I just finished playing the demo and either this game is awful or this has to be one of the worst first impressions I’ve ever seen a game have. I think everyone here has already hammered home the many complaints I share with them: the movement speed is too slow, jump is pretty much the only thing you can do without a costume, every single face button is mapped to jump (including the triggers) for no reason whatsoever, the game feels like it was designed for babies, the myriad of technical issues (characters tposing, random slight framedips and cinematic cutscenes freezing) despite this game being pretty unimpressive for Series X, all that jazz but honestly I need to elaborate more on a couple of issues.

The powerups in this game are awful. Genuinely there is not a single good powerup this game has. A lot of them have this one ability that’s just “break blocks but in a different way”, the flower is a worse Mario Odyssey capture, the rabbit flutter jump kills your already slow speed, the dragon costume REMOVES your jump completely because the action replaces jump (and this applies to the punching powerup as well), meaning you’re in for a wild ride if you’re stuck with that powerup for a good chunk of the stage, the acro-bat is just a worse homing attack, sheep slooooowly moves across giant fans, and then there’s this fox powerup that just...turns you into a box randomly for no reason? Like...huh?????? You can’t even move or do anything when it’s transformed besides slide forward slightly in one direction, so again traversing these stages with this thing must be a real treat. It’s such a useless powerup it’s almost baffling it was put in.

I think one of the biggest things that bring it down for me is the fact that your player character utters the exact same 2 grunts on loop EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. YOU. JUMP. This may not seem like a major critique but when you’re jumping around these levels a lot you will start to wish for the sweet sweet release of death, I guarantee it.

Overall this is one of the most boring and simplistic bargain bin platformers I have ever played, and I seriously doubt it will get better later on. Even by the 5th world the level design still feels like it was catered to babies, and this is all a shame because I do like the visuals and the music is fantastic, but this game needs far more than just a delay, it needs a complete overhaul of everything if it wants to succeed, because otherwise this game is gonna bomb HARD (especially with this being $60 at launch. No I’m not kidding).

Turns out Morio Kishimoto always was the superior higher up at Sonic Team all along