This game was so close to becoming one of my favourite Sonic games, but the grinding at the end of the game really made it worse for me. Don't get me wrong, this is still a great game. As you can see, I've given it a 3.5/5, which is deserved. The level design is much better than it was in the original, with less death pits and more diverging paths you can take. One thing about this change is that it's more of a boost to win game than the original, but due to one of the biggest flaws in the game, I honestly think that's a good thing. What I strongly dislike about this game is getting to and doing the special stages. Sonic's requires you to beat the game in order to have a chance to do a majority of them since you need upgrades for your ships, and you need two to beat the last special stage. This would be fine if you could upgrade the desired ship, but you need to upgrade the other three ships before you can get the second upgrade for the ship you use to race, and that's only the Chaos Emeralds. While the original Rush game makes you play the campaign twice, the Sol Emeralds were obtained through just playing, no special stages involved. However, in this game, you need to do various missions that are unlocked by either fighting a boss and doing a slightly harder rematch, or finding a Hidden Island and replaying the level. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that WHICH islands you need to find aren't specified, meaning I had to use a guide to find them, same thing is with the Johnny races. It's also a bit frustrating that the game doesn't tell you about the boat upgrades, meaning you could be replaying a special stage for hours on end and not even know you can't do it yet. You can run into Johnny whenever so long as you get to the right spot, so it should at least be locked out without the upgrades. Other than the special stage content, again the level design is very good and much better than the original. The bosses are a lot more fun too since they don't have instant kill moves like the original did. Bosses also have more openings which means that the battles don't get dragged on for too long. The ship minigames are alright, I like some more than others but I don't hate them, just wish they could've been shorter since they start to slow the pacing of the game near the end. If the grinding wasn't there and the special stages were more fair instead of being extremely time consuming, it could've been one of the best games, but it's still a really good game. Overall, I would say if you're patient enough to get the true ending and don't mind a bit of grinding, this game is definitely worth checking out.