Note before we start I will not be covering all the big glitches heard about on twitter and youtube in this review as I did not run into anything major throughout my time with the game beyond a weird instance where the second boss would insta kill me the moment I used a homing attack on it regardless of my ring count.
Sonic the Hedgehog is a franchise I’ve always had a bit of a weird relationship with. I grew up playing the games and I still love a number of them to this day, but at the same time a lot of the games haven’t really been what I wanted. Besides Mania, generations, Sonic 2, and Sonic 3(& knuckles) most of the games in the series come with a caveat for me when I recommend them to friends. With Sonic Adventure I have to warn about the Big The cat stages, Unleash the werehog stages, etc etc. I was hoping that Colors would join the four I could recommend without mentioning a major flaw it has beforehand, unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Now I want to say that I don’t think Sonic Colors is a bad game. It’s perfectly fine, but ultimately I do think that is all it is though. I admit part of this opinion may just be because of how the game was talked about to me before playing it. Going into Sonic Colors I heard a lot of people say it was the best boost formula Sonic game, if not the best 3d Sonic game in general before I played it; and I think hearing people say that kind of set my expectations too high for this game while also kind of misrepresenting what the game is.
I feel like it’s a tad incorrect to call Sonic Colors a 3d Sonic game considering that 3/4 of the game’s levels are either fully 2d or are primarily 2d. I won’t lie, I was more than a little disappointed by this. I do enjoy 3d Sonic gameplay despite the flaws and issues most 3d Sonic games have, so when I was starting this I was expecting and excited for 3d Sonic gameplay. So being given an almost entirely 2d game with some minor snippets of 3d sections of stages and only one fully 3d boss I was pretty let down. There is nothing wrong with most of the levels being 2d, it just wasn’t what I came in hoping for. Most of the levels themselves were fine gameplay wise as I said earlier; though they were pretty much all forgettable and kind of blend together in my head as I try to think of them now. I would chalk this up to the levels being both really short and also using the exact same aesthetic across every level for a world.
Theming each level based on the world they’re in is fine and some of my favorite platformers like Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze have done it, but generally those levels are just themed around a general aesthetic and have their own look. Meanwhile here most of the levels in colors just use the same assets and backgrounds. This mixed with how little time you spend in each level makes them not feel unique at all. Which is unfortunate because the general aesthetic of each world in the game is strong in the first few levels for that world, it just overstays its welcome by the time you reach the final boss for the area.
As for the bosses that was another area I was kind of just whelmed by. They weren’t anything to write home about but they weren’t explicitly bad either beyond my earlier comment about a glitch in the second fight. I did have mixed feeling about how the later three worlds had bosses that were just tougher versions of the previous three bosses though. While I do normally enjoy when games do this, its usually because they’re brought back as a normal enemy or a miniboss instead of just being a world boss again. It was probably due to a lack of time working on the original colors release but I can’t help but feel that it would have been better to have unique area bosses for the second half of the game. Like, it just feels weird to reuse bosses like that to me because while it most definitely was a time constraint it does just ultimately make the game's areas have less of their own identity outside of what wisps you unlock in those areas.
Since I forgot to mention it earlier the wisps are the new power up mechanic that were introduced in Sonic Colors when it first released. Basically you free this little ghost like aliens from eggman pods and they help Sonic do something useful like float through the air or to climb up walls. In my opinion these are probably the best part of the game. Giving Sonic actual meaningful power ups that change how you can approach the stages was a really good call and all of them feel really fun to use; even the one that just turns you into a cube had some good puzzles built around it that made how you approached the level with it different. I can definitely see why this was the gameplay element that was carried over into future games, even if it didn’t make sense with those games’s stories.
Speaking of stories I’m not the biggest fan of this game’s story. There’s nothing wrong with it really, it just feels very by the numbers for Sonic just with wisps instead of chaos emeralds. It doesn’t really do anything particularly exciting and mostly just feels like its trying to reintroduce Sonic to people. This marginally makes sense after how different and wild the last several Sonic games had been at that point, but I think the different and wild approach genuinely worked better for the 3d games in the series personally. Sonic is a blue talking hedgehog that’s kind of built like a halfway transformed animorph, he’s weird by default. Him getting turned into a werewolf or stopping sentient water from trying to destroy the world because it got some shiny rocks feels a lot more natural for 3D Sonic games than just saving small creatures from Eggman’s money sink of the week like how you would in the 2D Sonic games.
I think this may ultimately tie back into my expectation of this being a standard 3d Sonic game when it was kind of clear that the team really wanted to make another 2d Sonic. Overall I do think that is what the game needs to be approached as, a 2d Sonic game. Under that assumption the story being as generic as it is feels a lot less out of place. Though if I'm being honest the story probably isn’t what most people play Sonic for so while it isn't the most important aspect of the game, I do still wish there was more too it.
Before I finish this out I just want to say that like almost all Sonic games the soundtrack is awesome. If there’s one thing you can count on Sonic for, its phenomenal music and Sonic Colors Ultimate delivers that in spades. This is another one of those games where I'd say listen to the soundtrack even if you don't want to play the game, the music is that good imo.
Sonic Colors Ultimate is a game that at the end of the day is pretty okay. It’s not bad but it’s not super amazing to me personally; though I do think a good chunk of that is bias on my part due to going in expecting something different from what Colors is. I may give this game another shot at another point with a better mindset about it, but for now its just an alright game that feels overall pretty standard.
5/10
Sonic the Hedgehog is a franchise I’ve always had a bit of a weird relationship with. I grew up playing the games and I still love a number of them to this day, but at the same time a lot of the games haven’t really been what I wanted. Besides Mania, generations, Sonic 2, and Sonic 3(& knuckles) most of the games in the series come with a caveat for me when I recommend them to friends. With Sonic Adventure I have to warn about the Big The cat stages, Unleash the werehog stages, etc etc. I was hoping that Colors would join the four I could recommend without mentioning a major flaw it has beforehand, unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Now I want to say that I don’t think Sonic Colors is a bad game. It’s perfectly fine, but ultimately I do think that is all it is though. I admit part of this opinion may just be because of how the game was talked about to me before playing it. Going into Sonic Colors I heard a lot of people say it was the best boost formula Sonic game, if not the best 3d Sonic game in general before I played it; and I think hearing people say that kind of set my expectations too high for this game while also kind of misrepresenting what the game is.
I feel like it’s a tad incorrect to call Sonic Colors a 3d Sonic game considering that 3/4 of the game’s levels are either fully 2d or are primarily 2d. I won’t lie, I was more than a little disappointed by this. I do enjoy 3d Sonic gameplay despite the flaws and issues most 3d Sonic games have, so when I was starting this I was expecting and excited for 3d Sonic gameplay. So being given an almost entirely 2d game with some minor snippets of 3d sections of stages and only one fully 3d boss I was pretty let down. There is nothing wrong with most of the levels being 2d, it just wasn’t what I came in hoping for. Most of the levels themselves were fine gameplay wise as I said earlier; though they were pretty much all forgettable and kind of blend together in my head as I try to think of them now. I would chalk this up to the levels being both really short and also using the exact same aesthetic across every level for a world.
Theming each level based on the world they’re in is fine and some of my favorite platformers like Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze have done it, but generally those levels are just themed around a general aesthetic and have their own look. Meanwhile here most of the levels in colors just use the same assets and backgrounds. This mixed with how little time you spend in each level makes them not feel unique at all. Which is unfortunate because the general aesthetic of each world in the game is strong in the first few levels for that world, it just overstays its welcome by the time you reach the final boss for the area.
As for the bosses that was another area I was kind of just whelmed by. They weren’t anything to write home about but they weren’t explicitly bad either beyond my earlier comment about a glitch in the second fight. I did have mixed feeling about how the later three worlds had bosses that were just tougher versions of the previous three bosses though. While I do normally enjoy when games do this, its usually because they’re brought back as a normal enemy or a miniboss instead of just being a world boss again. It was probably due to a lack of time working on the original colors release but I can’t help but feel that it would have been better to have unique area bosses for the second half of the game. Like, it just feels weird to reuse bosses like that to me because while it most definitely was a time constraint it does just ultimately make the game's areas have less of their own identity outside of what wisps you unlock in those areas.
Since I forgot to mention it earlier the wisps are the new power up mechanic that were introduced in Sonic Colors when it first released. Basically you free this little ghost like aliens from eggman pods and they help Sonic do something useful like float through the air or to climb up walls. In my opinion these are probably the best part of the game. Giving Sonic actual meaningful power ups that change how you can approach the stages was a really good call and all of them feel really fun to use; even the one that just turns you into a cube had some good puzzles built around it that made how you approached the level with it different. I can definitely see why this was the gameplay element that was carried over into future games, even if it didn’t make sense with those games’s stories.
Speaking of stories I’m not the biggest fan of this game’s story. There’s nothing wrong with it really, it just feels very by the numbers for Sonic just with wisps instead of chaos emeralds. It doesn’t really do anything particularly exciting and mostly just feels like its trying to reintroduce Sonic to people. This marginally makes sense after how different and wild the last several Sonic games had been at that point, but I think the different and wild approach genuinely worked better for the 3d games in the series personally. Sonic is a blue talking hedgehog that’s kind of built like a halfway transformed animorph, he’s weird by default. Him getting turned into a werewolf or stopping sentient water from trying to destroy the world because it got some shiny rocks feels a lot more natural for 3D Sonic games than just saving small creatures from Eggman’s money sink of the week like how you would in the 2D Sonic games.
I think this may ultimately tie back into my expectation of this being a standard 3d Sonic game when it was kind of clear that the team really wanted to make another 2d Sonic. Overall I do think that is what the game needs to be approached as, a 2d Sonic game. Under that assumption the story being as generic as it is feels a lot less out of place. Though if I'm being honest the story probably isn’t what most people play Sonic for so while it isn't the most important aspect of the game, I do still wish there was more too it.
Before I finish this out I just want to say that like almost all Sonic games the soundtrack is awesome. If there’s one thing you can count on Sonic for, its phenomenal music and Sonic Colors Ultimate delivers that in spades. This is another one of those games where I'd say listen to the soundtrack even if you don't want to play the game, the music is that good imo.
Sonic Colors Ultimate is a game that at the end of the day is pretty okay. It’s not bad but it’s not super amazing to me personally; though I do think a good chunk of that is bias on my part due to going in expecting something different from what Colors is. I may give this game another shot at another point with a better mindset about it, but for now its just an alright game that feels overall pretty standard.
5/10