you. There are a plethora of team actions you can pull off: slingshots which allows you to trail behind the team leader and get a good speed boost off of him, skimboost which allows you to save other teammates and get them back up to speed when they hit a wall or get slowed by an item, passing items you don’t need to other racers, and taking out other enemy teams along the track. Doing all of these actions fills up the team ultimate meter, which when activated grants you invincibility and a burst of speed for a limited time. This actually was way more fun than I remember it being, even with CPU players, and it really does give this otherwise kind of mundane racer its own identity. The issue is that with CPU partners you get screwed over in certain areas. For instance, with Team Ultimate, the effect lasts longer if all 3 of you activate the ultimate at the same time, but the thing is this is pretty much impossible with CPU players so I never feel like I can take advantage of that. The items are now wisps, most of them are the standard generic weapons kart racers are famous for, but there are some that are pretty neat (burst laser and spikes are cool editions). Not Quake though, Quake is awful. It tries to mimic the swarm item from ASRT, but the thing is while swarm could be troubling for the racers nearing first, pretty much all of them could be avoided with skillful driving. With quake it’s a complete crapshoot, as you’ll be faced in a situation where stone pillars clog up the lane you’re racing on and it’s next to impossible to avoid any of them.

TSR features a full fledged fully voiced story mode. The story is really nothing special and nothing really happens within the plot, but this is basically where most of the single player content is, and man you can tell they were STRUGGLING with the tracks to use the further you went in. Grand Prix races often recycle the exact same tracks you’ve already played over and over again, sometimes making them be in mirror mode so it’s not a complete carbon copy, due to the fact that there’s not a lot of tracks in this game. For a game that wants to deliver fanservice, the fanservice and the amount of content in this game is really pitiful. You earn credits to spend in this gumball machine to earn customization parts for your car or item boxes to give you a boost in the next race. The amount of car customization you can have is pretty admirable, but the process of getting them is kind of a chore. You can only spend 10 credits to get 1 item at a time and I don’t really understand why. Why not allow us to spend 100 credits to get a bunch of items at once and view them? This system just takes forever.

Overall Team Sonic Racing is still a fun time, more so with friends. It’s definitely better than All Stars Racing, but not as good as Transformed. It’s like a wierd middle ground. Also don’t bother trying to play online, there is literally nobody there to play with you lol. Some free bonus post launch DLC might’ve helped, but I guess they were just ok with TSR squeaking by doing the bare minimum

Idk man I really enjoyed this one lol.

The movement is so good, you can vault and wall run across pretty much every surface, grind on wires endlessly, jump on pretty much anything from bushes to cars, swing on poles, airdash, skim across water, chaining these actions together to keep your speed up and avoid touching the ground is amazingly satisfying and has a great sense of flow and momentum. If a movement system in an open world sandbox area is so good that you don’t want to use fast travel then I’d say that it did a great job. The game also rewards you for keeping the flow going with a “style” system, which can power up your attacks and give you additional perks in combat.

Unfortunately I don’t think other elements of the game really pick up the slack. Combat works and can be fun but is a bit of a chaotic mess, and mostly just revolves around grinding infinitely on a closed loop and spamming ammunition into the enemies below. You can’t fight them on the ground like you normally would in other shooting games, your health will get eviscerated extremely quickly. The game constantly encourages being on the move 24/7 so their attacks will miss more often. Again it works, but it’s not inherently satisfying. The writing is also hit or miss, not exactly a good thing to say for a comedy focused game. There are some genuinely good lines don’t get me wrong but like 90% of the humor in this game is just 4th wall breaks and pop culture references (there’s one point in the game where a side character unironically says “Huh? Oh sorry, I was checking Reddit.”)

I honestly could recommend you this game on the movement system alone it’s so good. In any case this game is super unique and pretty fun so I would recommend trying it out anyway, preferably on PC. It’s a shame an enhanced next gen version hasn’t been made for consoles yet.

The reveal in 2015 that Sanzaru Games had been developing another handheld Sonic game was one of the biggest shocks this franchise had ever produced.

On a retrospective first glance, this may seem odd to say. It wasn't like Sega had ever been opposed to keeping their contracted developers around for more games, for one. With the Sonic Rivals duology, for instance, they’d made pretty clear that mediocre reviews weren't going to lead to any bad blood between them and a promising developer. Plenty of Sonic games otherwise seen as mediocre had received sequels, and plenty more Sonic games out there had far more bizarre concepts bound to cause more discussion upon their reveals, so what was it about Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice’s reveal specifically that set the fanbase ablaze for a few days?

Well it's right there in the title, isn't it? It's Sonic Boom.

Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric left the brand scarred in a way it hadn't been since after Sonic 06, now released in a time where online video game content was many times hotter than it was before. Essays, lets plays, reviews and breakdowns came out every week detailing how Sonic Boom marked the end times of the franchise, the new low, the sign that it was finally time for Sonic to give up. Most people, especially those not invested in the franchise, weren't really aware of the decent 3DS game, or the pretty good TV show, because the main thing the brand was pushing was an absolute failure of a product with "Sonic Boom" as the big headline. So while games like Sonic Rush, Advance, and even the handheld version of Colors were discussed and perceived on their own terms, the splash zone of Rise of Lyrics explosive failure was simply too large, and Shattered Crystal kind of got caught in the blast because of it.

So when it all settled, one year after it’s reveal, Fire & Ice's release itself had far less fanfare to it than just the fact it existed at all. Despite being Sonic's lone 2016 game, and despite an "infamously high" 7.5 score from IGN, the game wound up forgotten and lumped in with Sonic Boom as a whole as a large failure. Which sucks for many reasons, but to me stings most because Sanzaru Games as a developer had an edge with Shattered Crystal that Sonic Team and SEGA as a whole rarely ever had: Improvements in Iteration.

Sonic Team's Sonic games, even at their worst, are very rarely lacking in ambition or new ideas. That goes the other way too: Many of Sonic Team's biggest smash-hit games, from Sonic Adventure to NiGHTS into Dreams, stem from radical departures and daring new risks, rather than a gradual sense of improvement from game to game. Its a design quirk kind of synonymous with Sega as a whole: One second you're drawn to Yu Suzuki's work on tightly-packed fighting games, then his next game is a grand RPG-esque adventure. So in the great westernizing process of Sonic Boom's many branches, Sanzaru Games had no reason at all to try and adhere to that kind of mantra with the second chance they had been given. Within all of Shattered Crystal scatterbrained design and seemingly rushed production lay a surprisingly stable groundwork, Sonic controlled absolutely beautifully and levels would often allow the player to truly express themselves in how they chose to navigate them as effectively as possible. Rather than reinvent or tweak the controls to fit a radical new direction, Fire & Ice keeps everything that made the controls in Shattered Crystal work and plainly improves upon them. The same great mix of double jumps and airdashes is still here, but Sonic’s airdashes now no longer stop him briefly to charge, and the speed gained in the airdash is maintained moving forward, much like it works in games like Colors or Rush. Levels in the prior game had a great sense of scale yet often felt like they could go on for too long, so now instead of one big level per world each area has three to four smaller ones, now also no longer requiring collectibles to progress. It’s a rare instance in the Sonic series of a game being made seemingly entirely with player feedback in mind for the entire creative process, where the creative vision was simply to iterate and improve rather than make the game stand on its own.

Which of those two is better is debatable, but it’s really interesting that the areas in which the game suffers the most are the ones where it remains too stubborn to change. The implementation of multiple characters in Shattered Crystal was a flaccid inclusion alleviated somewhat by how most of their “required” uses could be bypassed with Sonic, but now in Fire & Ice it’s as if the developers really wanted to double down on forcing you to use Sonic’s entire crew. Amy is added to the mix with her sole purpose being to move walls only she can move, and Tails is given a new puzzle-solving laser to solve pace-breaking puzzles occasionally sitting in the way. Pair that with a quick-select function that asks you to fiddle with the touchscreen with your imaginary third hand, and that the aforementioned smaller levels means more of these obstacles are bound to appear in your main path, and it becomes a weird clash of genuinely better game feel and pointlessly re-included gimmick mechanics. The game’s main claim to fame, the Fire & Ice system itself, also kind of feels like this: You use either shoulder button to switch between being lit on fire or emitting a cold aura, which freezes blocks of water and melts blocks of ice. It’s nothing more than a reflex game, like Ikaruga’s polarity system for dummies, and feels only slightly less tacked on than the additional playable characters. What’s worse, having to use L and R means that bottom screen navigation now requires using the touch screen, whereas before pages on the bottom screen could be switched between with them.

I want to reiterate: Every good element from the previous game feels as if Sanzaru Games made a genuine effort to improve upon them. The shorter and snappier levels are all filled with great level design, the enerbeams swinging physics work amazingly with Sonic’s airdash, the environments and music are all leagues above what they were before, and the pacing of the game as a whole feels far less like a game struggling to even be released and more like a full-on polished product. It’s all of the things surrounding that, the mediocre mechanics they were too stubborn to let go of and the pointless gimmicks that were included despite sometimes harming the preexisting foundation, that end up souring the pot more than it needed to. In some ways, it reinforces why the developer’s direction was never optimal for this franchise: They lack the confidence in their new ideas to truly build the game around them yet feel obligated to include them to make the game still stand out in some way. You compare that to Sonic Team, who without hesitation made an entire game centered around swordplay because they thought it would be a cool evolution of the Storybook gameplay, who gave Silver the Hedgehog equal screenspace with the series’ protagonist because they wanted to use the Havok physics engine for something new, and so on, and it’s in a way understandable why a game as otherwise safe and standard as Fire & Ice has fallen by the wayside.

Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice isn’t bad, and despite its missteps still feels like a genuine, heartfelt attempt to improve upon Shattered Crystal’s foundations, and I’d say it still is a pretty good game. But it’s a game that makes complete sense: Every decision made in its development has clear, predictable reasons, everything about its buildup and release went pretty much exactly as one would expect, and its new mechanics wound up just as unremarkable as you would expect by how safe the game otherwise plays it. That cutting-edge feel, that strive to be different, that conviction to whichever new idea is being pursued that Sonic and SEGA fans in general have come to adore is missing here, and that in my eyes is the main reason this game has wound up so forgotten. In its aim to satisfy, in its attempts to fix the flaws of its predecessor, flaws which arguably has made that entry stand out more in retrospect, Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice just became yet another entry in the series. Despite being a fun time with lots to like about it, even well after its release, the most shocking part about the game still just wound up being the fact that it was able to exist at all.

[Playtime: 12 hours]
[Key Word: Crowdpleaser]

Sonic's always had a strange, yet interesting history on handhelds. Its history spans five different developers, from Sonic's birth to 2016, with each year gradually changing what the point of the games should be. In the 90s it was Ancient and Aspect, trying to replicate the creative, varied, ball-rolling and feel-good adventures or Sonic 1, 2 and 3, cramming them into tiny 8-bit Game Gear games. While they aren't fantastic or even, good, really, you get a sense that they really tried to capture what people were enjoying about Sonic on the genesis at that point and time, and distilling it into a new format. You see this further with Sonic Pocket Adventure by SNK, a lovely tribute to the Genesis games that gets really close to actually feeling like them despite its 8-bitty visuals, yet feels somewhat restrained by not being much more than just a recreation. From there you get Dimps' Sonic Advance games, now latching onto Sonic's striking new identity after Sonic Adventure: It was still a series about feel-good adventures, of course, but now there was a bit more flair to it all. Sonic in Adventure wasn't just a cool design with a cheeky idle animation, he now had a voice, several fluid animations, strikingly expressive graffitti-esque art, he comments on situations and does cool breakdance tricks after beating levels. Somewhat like the Game Gear games before them, the original Sonic Advance became a game trying to distill the essence of Sonic Adventure, the style, the vibes, even the dramatics in the game's memorable Egg Rocket stage, into a format befitting of a handheld. Advance 2 and 3 are obviously much the same thing but for Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes respectively, with Advance 2 channelling the high-octane adrenaline of SA2 levels like Green Forest and Sky Rail into a 2D sidescroller plane, and Advance 3 taking Heroes' team-up mechanics into its own direction.

Yet with Sonic Rush, things began taking a new direction. Not only had there not been a big new Sonic game to try and channel after Heroes, but Dimps had also begun finding their own voice. Sonic Advance 2 had been a monumental triumph in terms of both sales and reviews, and its bold adaptation of 3D gameplay into 2D gave Dimps a somewhat unique basis to build off of – to make Sonic games entirely their own. Even when SEGA would try to reel this back after 2008, instead only having them work on games specifically branded as derivative of others, Dimps now took these games on with a distinctly their-own approach, seen in games like Sonic Colors DS, Sonic Lost World 3DS, and most infamously Sonic 4. In short, Sonic's handheld games had gone from cute imitations, to games driven by their source, to full on original games, to original games using their source as a baseline.

Which now brings us to our fifth and last, developer, for the final Sonic handheld ventures: Sanzaru Games, and Sonic Boom on 3DS.

Shattered Crystal was always going to be fighting an uphill battle compared to its handheld siblings: Mainly, it had little to no foundation to build off of, with Boom as an entity being made specifically to reinvent the series, in a more Americanized direction. For the big debut home console game, Big Red Button was a great choice for this: Jak & Daxter-ifying Sonic with some of that game's lead developers at the helm, whilst not seeming like a great direction to a lot of Sonic die-hards, at least seemed like a great way to get a solid product out. Thing is, unlike games like Advance and Pocket Adventure, Shattered Crystal didn't have a pre-existing thing to try and replicate: Due to being developed in parallel with Rise of Lyric, Sanzaru didn't have much to work off of beyond a few core concepts for the world, and a general idea of teamwork. On top of this, unlike Big Red Button or even Dimps, Sanzaru were in no way known for their excellence in 2D game design, or even known as good developers in general. And so, in a way, Shattered Crystal ended up a hodgepodge of all the different eras of handheld games, trying to both share the brand identity of its console counterpart, yet also be its own thing, but still building its foundations off of some core ideas from the main game, althewhile being fertile ground for the games' developers to grow and learn.

I wanted to give that rundown both because I find it incredibly fascinating to think about, but also because it makes the end product of Shattered Crystal make a lot more sense. Its a messy little game, filled both with ambition to be like what handheld Sonic once was, yet also embrace elements of the 2000s western-made platformers. The game's levels are uncharacteristically large for one, and a lot of the game is focused on exploring them to find collectibles manditory to unlock later levels. The other playable characters, Tails, Knuckles and Sticks, can be switched to on the fly, yet all they really offer is unlocking passageways or access to aforementioned collectibled. Its a very arbitrary inclusion of multiple playable characters, and it combined with gargantuan levels you're forced to explore could have very well ruined the game to be as bland and boring as its Wii U counterpart. So its a good thing, then, that they somehow managed to make Sonic himself feel absolutely fantastic to control. I'm serious: I have no clue how they did it, but Sonic controls like such a dream and has so many movement options, yet remains at a comfortable enough speed to make exploring levels still feasible compared to Dimps' best outings. Its a distinct feel to the character, yet immensely fun to play around with, mainly due to the fun interplay between the airdash and double jump.

To break it down, at any point in midair Sonic can dash either to his sides or straight up, after which he regains his double jump if it was used before. After a double jump he can airdash one additional time, but not in the same direction as the previous airdash, and this repeats until you've airdashed in all directions. What this means is that you can get crazy airtime by doing all of these interlinked airdashes and double jumps correctly, giving you more distance than Tails' flight in most instances the game wants you to switch to him. Jump, doublejump, airdash forward, doublejump, airdash up, doublejump...its reminiscent of those cool strings of moves you execute for long jumps in Mario Odyssey, only far more compelling due to being attached to get-to-the-goal speedrunning stages that still have a lot of options on how to best progress through them. What this means is that when the level asks you to switch to Knuckles to tunnel up a steep cliff, or switch to Tails to cruise over a bed of spikes, and so on, you can almost always execute it faster and more satisfyingly through mastery of Sonics controls. Add to this the fact that the doublejump maintains all of your speed, and the fun Enerbeam that has some really satisfying swinging physics, and you get some levels with some genuinely great flow to them. It takes a similar formula to the Wisps in the mainline Sonic games, switching to far simpler playstyles to clear very specific-to-them challenges, and instead gives you the tools to completely skip them if you're skilled enough with Sonic.

Granted, this doesn't always hold water, and the rushed nature of the game does sometimes catch up to it. Sticks exists to hit switches with her boomerang and she is the ONLY one who can do so, meaning there will inevitably be sections like the start of Scrapyard Zone where you're arbitrarily required to use her. The collectible grind can also halt your flow a lot of the time, like with the strangely out of place Tails Submarine levels where you play a slow and boring diving minigame for 2 minutes each in the middle of an otherwise fast paced game. Or rather, its a game where you can otherwise MAKE the pace faster than it in reality wants to be.

And thats just what makes Shattered Crystal so interesting. Despite everything, it holds on to so many things that makes Sonic games so fun to play, like fast movement, levels you can explore for both items and shortcuts, hell they've even got Richard Jacques – composer of Sonic R and Sonic 3D Blast – doing the music, and its often quite good! The levels themselves are super cool in theming, mostly thanks to each level having a "foreground" and "background", putting new spins on the same level theme sort of like how Sonic Heroes handles its levels. In Shadow Canyons, for instance, you go from grinding on rails and running along scaffolding by these big imposing cliffs, to being flung into the mining facility going on in those mountains. I honestly don't want to spoil the final level because it is such a cool theme for a stage with this system, that it makes the entire game feel worth it just to get to.

Because at the end of the day, for as much cool stuff there is in Shattered Crystal, for as close as it really does come to being a successor to Dimps' handheld lineage, the game is sadly just too much of a chore to get through normally. Unlike a game like Sonic Colors, the explorative nature of the stages isn't just there for optional unlockables, but rather required for progression and beating the game. By the end, you will more or less need a 90% completion rate, meaning most stages need to be both combed through but also beaten with above 50 rings and under a specific time. Its not that this stuff is bad or unfun to do, the game has a super detailed map on the touchscreen showing you where you havent been yet and where things are and I actually really like the autorunner extra stages you can do inbetween levels. It's moreso that it leads to the game feeling at odds with itself: Its immensely fun to speedrun and try to go faster in, but so much of the game wants you to instead do the fun-but-not-nearly-AS-fun collectible hunt. Then, you add that with how the controls can start to really hurt your hands after a while: There's no D-pad movement, meaning you need to slam a somewhat-flimsy circle pad as far to the left or right as it can go to move quickly, whilst also holding down Y at all times to run, whilst also asking you to be ready to use B to jump and A or X to airdash and enerbeam...

It all adds up to Shattered Crystal being a game with truckloads of potential to be amazing, that holds itself back both due to a rushed development and a need for surface-level parity with the slow-as-molasses home console Sonic Boom game it has no business associating with. But when you're able to overcome all those restrictions, when there's no longer a need to collect things, when you've mastered Sonics controls to almost never need to switch to the other bozos, and when you get a true flow going with mechanics you would never expect to be so fun for what the game looks to be on the surface...

That's when you've broken free. Because trouble keeps you running faster.

Playtime: 20 Hours
Key Word: Shackled

I'm going to make it clear right now. I can't stand this game. I can't stand how people act like this was one of the definitive racing games in the era it was in. Playing through all the cups on every CC was suffering. I didn't like it back when I had it on the Wii VC and I still don't enjoy it at all.

The controls just don't feel good, the AI are such cheaters and it's not even funny how awful it is. I'm sure it's just as bad in some other games but it feels the worst here. The items are also atrocious here, a lot of them just don't work well like red shells hitting walls and green shells being slow making you hit your own shells most of the time. Some tracks are just awful like mirror Toad's Turnpike or Rainbow Road in general. Nintendo doesn't even bother to implement the Ghost Data system in later rereleases of this game even on NSO. It's a shame because the OST is one of the best I've ever heard in a game but the game itself is something I never want to play again. Also I used Wario and Toad in this game if anyone curious who I used.

Oh boy, 3&K. The game everyone and their grandmother declares as “the pinnacle of 2D Sonic”, better yet, “the pinnacle of Sonic in GENERAL!”

So of course I think the opposite 😃

Full disclosure though, I don’t hate this game. I don’t even think it’s mediocre or just ok/average, I genuinely do like this game and think it has a lot going for it, but after replaying and 100%ing it again via Sonic Origins it is an incredibly bloated overrated Sonic game in my eyes.

Before I start to rag on it for being Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, let me go over what I loved about it. First off, may seem like a minor detail but the ability to control yourself in the air after jumping from rolling or spindashing is HUGE, it makes me miss this feature so much when playing the other classic games, having control ripped away from you and being at the mercy of where the ramp or whatever flung you from just never felt right, it felt restrictive. Second, the usual things Classic Sonic games get right are here and accounted for: creative zone themes, catchy af music, gorgeous spritework, tight controls, everything in this regard is as it should be. Lastly, I want to touch up on the visual storytelling, it stuck out a lot to me compared to the previous times I’ve played this game. Technically this is something they started doing more and more as the games went on but 3&K is the culmination of this multiplied tenfold. The way the environment changes throughout your playthrough of a level, the expressions of the characters, the background elements all combine into something I was actually kinda getting into more and more the more I noticed it.

I also like the instashield. While it’s not as fun or as useful as the drop dash, it works fine for what it does: make annoying enemies killable no matter what (though I do think if they just didn’t feel the need to make annoying enemies in the first place then this skill would be redundant, but I digress). I still don’t like the blue spheres special stages but I’ve gotten way better at them the more I play the game so they really aren’t that big of an issue for me, though some of the Super Emerald blue spheres stages still kinda suck.

The level design though…I’m so torn. The main gist is that 3&K segments its level design into two different factions: speed and platforming. Rarely do these 2 elements mix: you have wishy wooshy automated sections where you just kinda hold forward and watch Sonic rocket through loops, corkscrews, and so on for pure adrenaline dopamine, then on the other end of the spectrum you have really slow rather simplistic platforming sections to slow the pace down (lava reef act 2 in particular is just nothing but staircases). This type of structure works fine enough but I don’t think the levels in 3&K have a satisfying sense of flow because of it, and it doesn’t help that some of these levels just straight blow. Marble garden and Carnival Night are thoroughly unenjoyable for me and the levels noticeably degrade in quality during the & Knuckles portion of the game, so much of it just sitting and waiting in place before you can continue. I also think that the game as a whole is odd in terms of pacing, it puts me in a bit of a predicament. Individually these games are too short to be remarkably satisfying to play through but combined the game feels far too bloated to be enjoyed in a full sitting. The bosses don’t help either, they’re pretty terrible. A part of why I always go after Super/Hyper Sonic is so I don’t have to deal with these tedious waiting game bosses and can just wail on them whenever I want (apart from the lava reef final boss or the first sandopolis boss, you’re just kinda out of luck with those no matter what lol).

All in all I’m left with an experience that is certainly good, just not great. Sonic 1 and Mania still remain king of the classics for me.

Right off the bat when first starting the game Sonic 2 explodes onto the scene in an impactful way Sonic 1 couldn’t, the levels are much faster, the colors are more vibrant, the music is absolutely going off the charts, on a surface level it does a great job at showing off the good things it has in store more than Sonic 1. Unfortunately the more you delve into the game, the more cracks start to show I feel. The overly speed focused design tends to leave a lot of setpieces blend together, the enemy and obstacle placement gets extremely dickish not even 3 zones into the game, the game has a forced 2 minute autoscroller, you get so caught up in the dazzling spectacle that you start to look past a lot of Sonic 2’s flaws. While I still prefer Sonic 1 over 2, I would be crazy to not mention the things it did get right: the creative stage themes and gimmicks (casino night in particular is responsible for so many would be gambling addictions out there lol), the introduction of the spindash and the speed cap removal, fantastic presentation and music, the climactic final boss and the subsequent satisfying ending, mfin SUPER SONIC. Still though, when it comes down to which classic game I prefer, 1 will always be my go-to

As a collection first and foremost I would say that Sonic Origins does the job well enough and does it with a little bit style. The presentation is slick and there’s obviously so much love put into this, from the animated cutscenes to the 3D modeled islands showcasing where each game takes place, it’s content packed, and a lot of the enhancements to the classic games themselves are nice (widescreen support, full sprite rotation, new animations and new sprites entirely with Super Sonic’s case). Mission mode has some extra bite size challenges to tackle, not spectacularly made but it’s there to fill the collection with more stuff to do and it gets the job done. I will say without having played many of the fanmade classic game enhancements I’d say this is the definitive way to play these games…but it ain’t perfect. For one the delisting of the original games on steam is pretty awful but the game is also riddled with technical issues from what I’ve been seeing, especially related to performance on PC thanks to Denuvo. I haven’t experienced anything negative myself mind you, my experience has been flawless, but I can only speak for myself. Honestly though I think my biggest issue is that it’s only a collection of Sonic 1 2 3&K and CD, games we’ve seen get rereleased time and time and time again. As awful as Knuckles Chaotix is why not release that game? It hasn’t been rereleased anywhere and is basically stuck on the 32X atm. Where’s some game gear support or more saturn sonic games? Heck where’s stuff that hasn’t even been seen in the US like Segasonic? This collection could’ve been so much more than what it is, but I guess they were just really focused on bringing us these 4 games and nothing else. It’s fine but like, you know, not super exciting. $40 is a bit too steep so I’d still wait for a price drop. It has some extra DLC where you get…more music, uh…you can zoom in on the 3D modeled islands…yeah don’t get the DLC lmao

I have no strong opinions on the new 3&K music. Launch Base’s new track is kinda catchy tho ngl