honestly, i'm not gonna mince words here - this game sucks. it fucking sucks. i love sonic so much but. it just does. maybe probably not the worst sonic game but good grief its definitely bottom of the barrel stuff. pretty sure what comes to mind about this game, if you mention it to anyone who (is masochistic enough that) has played it, immediately what will come to mind is the bullshit controls. or...perhaps the subpar story if for some reason the controls weren't the main issue for them. but the controls. they're worse than sonic heroes/shadow the hedgehog. worse than sonic r. the wiimote already has tacky motion controls but this game takes it to a whole other level. sonic is always running forward and you can stop by pressing 1 (i didn't find this out until i got to the third world i think, don't know if i wasn't paying attention or it was actually introduced that late) but that won't help you because when you move forward in this game it is not straightforward. its finicky as all hell, even if you keep the wiimote as straight as possible, any slight movement and sonic will move way to the left or right or whatever direction you don't want to move in. 50-70% of the time when you need to flip the wiimote back or forth the game doesn't register it. i know it doesn't because i literally have to flip it using more force than i should for a motion control game and when i decide to stop playing i feel tense because of all that extra stuff i shouldn't have to do. standing up and moving closer to the wii sensor bar doesn't help. shouting at the tv also doesn't help but it does make playing it less irritable i guess. all of the levels are actually quite simple, just collect rings, defeat enemies, find this and that yadda yadda. the real challenge here is fighting with the controls.
moving aside from the gameplay, this game isn't even that pretty to look at. sonic colors is so much prettier to look at but i'm not sure if it's really worthy of comparing since this game was made in 2007 and colors was in 2010. i heard around this time of making this game sega split up the dev teams or something along that line to work on sonic 06 so that's probably one reason why the graphics look bad. the colors are depressingly dull, i get this is meant to be a more "serious" game, takes its themes from a historic viewpoint, and is also on a "weak" gaming system, however i think it's still worthy of criticzing. the ui is kinda eye candy for me though.
why am i giving this a 2.5 instead of a 2 or something lower, even though my views on this game are mostly negative? because the few moments this game decided to work it wasn't too bad. i've played plenty worse games than this. (and...i also have a huge bias because as much as it felt like i was pulling out my hair or teeth constantly, there was some part in the story, or just seeing the characters that kinda dulled that feeling, even for a little bit)
i really believe if the controls were more thought out, the graphics were less pitiful, and the gameplay were improved, this would just be a mediocre game. it could be more than just mediocre but i think that would require more ambition than is needed on a system like the wii.
i haven't finished this game but i've seen all i need to see in order to type up a review. i'll still finish it though. semi-unrelated to this game but i've been trying to finish what i start

also i hate this cover please don't look at me like that

edit: literally two days after i wrote this review i decided to play again and the save file corrupted. guess im forced to just abandon this now