At the time of writing I've finished up to the trial portion of episode 4 and feel completely drained.

Everything about Dual Destinies feels so directionless and half-assed like they had a bunch of ideas and no clue what to do with them. The decision to try and shove in 3 main protagonists here baffles me; Phoenix's name is in the title and they brought him back because everyone missed him! Yay! He's done practically nothing for the whole game so far and his story concluded with the trilogy. Apollo is back too but much of his snarky attitude and 'only sane man' stuff from his game is dropped, and, similarly he doesn't get much to do here except act as The Partner Character. Athena is pretty fun, I don't mind the mood matrix and they're clearly building up to some story revelation with her but it's just not enough to keep me interested.

Also sorry if you like Blackquill but fuck Blackquill I am so tired of this guy. They brought back Klavier in case 3 and I was like 'oh cool a different prosecutor' but nope he's the sole prosecutor for cases 2 through 4 and I already see his dumb face on the photo for case 5 too and I don't really wanna know if they mess up Edgeworth too. I'm not gonna get into the whole 'dark age of the law' stuff because I haven't beat the game yet but it sure does sound boring from the other reviews 👍

tl;dr the fucking phone game is better than both of the new $60 releases in this franchise

played this on an iphone 11 mirroring to TV. performance was alright (though there really needs to be an FPS cap and better performance settings). the level design and controls here feel like the perfect mix between the adventure and boost games. it's not perfect (knuckles/rouge gliding in particular feels a bit too heavy and sensitive to turning) but i had enough fun to bother going back after i beat the story to get all 101 dream orbs

ggs sonic team

The closest to praise I can give this is that it's not Sonic 4.

This game isn't a horrid unplayable glitch-ridden mess like 06 or Rise of Lyric but it sure is another Sonic game that leaves you feeling 'eh.' Superstars is an incredibly weak follow-up to Mania and if there's one thing it does have in common with Sonic 4, it's that it's clearly being marketed as something it was never given the budget to be. (Also please for the love of god don't pay $60 for this. It's worth half that price at best.)

With regards to actual level design... also 'eh'. The levels can be fun to play through but in classic Sonic fashion there's an awful lot of automation or unfun gimmicks thrown in here. Despite initially being said to feel close to Mania, there's been some changes made to Sonic that are entirely unnecessary - he's a bit less responsive now, and for whatever reason the spindash has been nerfed into the ground. (because everyone loved that in Forces!)

The two other notably mixed things here are the music and boss fights. Jun Senoue makes some very nice music... when he isn't trying to imitate the genesis with a dying cat. His music (and some of the others) contrast pretty hard with each other, and when there's 18 composers working on your game it's not hard to imagine why.

Boss fights are generally unmemorable, and the ones that are memorable are only memorable because they're the extremely tedious ones where you have to sit around for a minute and wait for the boss to attack before you can do anything.

TL;DR - Superstars is a half-decent 2D sonic game but it will be forever doomed to live in Mania's shadow (i wouldn't really put it above 3&K either to be honest). Buy it on sale or something if you really wanna I guess. 6/10