This game is a fantastic example on the importance of disregarding the popular groupthink and just diving in to form your own opinion on a thing, because honestly? I adored Sonic Superstars (for the most part) and I’m extremely surprised at how harsh the reception and general talking points about the game have been. These have absolutely been blown out of proportion and I would love to have some of whatever the crowd saying that it’s “just as uninspired as Sonic 4” are smoking.

The original Sonic the Hedgehog was the very first video game that I ever played and it’s almost exclusively to blame for the lifelong video game addiction that ensued. I’ve played through that original game and its sequels more times than I can count, more than I’ve replayed any other series. They’re something akin to comfort games for me, something familiar and cozy that I can return to whenever the urge arises. This probably makes me sound biased as hell, and that’s because I unabashedly am. 2D Sonic is my shit - always has been, always will be. I can’t divorce the childlike fascination these games always manage to elicit from me to form some lame ‘objective’ analysis, nor would I want to. In my eyes, Sonic Superstars still has that spark that makes 2D Sonic so special and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

When Sonic Mania came out in 2017, it was an instant smash-hit to every neuron in my brain; it led me not into temptation, but delivered me from evil. This is to say, of course, that it’s one of the best games to ever grace the medium, and it’s concentrated nostalgia done pitch perfectly - one of the game’s biggest strengths that also serves as what I would consider to be its only weakness. Mania borrowed heavily from its predecessors with stages and themes, and it’s all great stuff. Throwing familiar stages in a blender and remixing them with some added spice was perfect for the type of game that Mania was clearly aiming to be, but I was always particularly enamored with the few completely original ideas we got. The fresh level designs we got were so promising and I just wanted more; I wanted a Mania 2 to just go all out with these new concepts, to just have fun with itself and the confidence to experiment and break tradition. My wish was wholly fulfilled with Superstars.

Everything excluding the obvious Sonic essentials is brand new here and it rules. I was constantly having new stage concepts/platforming gimmicks thrown at me and it was immensely enjoyable being thrown into the chaos of it all. There’s no familiarity to fall back on and I loved having my preconceived notions of what I thought this game was going to be challenged at every turn. Speeding through stages while mastering these gimmicks is as satisfying as ever because player control is pretty 1:1 to the Genesis era (sharp, responsive, fluid). The developers stated that Superstars’ characters were fine-tuned side-by-side with the Genesis titles and it definitely shows with how accurately it captures how precise those games feel to play. I really like every stage in Superstars, too, with some extra special standouts being Speed Jungle and Cyber Station, and they become even more enjoyable once you start using your Emerald powers to fly around and dominate. It’s a real power-trip in a good way and it finally makes individual emeralds rewarding to collect in the short-term. The level design is accommodating and expects you to use these abilities (it’s no coincidence that these stages play with more verticality than usual) and frequent checkpoints, which refresh your abilities, mean you don’t have to be overly conservative on experimenting.

My only real complaint about the stages themselves is that they’re a little weirdly paced. They all err on the ‘extremely long’ side on some Sonic 3 and Knuckles type beat and I tend to prefer the “more condensed stages” approach of something like a Sonic 1/2/early Mania. There are hints of Sonic CD peaking its head in the philosophy of the level design from time to time with how often you’ll be moving backwards and zig-zagging all over the place, but I find everything to be way more streamlined here than it was in CD. It’s also a little weird that some Zones have 2 Acts where others have 1 super long act for seemingly no rhyme or reason? It’s not a dealbreaker or anything, but it does raise the question of why the 1 Acts weren’t just split into 2 Acts for the sake of consistency.

There’s a lot of shared vocal loathing for the bosses in this game, too, and I can actually understand where this complaint is coming from to an extent. There’s a lot of waiting, extended pattern recognition cycles, and very limited windows of vulnerability but I must admit that I’m in the camp that really liked these fights (in the main campaign, but I’ll get to that). They really do feel like an ordeal, like a real threat that needs to be overcome, and they all utilize actual gimmicks used within the stages in a cool final test of what you learned in the past few minutes. Yes, they’re on the longer side, but honestly it was pretty refreshing to have Sonic bosses that you don’t just obliterate in like 8 seconds from face-tanking. I do think that some of the late game fights could use some trimming but it’s not anything that really bothered me, quite the contrary: they were, dare I say, fun! (Also, proper Emerald power usage destroys a lot of these guys so you’re definitely rewarded for going out of your way to explore and collect them).

In fact, exploration in general is rewarded fairly handsomely in this game, and I really appreciated them bringing back the special stages from Sonic 1 too, but I do kinda wish that the medals weren’t funneled solely into unlocks for the battle mode (which I do not care for, at all). Something like being able to unlock gallery art, music, bonus modes or mini-games, etc. would have been a much better idea in my opinion.

So yeah, overall, I adored Sonic Superstars and all of that adoration comes from the main campaign. Everything that’s not the main campaign, on the other hand….

Is bad! Like, straight up. Trip’s Story is just the main campaign but with an 9 year old Mario Maker designer in the studio (a bunch of random shit everywhere) aka, worse for no reason whatsoever. There’s not really even any new story here? And the true final boss you get for beating the second campaign is just a battle to not get carpal tunnel syndrome or have your wrists snap in half because it demands absolute perfection and….luck. You can say what you want about the other bosses in the game but none of them require flawless play to this extent for this long with a luck element on top of that. The battle mode is super PSP-core, and not in an endearing way, but in the “this is a PSP multiplayer game you’d find for 2 dollars in the Dollar General bargain bin and play it exactly two times only to never touch it again” type of way. I do not know what they were thinking outside of anything in the main campaign with Superstars but one thing is evident: there was no cooking to be had here.

But that’s not really what I play these games for. I play for the meat and potatoes of just having a good time blitzing through fun stages and improving my time, and Superstars nails that for me. Is it worth the ridiculous $60 price tag? Probably not for the amount of actual content that’s offered, but what is good here was a blast. I’ve replayed the game three times now, and I’m already itching for a fourth. It doesn’t reach the highs of Mania, but that’s not a detraction because that’s obviously a really high standard to reach. Sonic Mania was everything I wanted out of a true 2D Sonic revival and more; Superstars is everything I wanted without the more…and that’s ok! I hope the message the divisive reception conveys isn’t that we don’t want more games like this, but that there’s room to clean up a few things and even further improve the foundation.