Sonic 2 is wonderful, it's a game that takes the best elements from its first entry and spends the vast majority of the runtime simply expanding upon those ideas and transforming them into the dominant experience rather than balancing them out with some more messy ones. Above all it feels as if the designers, having had the experience from the first game in terms of understanding how to build a game around the incredible speed and momentum that the player was able to craft, were able to make something that was a much more consistently engaging time where there were less harsh pacebreakers and far greater heights that could be reached as well. While a big part of this comes from the much tighter level design, the changes to Sonic's own movement are just as significant as well, feeling a bit less slippery while still playing into a strong sense of momentum, along with no longer having a speed cap and being able to spin dash. This all not only allows for far more control to make it a bit easier to maintain your speed, but it also leads to those moments to feel far more rewarding due to how absurdly quick you can get. This culminates in an experience that feels inherently more engaging from the beginning due to basically all the changes made being ones that play into the more unique qualities of how you play as Sonic and make it a less cumbersome, frustrating experience in the process.

This is of course all heightened further by the level design being as good as it is, with stages often being sprawling, mazelike settings that never quite make you feel lost, but certainly make it hard to exactly pinpoint where you are. While this initially sounds like a bad thing, it ends up contributing to the game in a largely positive way thanks to how it essentially tells the player to just pick a direction that feels right and roll with it, with stages very rarely looping back in on themselves in a way that would cause things to become confusing. The way that so many of the branching paths can also act as rewards for good play is an interesting dynamic as well, with the reward for being able to make certain tricky jumps often being an opportunity to more easily maintain what momentum you have with punishment for failure on these sections more often than not simply being taking a slower path that requires more methodical play. This not only contributes to the insane scope of many of these levels, but also provides a more compelling punishment for a mistake than just killing the player, and while that does happen from time to time, it's forgiving enough in most cases to not become a point of frustration.

The visuals have also taken quite a jump in quality from the first, still often depicting these bleak, industrial hellscapes to signify Eggman's attempts at conquering the world, but adding far more detail and colour to the world as well to make it an absolute treat for the eyes in places. The seemingly endless cityscape background of Casino Night zone is especially a highlight in this regard, adding a sense of pure majesty to contrast the damage that's already been done by Eggman, while also being a deeply evocative experience. Even most of the slower pacebreaker stages are great here, often utilising ideas and gimmicks that still allow for bursts of speed in between these calmer moments, often messing around with the physics in one way or another to further add a sense of depth to what you're doing so you very rarely get the sensation that you're just waiting around for something to happen.

Once again, Casino Night is a highlight in this regard for the way that the various pinball machine mechanics are used to cause you to go darting around the screen while not actually making all too much forward progress for the most part. It gives off the feeling of moving at a slower pace through the stage while still messing about and having you be sent flying in all sorts of directions. The aquatic ruin is another zone that does this pretty well by having the slower elements being confined almost exclusively to the lower paths that you'll only fall into if you fail to make the above jumps, once again playing back into this idea of punishment not being death, but rather making you have to play more methodically. While rather easy for the most part, I also quite enjoy most of the boss fights in the game with the way that they more often than not don't really go for being a big test of skill or anything like that but instead show off a variety of cool, clever little ideas that almost always require a slightly different approach to break through and win. I definitely prefer this method of boss design in a game like this for the way that they'll often feel more like extensions of the platforming gameplay than anything else, requiring you to better understand the fundamentals of your moveset and apply them in slightly more involved or time sensitive ways to succeed, such as with the drill boss that alternates its weak spot between places you need to spin dash into and those that you need to jump on.

In the end though, I'd love this game way more if not for a couple of frustrating issues that get in the way. The biggest problem is simply the fact that from oil ocean onward, the game takes a bit of a dip in quality and makes those last couple of zones feel a bit tedious. Oil ocean isn't really bad but none of the big unique points of it really appeal to me in any way beyond the dreary aesthetic setting up these late game areas really nicely. The oil itself weirdly just doesn't feel like a particularly big punishment unless you decide to completely stand still, with the way to escape it being a bit more finicky than it is actually difficult thanks to the weirdly telegraphed fan blades basically causing falling back down to be a bit of an inevitability, even if the only punishment is just wasting more time. The cannons appear to want to achieve a spectacle to the pipes in chemical plant zone, being this big scripted moment that takes you a really far distance, but it ends up falling a bit short due to the more predictable nature of where you're shot combined with the far slower speed of it all, feeling way more dull and being yet another thing that just takes time without a lot of payoff. Metropolis zone is definitely the worst of the lot however, feeling as if it took some serious inspiration from the bad bits of Sonic 1, with the stages having a multitude of gimmicks that either completely halt your momentum or blindside you entirely. Every enemy here sucks, especially with how many of them are place on the edges of platforms you need to reach, and the single block spear platforms and the nuts you need to run on for a reaaaallllyyy long time to get them all the way to the top are further examples of rather questionable level design, especially how once again they're often placed directly after somewhere that seems to suggest to the player that it's a good time to try going fast yet again, leading to further moments of frustration.

Sky chase is mostly just a bit too slow and too long but is a neat enough spectacle, and the flying fortress has similar issues with frustration as Metropolis but to a lesser extent at the cost of more bottomless pits, neither quite as bad as the area directly beforehand, but not especially great either to me. The final boss is also the one fight in the game that I just do not like in any capacity thanks to how little clarity there feels in terms of when it's safe to actually attack, leading to a fight that feels very trial and error at first (which is a big problem when there's another fight directly beforehand that you have to deal with every single time) and then far too simplistic afterwards while still almost always carrying the risk of you just getting hit because the game decided that it'd be a cool and funny idea.

It all makes for a less enjoyable time than I'd have liked when all of the lesser areas are basically back to back, even though it by no means ruins the game entirely given how much wonderful creativity is on display for a lot of the playthrough. Also, while I definitely prefer the way that accessing the special stages is handled here, not only rewarding exploration to a small extent, but also providing a much greater number of chances to succeed and collect all chaos emeralds this time around, the special stages themselves are only marginally better in my eyes. I like the idea of the halfpipes quite a bit and think that the janky, pseudo-3D effects are charming as hell, but actually playing them is where things get frustrating with how little time you're given to react to everything, making it an irritating game of trial and error that you'll lose more often than not, only to be booted back to the checkpoint but now without any rings or shields you might have had. It basically makes it another game where the effort to actually unlock Super Sonic is too much for me to want to bother with whatsoever, which is a shame since I really do want to go for completion on one of these at some point, it's just that it always seems like a miserable experience.

Even with all this said, Sonic 2 is basically a perfect sequel that understands the variety of ways to fully utilise the unique mobility of a character like Sonic to make for a fast paced, reasonably unique platformer filled to the brim with creativity. It's got its rough edges for sure, but I do have to appreciate the ambition for sure and also cannot deny how well crafted everything is up until the last couple of areas. Interested to see where the 3rd game takes all this stuff as well considering that's considered the best of the trilogy by a ton of people by a pretty decent margin. With this I am now one step closer to becoming a Sonic fan, was only a matter of time...