On paper, I feel like I should dislike this game. It's another open-world game jam packed with meaningless things to do, like collecting little tokens, and solving puzzles that I have seen in so many other games. Plus, I just said "Why?" SO many times playing this game. Like why is the best way to level up Sonic to go frickin' fishing? Why does it take so long to level up Sonic's speed and ring capacity, yet it's instant to level up his attack/defense? Why does the open-world keep forcing me into annoying 2D sections? What the hell is going on in the story? Ok, that one wasn't a why... but still!

Despite all these weird decisions, and a bit of jank, its an incredibly enjoyable experience. I think it manages to capture the fun that can be had in an open-world, and avoids most of the terrible aspects. For example, it avoids the whole "follow the dotted line on the minimap" design by obscuring the map at first, and putting tons of grind rails everywhere which are such a blast to ride, but lord knows where they are going to take you. Genuinely though, when I saw the first gameplay trailer, I thought the rails in the sky looked goofy as heck, but they really encouraged me to not really worry about the destination and just have fun with the game.

It also helps that everything is so quick. It doesn't take too long to get to any part of the map since the maps are pretty small, and Sonic is so quick. Honestly, this game made me realize how much slowly walking across open-worlds sucks. It's going to be hard to go back to Assassin's Creed after this. Another thing that's quick are all the challenges the map is filled with. They aren't really all that interesting, but they don't ever last that long, so they end up being pretty satisfying to do.

So yeah, this Sonic game is pretty good surprisingly. Not perfect by any means, but I had a good time with it.