Similar to Secret Rings, it's an on-rails game, but in comparison, I think it's design and ideas are better implemented, and it controls better, not being exclusively restricted to motion gameplay.

It also has what I consider to be the best story in any Sonic game, with some fantastic thematic elements and a plot revolving entirely around the meaning of life, and the importance of death, with a genuinely beautiful and heartfelt message that impacted me so much as a young kid, it genuinely shifted my perspective, as funny as that is to say.

Also Knight of the Wind is a certified hood classic and Crush40's best song hands down.

A rather fun time with a lot of promise and really high production values.

As a note, I played the entire game on fucking keyboard and mouse which I dont really recommend, the experience got much better after I used an Xbox controller after getting one a few weeks later lol.

I think a lot of the level design is really fun and well designed, especially the first stage and Area 99. Those stages in particular had great ideas and execution and if everything in the game is what they promise, I'm completely on board. Some of the later stages have some questionable choices, Shadow's stop and start chaos ability usage, and a largely vertical stage that wasn't the best being the biggest offenders.

A lot of the bosses were good as well, with the busted Egg Dragoon being especially worth mentioning. As despite it being a difficult fight that will give you some shit, it's entirely fair, due to all of its attacks having half a year of leadup to give ample time to dodge.

I've seen reports of the game being a bit buggy, and even seen a tweet or two that had glitches, but I ultimately didn't have any encounters myself around a collective, probably 5 hours of playing.

Overall, this was a fun time and I'm interested to see what the devs plan to put out.

Also, regarding the situation of them having accepted money to work on the fangame. When you come from a community such as the Touhou fanbase where fanworks are not only allowed to be created, but also be SOLD at physical festivals and EVEN online storefronts with no issue, and when all it's done is help and make the community flourish: a group of people trying to make a high quality Sonic fangame with the OPTION to donate money to them really does not seem as evil or scummy as some would lead you to believe. However after the recent statement by a worker at SEGA themselves, I think it best they stop taking any and all donations regarding Omens. I still don't think the act of the donations in of themselves makes them some horrible greedy sleazy fucks as some pushed.

One of my personal favorite "kart" racers on the market currently. A lot of very well designed courses that are a joy to traverse, and rewarding to those who take the time to master their shortcuts and utilizing characters and their special attributes to glide around the courses perfectly.

The wide variety of characters with different stats, handling, abilities, as well as the wide variety of actually skill based items just makes the game super rewarding and fun to play. Add a nice soundtrack and a dedicated community and you've got a based kart racer on your hands.

While definitely a big disappointing after like, 6 years since the last mainline Sonic title, I certainly didn't find it to be this complete disasterpiece I saw so many others claim it to be. At worst, it's relatively middle of the road and mediocre, at its best, it has some really fun and well designed, if short levels, such as Null Space, Capital City, and Mortar Canyon. The 100% experience of going for all the missions also made it a bit more enjoyable overall, as they actually require you to interact with and explore the levels much more beyond the basic "run through them". The loss of the lives system among the addition of difficulty levels is appreciated, though I wish they were implemented a bit better, as is they break the difficulty, and since S Ranks are also quite easy to get in most stages, the difficulty can be rather low.

I need to put a massive asterisk on this review that the game only holds this rating when modded to make the game more like the Dreamcast version, a translation/story fix, and to fix various issues such as the bugged Emerald Radar, and changing the mech physics to feel more like SA1, among other alterations. The original version of this game would only rank about 2 stars for me due to various issues I have with progression and the other gameplay styles.

With these alterations however, this game is significantly more enjoyable to play overall. The speed stages are as generally enjoyable as they were before, the Treasure Hunting stages are much more fun when you can actually locate multiple emeralds at once, and the mech stages just feel much better with changed controls, loosened controls. The story is pretty great, especially with the original text, the writing on Shadow was based.

I have no care or love for the Chao Garden especially after those bastards at the school stole him from me and never returned him.

This game bothers me because it could've been something really unique and interesting. Unfortunately a troubled development history, rushed release, and a shitty deal with Nintendo forced what was known as Sonic Synergy to be forced onto the Wii U, a console far too underpowered to handle what they planned for the game, resulting in the product being morphed into something quite different and quite worse.

While far from what I see about it being thrown around as one of the worst games of all time, it's really quite mediocre as a title, with very simple combat, exploration, and platforming, a general level of bugginess, and only a somewhat decent score.

What could've been a brand new avenue for Sonic and something genuinely advantageous for the franchise, opening up a secondary spinoff franchise with its own unique concepts and ideas developed largely by an outside studio, was essentially killed off due to the failure of it's big title. Truly sad. I hope one day we can see Sonic Synergy resurface one way or another.

I am incredibly and unbelievably nostalgic for this game which absolutely taints my perspective of it. I think the concept of an on-rails Sonic game isn't horrible, and I actually really like a lot of the set pieces and design of a lot of the stages. Filled with a lot of cool little moments, and an absolutely fantastic soundtrack. Storywise it's one of the better ones in Sonic's arsenal in terms of thematics, despite it's flaws.

The biggest stopgap in this game is its controls and if you can grapple with them, and how accustomed to on-rails games you are. I grew up with this game so its like second nature for me, if you don't like either of those things, your probably wont have the best time.