While I understand the notion that P-06 is "the best Sonic game", I can't agree with it. This is an amazing fan project, and it fixes so many issues with 06, and I'm eager to see what else is in store - the full game isn't ready -, what's here is incredible.

But in my opinion, there are still just some things about 06 that I'm not fully on board with. Namely, I hate the boarding sections of Sonic's levels and the messy mach speed sections.

Let's start with the boarding sections. Plain and simply, these are just unfun to control. It felt like I was either always overshooting where I was trying to go, or it was a fight to turn at all. Jumping is incredibly clunky, and you'd think successfully doing a jump would reap you the rewards, but collecting the ring/life boxes or landing on rails after jump was so inconsistent. Mercifully, there are only two boarding segments of the game; the one in White Acropolis is pretty easy and I feel like doesn't ultimately affect the total score of the level all that much. Crisis City's really sucked though, and was incredibly poor to control.

As for the mach speed sections, I just think these are pretty fundamentally below average. I imagine this fan remake (I haven't played the original) makes these parts much more bearable, but I still can't tell you how many times I was sent careening into an obstacle and lost all my rings, or how many times I would jump a bit too early or too late and, because of how long these jumps are without being able to land early, drop right in front of something I couldn't avoid. You can get a pretty great sense of speed during these, but it's not really worth the trouble. Every mach speed section is the ending to the level its in which is incredibly frustrating. You might be doing pretty good and have a lot of rings, but something unforeseeable makes you lose your rings and suddenly you don't have an S rank anymore.

Those two things only affect Sonic, however, and besides those portions, Sonic's levels are a good time. And Shadow plays pretty much the same except slightly more fun combat, and vehicular combat which was a decent shakeup. Silver had a learning curve, but once I got the hang of him... well, I still preferred the other hedgehogs, but he was fun.

Then there are the friends, most levels have you hop between multiple characters. Tails, Knuckles, Rouge, Omega, Blaze, and Amy. To be honest, I consider all of these characters to be less fun than playing the main three, with the exception of Blaze and Amy. Maybe it's just because they played like Sonic and broke up Silver's levels, but I found those two to be a lot of fun. Hell, Silver's Dusty Desert actually ended up being one of my favorite levels of the game because of Amy's part (which is kind of funny cause that level is pretty infamous in the official game).

Highly recommend trying this one out, whether you hate 06, never tried it, or like it. It's still missing the final story, hub worlds, boss fights, and other ins and outs, but it has the most important parts of the game and the most fun parts.

I don't like this revisionist history I'm seeing with regards to this project that tries to paint Sonic '06 as something that can be salvaged with "better core gameplay". Sonic 06 was a fundamentally broken game, in every single aspect of its design. It's not something so easily fixed, and after all these years of it being one of the most laughably bad games of all time, one that even the most die-hard fans seemed to have trouble defending, it's very strange seeing people online saying stuff like "it had good ideas!" or "it just needed a bit more development time!" or "It has a lot of potential!". My knee-jerk reaction is to say this is nostalgia talking for a lot of people, wanting to believe this game they felt so disappointed by as a kid could've ended up as a masterpiece, but the reality is that the game never stood a chance. You'd have to go back to the drawing board with Sonic 06 to pull out something decent, not just give it more time in the oven.

No hate to the project's creator, because I think it's a genuine show of love for the series that someone would undergo trying to salvage one of the most infamous games of all time. If I'm judging just his work I'd be praising him, but unfortunately his great work is still being built upon, well, Sonic '06. If the myriad of tweaks is enough to make this game enjoyable for Sonic fans, all the more power to them. But playing this project just crystalized for me how much Sega absolutely failed with Sonic '06. The level design is boring, frequently includes frustrating mechanics and the additional characters outside Sonic, Shadow and Silver still feel tacked on and never as fun as the primary trio, and focusing on half-baked physics puzzles and vehicle combat for the Shadow and Silver campaigns is still completely misguided.

I fully admit the game controls much better now, and would love to see people take this framework and do something new with it. But good core controls doesn't suddenly make Sonic '06 worth playing, it just shows that game development is complicated, and the fixes we propose as fans often aren't enough to save the games we want to love. I wanted to love Sonic '06 when I played it as a young kid, but even then, when my standards for games were so much lower, I still felt that this game was broken beyond repair. Unfortunately after playing P-06, I still feel that way.

Erm... One ticket to BONERVILLE, please!

Ok but seriously who smacks off to porn games when sites exist? Is it because it's interactive? Please explain.

1.5 imp handies outta 5

A 2020 HD remake of 1996's Chex Quest somehow feels even weirder a concept than the original pack-in. The transition to polygonal assets leaves the whole thing feeling kinda cheap, and sheds a lot of the naive innocence that the original exuded. That being said, it is interesting to see the levels reimagined with the allowance of layered verticality – an impossibility of the DOOM engine. The most fun I had with this was seeing how nearly 30-year-old levels had been tweaked and translated into a new engine while still trying to capture the spirit of the original. Unfortunately, only the first level and Arboretum really feel evocative of their predecessors. The other levels are just sorta generic industrial space venues, which, is pretty appropriate to the originals, but they don't feel like particularly great callbacks.

The levels aren't the only thing that suffered from the shift to 3D, though. The movement kinda feels like ass, with very little feedback and an awful acceleration lag when trying to sprint. The weapons, too, have little-to-no feedback and straight-up don't function like they should. The shotgun has no spread, the rocket launcher feels like there's no splash damage, and the plasma rifle's projectiles are incredibly slow. It's charming that they retain their original sound effects, but their referential inclusion spurs little more than a "huh, that's neat!" after first noticing.

Surprisingly, the best part of this game is the writing. They've really leaned into the corniness of this game's very existence, with Captain Fred Chexter slinging cheeseball one-liner after cheeseball one-liner. I think this gets the closest to capturing the spirit of the original, but it's a bright spot awash in a sea of mediocrity.