When I first saw the reviews, I was scared and started to lose hope. I lowered my expectations a bit, but was still excited to get to Ouranos and try the new update. While I definitely think issues are present, it didn't stop me from having a hell of a time. I didn't 100% it, but I wanted to beat the main game and see the ending before I got spoiled, so I focused on the main quest while doing additional stuff along the way. I'll start with the beginning, playing with the new characters. Amy is pretty fun, but the camera sometimes gets a little weird when you use her additional jump. Still, I love her kit in this game and I think it's great that they finally did something with the fact that she's a fortune teller. Knuckles is easily the worst unfortunately due to his glide with the weird start up and abysmal turning. Luckily, messing around with the settings lets his gameplay be better, not great, but good at least. Tails, while lacking a homing attack, makes up for it with his flight, which is really fun to use especially with his cyclone update. Every character has the issue of walking a bit after you stop which is really frustrating for platforming, but you can work around it by jumping (if you can). I found that the first time you play as the other three it can be hard to get used to but the second time around was much easier and felt more fair. As for Sonic, his trials were really odd in terms of difficulty. Trial 1 was somewhat hard, Trial 2 was a lot harder, Trials 3 and 4 were really easy, but Trial 5 was ridiculous. Having to defeat all three Titan battles with THAT ruleset is absurd, but getting it done feels really satisfying. Though my issue with Trial 5 is that the strategy to actually do it (Cyloop --> Punch + Stomp combo spam) feels so cheap and not really as satisfying which took away from the epic parts of the original fight. I think if you either adjusted one of the three rules or got rid of the portions where you get the last Chaos Emerald before each fight, it would be much more bearable and fair. Lastly, the final boss, while confusing, was so much better than the original in every way and I was constantly on the edge of my seat, losing hope. However, when I finally figured out what to do, I felt that hope return and the ending was absolutely amazing and much better than the original that I already quite liked. I really hope Sonic Team continues building off of this in future games, especially the boss fights because that was easily the coolest Super Sonic has ever been. Overall, I would say that while the difficulty of this update was definitely a lot higher than anything else in the mainline series, I had a blast going through these challenging segments, and the final ending felt very rewarding for doing so.