Sonic Lost World doesn't feel like a Sonic game. For the most part, it's just a generic, bland, and broken platformer with sonic assets plastered over it. The parkour gimmick had potential, as the wall running can be fun at times, but it was just executed too poorly. Furthermore, the level themes are just your basic grassland, desert, snow, jungle, etc that's seen in nearly every platformer, and the villains (The Zetis/Deadly Six) all have cardboard personalities. All their dialogue and jokes are completely based on a single defining trait. For example, one's fat so every line has something to do with food, one's emo so he just acts depressed constantly, and one's a woman so her entire personality is based around liking boys, fashion, and shopping. It's just all so uninspired; the game feels as if it was designed by a parent who calls every console a "Nintendo", like the creators had only the most basic concept of what a video game is supposed to be and went through a checklist of the bare minimum requirements and left it at that. And then there's the writing of Sonic, Tails, and Eggman... Their characters were butchered so badly, especially that of Tails. All three of them just argue the entire game and Tails is just a whiny asshole because he's sooo jealous that Eggman is helping Sonic fight the Zetis. Again, the only interesting thing about this game is the parkour mechanic, but the controls are so buggy and the level design is so bad that you can't even fully enjoy the parkour. Everything else is just boring at best. The Zelda DLC level was really cool though, I wish Sonic and Nintendo would do more crossovers in better games.

Pretty sure this game happens in the same universe as Final Fantasy 15.

Ok so hear me out, this game isn't that bad... Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is somewhat of a sequel to Sonic Heroes and a spiritual successor to the Sonic Adventure franchise, the only difference is the name which tried to look like a reboot in the veins of DOOM (2016) or Tomb Raider (2012) but actually is just a continuation of the modern Sonic Franchise.

The game plays quite exactly like Sonic Adventure 1 where you have access to an open world with NPCs and Medals scattered around to find and obviously the entry point of each action stage. On paper all of this sounds quite delightful, a sequel to Sonic Adventure 2 that tries to be more like the first game? I'm all in, and technically it's what we got.
Just like in Sonic Adventure 1, we get multiple stories that all go over the end of the game but from a different point of view, but unfortunately, the game took too much inspiration from Sonic Adventure 1 that they also did the thing where every story recycles Sonic's stages with different enemy placement and vague new gimmick which aren't really worth a playthrough.
The game features Sonic (with Tails & Knuckles), Shadow (with Rouge & Omega), and two newcomers to the Sonic franchise, Silver and Blaze. (And sometimes Amy in multiple stories)
All of these characters have their own unique playstyle like how Sonic Adventure 1 did, but unlike Sonic Adventure 1 they do not have any unique stages like Tails's race level or Knuckles emerald hunt, they usually just appear during the stage where you pass the baton and just switched to the character in question but it usually never last long and you switch back to the main character of the story before the stage ends so, to be honest, they are quite useless. If I had to rank all of the side playable characters would be, Tails first since his playstyle is quite fun, it's pretty much the same as his Sonic Adventure 1 counterpart, next would be Knuckles as he's pretty much the same as his Sonic Adventure 1 counterpart too but in this game, his wall climbing physics are beyond broken and the same could be said about Rouge as she plays exactly like knuckles but she's even more broken for some forsaken reason, and lastly would be Blaze and Amy, Blaze is barely ever used but her only gimmick is jumping high, and Amy have the exact same gimmick but she has her iconic hammer that can barely damage an enemy, you have to stand really close to an enemy and then it may or may not register as a hit, so yep, shame on you Amy...

Now it's time to talk about the real meat of the game, Sonic. Now hear me out, this is most likely the most controversial part of the game since barely anyone ever finished his storyline and even bothered to try the other ones, not that I blame anyone for not finishing this game.
Sonic's movement is quite different from both Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, he's actually quite slow compared to his previous 3D adventures, and hear me out, it's not a bad thing. One of the biggest issues I had with Sonic in Sonic Adventure 2 was the actual speed of Sonic, he was too fast! It was really common to actually break some speed events in that game because Sonic was just too fast and it made him somewhat of a pain to control, I thought it was perfectly balanced in Sonic Adventure 1 though.
So what did they do in Sonic 06? They did something crazy, something that I never would've thought about doing in a Sonic game... They removed the Spin Dash... And you know what? it's not that big of a deal! Since the action stages in Sonic 06 weren't designed for it the game works fine without it, also do keep in mind I'm talking about the game in a technical way as if Sonic controlled as intended.
Let's talk about Sonic 06's first stage, this stage is great! It's pretty much a reimagined version of Sonic Adventure 1's first stage and when you think about it the stage is really well designed! Instead of making you do a bunch of Spin Dash to get around the game pretty much make a path with those speed boosters that looks like treadmills and springs. At the end of the day, these stages are the perfection of 3D Sonic, they are pretty much stages that play themselves automatically and require little to no precise input from the player. Another stage that was remarkably well made in Sonic 06 was the Castle stage with a bunch of secret paths and just focus on being fast! Though obviously it is quite hard to tell with how jank Sonic controls in the game and that's what really kills it.
Back to Sonic's controls, what makes them so bad? I'll point out a few remarkable issues I had with them. First of all Sonic's homing attack is slow! It's really slow when you compare it to Sonic Adventure 1 when you can just kill 10 enemies on the screen in 3 seconds with 10 A input, it was so fast and fun to just quirky spam on enemies, now there's an annoying cooldown of about 1 second per enemy and it feels slow! Another one would be again about the homing attack, in this game, you never know if Sonic will connect to an enemy or a rail or anything like that, it always feels like a gamble, it's really noticeable in the broken city stage where you have a bunch of grinding rails next to each other and you can't just hold left or right and press the jump button to quickly get on the rail you want, in this game, you have to jump out and then do a homing attack and pray it will not either launch you to oblivion or land or on the same rail or land on the rail you actually wanted to land on, an easy way to fix this issue would've been to add a homing lock-on visual to actually tell if you are gonna hit an enemy, a rail or just going forward with a boost. About the controls themselves, they can feel a bit stiff, it's hard to tell but they could always be better.

Now that I've gone over the "good" action stages which mostly focus on the usual sonic business of running around without a care in the world, it's about to talk about the awful platforming stage. The main issue with platforming stages comes from the death pits, so many death pits in this game! and some of these stages really drag on like the laboratory stage for example, it's really long and really easy to fuck up, and the life system really doesn't help as whenever you lose all of them you just restart to whatever was when you last saved.
These stages are often the ones where you'll have to use one of your partners like Knuckles or Tails simply to fill the game with more "content" but in the end, it just feels like an unpolished extra mission that just relies on tight platforming and killing enemies. These stages are mainly the focus of Shadow's story and it's obviously the worse one. As I mentioned before Shadow's story is just rehashed stage from Sonic's story but in a different order and just focuses on Killing enemies to advance forward, Shadow plays somewhat like Sonic but instead of having the classic homing attack where you can just instantly jump from enemies to enemies by spamming the jump button, here when you spam the jump button it just makes Shadow attack again and again on the same spot instead of jumping to another enemy, it was obviously made to fight monsters that require more than 1 hit to kill and honestly it does work in favor of his stages but thinking that way is stupid, all they did was fixing an error they created on purpose and end up making the game worse in the long run, though I doubt it was the least of their concern when they shipped this game as if they truly cared they would've made a unique stage for each campaign. So if you've played Sonic's story it means you pretty much already played Shadow's story and honestly it's the exact same problem that Sonic Adventure 1 suffers from, making different character campaigns just for the sake of making more content but ending up just recycling old content so it ends up being bad! The only main difference from Shadow's story is obviously the cutscenes and one or two new bosses but all of the bosses in this game are beyond terrible so missing out on those is a blessing.
Now, what about Silver's story? It's just, just fine, it's playable, that's it, nothing else to say, it's terrible at times like most things about this game but overall it's fine, that's right, just fine. Silver's gimmick is telepathy so most of his stage relies on slow-paced platforming with some combat and that's all, no funny Sonic speed, no stupid knuckles vehicles, the idea honestly is fine and would've worked as its own unique 3D platformer but Silver in sonic is just as useless as Tails and Eggman's missions in Sonic Adventure 2, it's here, it's fine, it's not fun but it's not the worst.

I honestly have so much more to say about this game but mentioning everything terrible about this game would just never end, this game is terrible to play and I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone, and with that Project 06 going on I'm sure more people would have fun with this, I haven't tried it yet personally but Sonic fans are strong, stronger than Sonic Team.
Overall this game is an unfinished mess, it brings the best idea from Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 but fails to put them together in a cohesive way and you can totally see some really good Sonic level-design hidden in the gameplay rough of this game, so I'm sure if they had a little bit more time this game could've been so so much better, sometimes a little bit of polish is all you need, and this game really needs some.

I went into this game not expecting too much in comparison to AA3. However I finished the game pleasently surprised! The characters are great, and Apollo is a more than suitable stand in for Phoenix. I played this with my friend and we dubbed the game together which made it a much better experience than it would have been if I just read it myself. Some of the one off characters like Stickler and Brushel we really fun to voice because of their goofy nature. The weakest link here is definitely Turnabout Corner but it's made up for with all of the other cases. Everything coming together in the end was quite satisfying and I was genuinely surprised at some of the reveals late game. Overall this is another really solid entry in this really solid series. My friend and I will be working our way through the next 2 main series games and I'm very much looking forward to it!

a crude mockery of everything that made the adventure games good. the overlap in levels across stories in SA1 was excused by the massive variety in gameplay that the different characters had. when SA2 abandoned that, they made completely original levels for both stories because the gameplay types in both stories were the same (speed, hunting, shooting). so WHY would you make a system where EVERY level is the same (with stupid "difficulty" changes that just add more annoying enemies), but all the stories have the exact same gameplay?? all it does is make you play the game four times in progressively more annoying ways, and then do the GOD AWFUL torturous chaos emerald minigame to get to the kino final boss. the controls are also slippery as hell, even by early 3d sonic standards, and as cool as the team system in this game is, it's not cool enough to excuse all of the horrible game design and abhorrent writing. this game is only saved by metal sonic and the final boss theme (best final boss theme in sonic).