Sonic Generations doesn't have enough paint to cover its empty, atemporal, white void.
Right off the bat: Sonic the Hedgehog cannot get away with a "bad guy interrupts lunch" plot. You can do that in a game like New Super Mario Bros. which openly is not even trying to have a story, but even Sonic Generations' rather barebones narrative has a cutscene with a full voice-acted conversation after every zone.
When you load a game from the main menu, sonic jumps out of the logo and free-falls down; if this seamlessly led into the level select, this would be a neat effect, but the game cuts to a loading screen instead. This is particularly ludicrous on modern machines since the loading screen lasts less than a second and a smooth transition would probably be easily achievable if it weren't for the fact we're dealing with PS360 code. The same thing happens when switching between Classic and Modern Sonic. There's just a lot of weird little things like this that make navigating the game feel clunky.
Classic Sonic feels bad. It's not as simple as "it's not like the old games" which I know had been a conversation back when Sonic 4 came out. Maybe they don't need to be exactly the same, but there were certain things that were possible in the Genesis games that were just good: for example, you can't spin-dash and then immediately jump to clear a large gap. Some of this feels like it's to prevent short-term "sequence breaking" or clipping out-of-bounds considering how limited and on-rails a lot of the game is, but a lot of it just doesn't feel good in general. Every physics movement, from Sonic's jump arc to the way that rings bounce, feels like they just stuck with the untuned default options of whatever engine they used.
I really hate to bring up something this nitpicky but inconsistencies like this have been bugging me since Sonic 1. Why are certain obstacles instant death? There are these spike balls in some of the underwater sections that just kill you in one hit no matter what. Why is literally anything other than a bottomless pit a one hit kill? The game is even pretty lenient in other aspects, for example it's completely possible to survive getting crushed. It just doesn't make sense.
Why does Modern Sonic have 2D sections at all? The two characters aren't differentiated enough. The moments where Modern Sonic is actually allowed to be Modern Sonic are probably the best parts of the game, but just like with every other 3D Sonic, the best part of the game is buried under hours of filler.
The selection of zones chosen for the game is bizarre, I'm not surprised that they were apparently chosen by a poll. 4 of the 9 zones are city levels, 3 of them are basically green hill variants. I get that they picked one level from every major game from beginning to then-present, but it's also weird how almost half of this game's levels are taken from Adventure-style Sonic games, despite neither the Classic nor Modern versions of the stages really providing this gameplay. City Escape is probably the most true to the original, but I don't understand how there are people who compare this to a greatest hits collection, at least not in terms of gameplay. To me it just reveals that this is a surface level celebration from a company that still doesn't really get what's good about these old games, and still won't another decade later.
Playing this so soon after Chorvs had me feeling a lot of the same ways that I did with that game. Both games give the player a number of tools, but neither game really gives the player engaging ways to try to experiment and learn them. You never have any space to truly play, you are never given any room for creativity. The level design is so strictly railroaded that half the time when I would try to jump to what I assumed was an alternate path I would just fall into a pit, or perhaps even more insulting, hit an invisible wall and continue being directed down the same rollercoaster ride. The entire game is a sequence of checks where you use the one correct move at the one correct time in the one correct way, or you get shunted down to the bottom path.
And on the subject of the branching paths, I don't like the way they're often handled. Many of the "bottom" and "top" paths are moreso "foreground" and "background" paths, with background paths typically being visible from the foreground. This just makes the play area visually muddy, with the player no longer being able to rely on gut reactions to fast moving obstacles. Given that the foreground areas tend to seem like bottom-path equivalents, at absolute best this seems like an intentional punishment.
The most fun I had with Sonic Generations was singing City Escape to myself during levels that weren't City Escape.
There have definitely been way worse Sonic games, the poor rat has had some serious duds. That said, with all the hype around it, if this is supposed to be anything close to the peak of what the past couple decades of Sonic have had to offer, I can't blame anyone who walked away from this saying "Sonic was never good".
Right off the bat: Sonic the Hedgehog cannot get away with a "bad guy interrupts lunch" plot. You can do that in a game like New Super Mario Bros. which openly is not even trying to have a story, but even Sonic Generations' rather barebones narrative has a cutscene with a full voice-acted conversation after every zone.
When you load a game from the main menu, sonic jumps out of the logo and free-falls down; if this seamlessly led into the level select, this would be a neat effect, but the game cuts to a loading screen instead. This is particularly ludicrous on modern machines since the loading screen lasts less than a second and a smooth transition would probably be easily achievable if it weren't for the fact we're dealing with PS360 code. The same thing happens when switching between Classic and Modern Sonic. There's just a lot of weird little things like this that make navigating the game feel clunky.
Classic Sonic feels bad. It's not as simple as "it's not like the old games" which I know had been a conversation back when Sonic 4 came out. Maybe they don't need to be exactly the same, but there were certain things that were possible in the Genesis games that were just good: for example, you can't spin-dash and then immediately jump to clear a large gap. Some of this feels like it's to prevent short-term "sequence breaking" or clipping out-of-bounds considering how limited and on-rails a lot of the game is, but a lot of it just doesn't feel good in general. Every physics movement, from Sonic's jump arc to the way that rings bounce, feels like they just stuck with the untuned default options of whatever engine they used.
I really hate to bring up something this nitpicky but inconsistencies like this have been bugging me since Sonic 1. Why are certain obstacles instant death? There are these spike balls in some of the underwater sections that just kill you in one hit no matter what. Why is literally anything other than a bottomless pit a one hit kill? The game is even pretty lenient in other aspects, for example it's completely possible to survive getting crushed. It just doesn't make sense.
Why does Modern Sonic have 2D sections at all? The two characters aren't differentiated enough. The moments where Modern Sonic is actually allowed to be Modern Sonic are probably the best parts of the game, but just like with every other 3D Sonic, the best part of the game is buried under hours of filler.
The selection of zones chosen for the game is bizarre, I'm not surprised that they were apparently chosen by a poll. 4 of the 9 zones are city levels, 3 of them are basically green hill variants. I get that they picked one level from every major game from beginning to then-present, but it's also weird how almost half of this game's levels are taken from Adventure-style Sonic games, despite neither the Classic nor Modern versions of the stages really providing this gameplay. City Escape is probably the most true to the original, but I don't understand how there are people who compare this to a greatest hits collection, at least not in terms of gameplay. To me it just reveals that this is a surface level celebration from a company that still doesn't really get what's good about these old games, and still won't another decade later.
Playing this so soon after Chorvs had me feeling a lot of the same ways that I did with that game. Both games give the player a number of tools, but neither game really gives the player engaging ways to try to experiment and learn them. You never have any space to truly play, you are never given any room for creativity. The level design is so strictly railroaded that half the time when I would try to jump to what I assumed was an alternate path I would just fall into a pit, or perhaps even more insulting, hit an invisible wall and continue being directed down the same rollercoaster ride. The entire game is a sequence of checks where you use the one correct move at the one correct time in the one correct way, or you get shunted down to the bottom path.
And on the subject of the branching paths, I don't like the way they're often handled. Many of the "bottom" and "top" paths are moreso "foreground" and "background" paths, with background paths typically being visible from the foreground. This just makes the play area visually muddy, with the player no longer being able to rely on gut reactions to fast moving obstacles. Given that the foreground areas tend to seem like bottom-path equivalents, at absolute best this seems like an intentional punishment.
The most fun I had with Sonic Generations was singing City Escape to myself during levels that weren't City Escape.
There have definitely been way worse Sonic games, the poor rat has had some serious duds. That said, with all the hype around it, if this is supposed to be anything close to the peak of what the past couple decades of Sonic have had to offer, I can't blame anyone who walked away from this saying "Sonic was never good".