I have quite a lot to say about SA2. I've 100% the game twice at this stage, and I've only liked it less and less each time I did. I still think it's good don't get me wrong, and certainly an improvement on SA1 in nearly all fronts, but this game quickly went from being one of my top 5 Sonic games, to just another one I happen to somewhat enjoy despite the many MANY issues it has.

So, before I talk gameplay I wanted to touch up on the game's story. I don't think it's super important and I don't think my enjoyment of the game would change if it were better or worse, but this is probably my favorite story in the series currently. It's goofy, incredibly cheesy and fun to watch all around, rare that I compliment a Sonic story since I personally think so many of them absolutely suck, but SA2's is still pretty great even to this day. Well...kinda great. It's nothing spectacular, groundbreaking or thought provoking by any means, but it's fun to watch from beginning to end, it has fun character moments with super cheesy dialogue. Sonic stories never need to be overly complex or overly simple. Just tell an engaging story with fun character interactions and fun dialogue and I'm all set. The IDW comics in particular have been doing that constantly and they're an absolute joy, but I'm getting ahead of myself (Ian Flynn for the Sonic games would be dope btw).

The gameplay itself is split up into 3 distinct game styles. I'll break them down one by one and share my thoughts on each. The first playstyle is Speed stages, Sonic and Shadow's gameplay. These are easily the best part of the game, with incredibly tight controls and mechanics, solid level design and great spectacle. It also improves on SA1 with a much better homing attack, better air control in general, nerfing the overpowered spindash but still keeping it as a strong viable option for speed, platforming and overall skips, the lightspeed dash, while finnicky is MUCH faster to use and execute, bounce bracelet is legitimately a great edition to Sonic's move arsenal, introducing the ranking system for that extra replayability factor, you get the idea. Shadow is roughly the same as Sonic except he doesn't get the bounce bracelet (or the rather pointless Magic Hands upgrade) so I do see him as a slight downgrade to Sonic but his stages are also fully unique and different and not just “Sonic’s stages but modified slightly” like SA1. I see some people lambast the levels as “linear” but linear isn’t really a bad thing. Sure, I much prefer more expansive level design like in Sonic Generations, but the linearity allows Sonic Team to create more focused platforming challenges and numerous setpieces. I think the stages are all great fun (with the exception to Final Chase, that one just sucked). I guess if I had to critique anything about the playstyle itself, it’s that the roll is not very fun to use and is only used to get under gaps or smash boxes. It kills your speed so whenever you do use it (which is thankfully not much) it’s a complete pace breaker. I’m also not a fan of mapping nearly every action Sonic/Shadow has to one button. It just feels like artificial difficulty, like when you’re trying to lightspeed dash but you’re a fraction of a nanometer off so you end up rolling like an idiot instead. All in all, very fun gameplay style and definitely the obvious highlight of the game as a whole.


So now we get to treasure hunting with Knuckles and Rouge. It’s…a fine enough gameplay style on its own but it’s also a MONUMENTAL improvement to the treasure hunting in SA1. Instead of just easily following the constant radar pings of all 3 radar systems or using Tikal to literally point you where the emerald piece is, SA2’s treasure hunting is actually way more involved. You only have one radar tracking one emerald piece at a time and you need to use the hint system to figure out where that one emerald piece is hiding. It feels less like you’re bumbling around an empty area just happening to find the emerald pieces and more like you’re actively hunting for treasure, actively engaging with the game’s mechanics instead of letting the game play itself. The stages themselves I find are well constructed and not even that big with 2 exceptions: Death Chamber and Mad Space, but I’ll get to them later. Rouge’s Security Hall can be a pretty huge annoyance if you don’t know what you’re doing but once you figure out the stage’s gimmick it’s not too bad. I also like the fact that if you happen to find an emerald early that the radar wasn’t tracking you get extra bonus points for it. Now as for the 2 stages I mentioned earlier…yeah, they’re pretty terrible lol. A good reason as to why this is the case is that they’re just too big. Death Chamber is confined but it’s super irritating to navigate through with all these different rooms you need to go through, and Mad Space…wow. Mad Space is just way too big for its own good. It takes an absolute eternity just to get from one section of Mad Space to another due to how big the entire area is (noticing some repetition with how much I’m saying big yet? Good because it’s intentional), and to top it all off the hint system is either unhelpful or in reverse, definitely one of the biggest low points in the game. Not helping things is the camera, though this is a problem all the treasure hunting stages have. The action with the other 2 playstyles is condensed and focused on linear pathways but since treasure hunting revolves around exploring 360-degree more open 3D areas, get ready to deal with a camera that gets caught in things constantly or never focuses on what you want to focus on. Overall, it’s a fine playstyle I guess. Starts out fun but ends up plummeting in quality by the end of it.


And thus that brings us unceremoniously to the mech gameplay. You control Tails or Eggman as they pilot mechs and…do things in them…mostly shooting stuff…hooray. Look, if you couldn’t tell by the tone of my writing, I absolutely despise the mechs. I hated Gamma’s playstyle in SA1, and I hate it even more here. It’s some of the most agonizingly boring and tedious gameplay I have ever played. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as something like the Werehog or 06 Shadow/Silver/Amigos, but it’s still pretty up there nonetheless. The problem with the mechs is that the main gameplay loop is simply unenjoyable (to me at least, I need to stress that). You press and hold the B button to lock onto a bunch of targets (the number of targets being determined by how many are in the area and by where you swing the analogue stick towards to lock on) then let go of the button to kill all the targets you’ve locked on to. That’s…that’s literally it. That’s the most mech gameplay has to offer. Hold down the button, wiggle the stick around a bit, then let go of the button. That’s all she wrote. It gets old EXTREMELY fast. There’s no strategy, there’s no challenge with this gameplay style, it’s the same tune each and every single time. You know how most gameplay styles out there with a ranking system are designed as a gameplay style first, then a ranking system is designed around it? Here it feels like the exact opposite, the ranking system was designed first, and then an atrocious gameplay style was designed around that ranking system afterwards. That’s the only explanation I’ve got, the only way I can see appeal in this gameplay style is just for the factor of “get more points” and literally nothing else. The mechs have nothing to offer beyond that, and if you’re someone who doesn’t care about score attacking games if the gameplay itself isn’t fun (like me), then these stages turn from being just dull to an utter chore. And what do these stages offer beyond a horrifically dull gameplay loop you might ask? Well, it has clunky super simplistic unsatisfying platforming challenges, slow moving elevators that only exist because, you guessed it, “GET MORE POINTS!!!!”, terrible stage gimmicks, and awful enemy placement (oftentimes the game just drops enemies right on top of you or right in front of you as you open a door to proceed). The handling of the mechs themselves is terrible. Turning kills all of your speed (of which you barely have any to begin with) and simple jumping feels like a struggle. And man, all of the mech stages are the pits, not a single one of them is fun. I’ve heard so many people declare that Eggman’s stages are way better than Tails’ stages but like…no? Not at all??? They’re just as bad as Tails’ stages if you ask me, just as boring and tedious and last just as agonizingly long to boot. Say what you will about Mission Street being a terrible level (and it is), but Eggman has it just as bad with the point fodder in Weapon’s Bed or the forced-on rails shooting sections in Cosmic Wall (which makes that already boring stage last WAY longer than it already does). Easily the worst part of the entire game and a terrible playstyle in general. The fact that they’re the front and center opening act of Cannon’s Core sours the ending even more. Speaking of which:

I guess it’s time to talk about the rest of what SA2 has to offer. First, I’d like to briefly talk about the kart missions. Somewhat early on in Tails and Rouge’s stories, they decide to get in karts for some reason or another and drive down long winding stretches of road to chase after something. Not only does this come right out of left field, but the karts themselves don’t really control all that well, not helping things is that the game never tells you how to “drift”, which you do by double tapping the acceleration. It’s pointless filler and there’s not really much I can say about them because of that, so let’s move on to the bosses. They’re…alright. Some bosses are surprisingly a lot of fun, mainly all the GUN mechs and the Egg Golem, but the character fights still suck, the Egg Golem rehash with Eggman is just far less fun, and Biolizard/Finalhazard aren’t very good closers either, Biolizard especially with how it just drags on and on. There are extra missions to tackle after you’ve beaten all the main stages, but these are some of the laziest attempts at missions I’ve ever seen. You get the normal stage, a mission where you need to collect 100 rings, a mission where you need to finish in a time limit, a mission where you need to find a missing chao (that one basically requires you to find the hidden mystic melody upgrade for every single character, yet another reason why I hate the upgrade system and why I’m glad to never see it come back), and a hard mode version of the stage after beating the others. These are all the missions you get and they’re copy pasted across EVERY SINGLE STAGE. Like, God, say what you will about Generations’ extra missions but nearly every single one of them was unique and had unique level layouts, obstacles, or gimmicks you needed to play around with in order to beat the missions. Here, with the exception of hard mode and the…kart missions I guess, it’s just the same exact crap copy pasted 50 million times across all the stages in the game, and they don’t even give you much of anything once you’ve beaten them with an A rank. Each A rank earns you an emblem, and clearing a specific amount of missions earns unlocks for different kart skins, themes, and if you collect all 180 emblems (which you won’t just do from A ranking every mission in every stage), you get an admittedly pretty cute and faithful 3D recreation of Green Hill Zone, which is a nice reward. But how do you get the rest of the emblems needed to unlock the final Green Hill Zone reward?

In a rather baffling 100% completion requirement, you are forced to complete all Chao Garden activities to earn all the emblems in the game. Me personally when I played this game casually, I didn’t really care about the Chao Garden. I might visit it once or twice before leaving it behind and playing the rest of the game, virtual pet simulators aren’t really what I look for in a Sonic game. However, because I wanted to get all the emblems, I was forced to engage with the Chao Garden’s nonsense. This means raising 2 Chao (one Light and one Dark, more so the second time for the achievement on PC) and winning all the Chao Karate cups and all the Chao races. Look, I’m fine with the Chao Garden being in Sonic games in the future but for the love of God, do NOT force me to engage with it in order to get all the emblems, because this was miserable. Leveling up Chao is such a long and tedious process that I basically had to abuse the animal glitch to speed the process up, and it still took forever (and keep in mind I had to do this for both a Hero and Dark Chao), and for what? The reward for all the grinding is the privilege of playing incredibly shallow, boring minigames that barely require any player input to win??? Are you kidding me? What an absolute waste of time and energy.

Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be revisiting this game any time soon. I still think SA2 is a good game and at the very least worth checking out, but the amount of repetition and time-wasting filler this game has is ridiculous and puts me off from replaying it ever again. If I do end up replaying it, I refuse to get all the emblems again, that’s for damn sure.