This sure is a video game alright

It's weird because control wise it's tight fun and responsive like all the other classic games but level design wise it's a mess. Just this massive hodgepodge of obstacles and enemies with no coherent thought for any of their placements throughout the stage, seemingly thrown together haphazardly just to justify the main gimmick of this game: time travel. You spin a sign to go to the past or present, run and keep your speed going and after all that, you travel to whatever time period the sign you spun indicated. It's mainly the same level with altered design and an aesthetic change, and you only do this to find the robot teleporters in both acts and get the "good future" of the stage. The level design changes and robot teleporters aren't enough of an incentive for me to engage with time travel (and especially because the time stones, which you get by beating the special stages, give you a good future permanently when you get all of them), and the only reward for getting all the robot generators or time stones is a different ending. All these nonsensical obstacle layouts and looping spring pits are there to justify this one gimmick that doesn't really even add much value to these stages for me anyway, and time travel or not, these stages are still either frustrating, awkward, or utterly dull to travel through, Metallic Madness and Wacky Workbench being the worst offender. The backgrounds don't help either, being this barrage of color and busy detail that strains my eyes after a while. I wouldn't say it's as bad as Chaotix, but it's still pretty bad. The bosses are also absolutely pathetic. It's fine to experience once, but it doesn't offer much more than that.