This is the first 2D Sonic game that feels experimental ever since Dimps was making 2D Sonic games. Unlike the Dimps games, however, this one actually doesn't completely shit itself on the level design department, and the gimmicks, both reimplementations of old ones and the completely new, fit in very well, keeping stages varied by always throwing something different at the player. The difficulty progresses pretty naturally as the game goes on and maintaining speed gets harder especially in the later stages, which might bother some people who are a bit too used to the 3D Sonic games or even Sonic Mania's overabundance of spectacle speedy moments with little interaction required from the player, but I can't do much about that aside from telling them to stop being bad at playing video games.

My biggest complaints are that the music is mostly bad/forgettable, which is a crime for a Sonic game, and the fact that the bosses have way too much waiting time until you're given a free hit after dodging their attacks. Yeah, I see why they did that as this game was made with multiplayer in mind and bosses would be demolished in a matter of seconds if they worked like in previous 2D games where you can hit them anytime you want as long as you manage to reach them, but in single player this just drags on and makes otherwise solid boss fights with challenging attack patterns into boring waiting games. Though the last boss for Trip's story can just go fuck itself with all the insta-kill bullshit and the last story boss did not need to be so fucking long without any checkpoints, what the hell were they thinking? The emerald powers are a neat idea, but for the most part they're extremely situational, so that could have been better executed too.

Since this was being made by Arzest, my expectations were honestly lower than Japan's birth rate looking at their track record, but I can tell they know what they're doing when it comes to making Sonic games at least. I mean, it makes sense, one of the leading guys is Naoto Ohshima after all, but yeah, Sonic Superstars isn't perfect by any means, I would even argue it's a worse game than Sonic Mania despite liking it a lot, but it is the most interesting 2D Sonic game we had in quite a while. I'm curious to see what they'll cook up next if Sega does end up making them into what Dimps used to be for Sonic back in the 2000s, hopefully they won't mimick Dimps and make worse games than their first 2D Sonic title as the years go by.