After the critical success of Sonic Mania, Sega have finally gotten around to giving us a new classic 2D Sonic in Sonic Superstars. Developed by Arzest this time, Superstars aims to give a proper brand new classic Sonic experience that plays and feels like the Mega Drive games but with an updated look that remains true to its original style.
For the most part, I think this does deliver what it set out to achieve. Arzest were able to borrow the engine used by the Sonic Mania team to ensure the physics here are as close to the original games as possible and I think they nailed that aspect. Sonic moves with momentum and slopes and rolls effect that momentum as you would expect. There might be some minor differences here and there but for most people I think they got it pretty much bang on. They've also listened to the asks of more playable characters by bringing Tails, Knuckles, and Amy along for the ride too. Tails and Knuckles play as expect with flying and gliding moves while Amy expands on her Origins moveset by adding a double jump in addition to her charged hammer move. Everyone plays and feels like how they should and I appreciate that.
After Sonic Generations, the series has had a bad habit of dipping into nostalgia and reusing old level themes or slightly tweaking old level themes and it had worn a bit thin. Thankfully every single zone in Sonic Superstars is brand new and it feels so refreshing. From the fast paced Speed Jungle to the ring filled Golden Capital, every zone in this game is brand new, with their own unique gimmicks and it is so appreciated after years of recycled ideas. The zones have a nice mixture of new and returning badniks and all the bosses are unique and on a surface level, that is exactly what I wanted from this game.
As we start to dive a little deeper however, the wheels begin to fall off. The game starts off with a strong first impression. We have our beautiful animated cutscenes back to introduce the story which sees Eggman hire Fang (returning properly after decades on the bench) to help him find some dragon creature on the Northstar Islands. The mysterious new character Trip is along to help Fang out and throughout the game, you'll see Trip messing up plans by accident and she's very adorable. I think she fits in right at home with the classic cast of Sonic characters and that is a huge testament given how many new characters they've introduced throughout the years that have just had little impact on me. After that cutscene we're fired straight into Bridge Island Zone, where the level design feels right at home and the music has that Tee Lopes oomph to it that made Mania such a joy to listen to. Everything is hitting the right notes and then you find your first special stage ring and the first oh…. of the game happens.
Chaos Emeralds are once again found in Special Rings hidden throughout a level like how Sonic 3 & Knuckles did it. Unlike S3&K however, you can only pick up one Emerald per zone, even after you've beaten the game you can't go back to that zone to gain an emerald. This is similar to how the Advance games did it and it's more a minor annoyance but I understand it's probably to stop people collecting all the Emeralds in 2-3 zones and blasting through the game as Super Sonic so I can deal with that design decision. The Special Stages themselves however are probably the worst we've ever had. They take place in a 3D space where you have to do a homing attack like thing to latch onto blue orbs and swing yourself to a moving Emerald. You get 30 rings (though this can be extended by collecting rings) and the first four were so easy to the point I was in and out in seconds and then the 5th one required an extremely specific strategy to get it and it became very frustrating very quickly when I spent the majority of the special stages for the bulk of the game failing on this emerald. 6 and 7 felt more like the standard difficulty curve that should have been done throughout.
Chaos Emeralds now give you unique powers you can use throughout a stage and they get recharged every time you spin a checkpoint. For the most part these are very ignorable and don't offer too much outside of helping Sonic reach paths he otherwise couldn't. You've got stuff like a rocket jump or vines that give you easier access to higher areas as well as the clone power that just sends a bunch of your character running across the screen defeating anything they hit and this was probably the most handy one out of the bunch. Again for the most part these were pretty ignorable to the point I only really started using them in the last couple of zones on my first playthrough.
Bridge Island Zone is split into the traditional two act structure and at the end of act 1 you have a chase reminiscent of the Sonic Adventure dolphin chase to kind of act like a boss but it's act 2 where we see our first boss of the game and some of the bigger issues start to rear their head. Bosses use some very Sonic 4 sounding music. It's got that awful soundfont along with the very short and repetitive loop going on. And that wouldn't be too bad but the bosses here are designed in a way that I would call antithetical to how classic Sonic should play. Every single boss in this game likes to do very long drawn out attack sequences that culminate in one window of opportunity to attack and get one single hit in because the boss gains Invincibility frames to ensure it can do another long drawn out attack phase. That's not how classic Sonic bosses should work. Bosses can have long attack phases BUT they should be vulnerable most of the time to allow more skilled players to pull off an attack in exchange for the risk of being hit and that allows bosses to be defeated quickly which is very much in tune with Sonic's momentum based gameplay. The bosses in Superstars kill all momentum and it sucks. I don't think boss fights should be taking 3+ minutes in a Sonic game outside of a rare occasion. It gets worse however as a couple of late game bosses decide to throw in a second phase… with no checkpoint, meaning that if you die, you have to do all of phase 1 again and that is extremely grating when you have that annoying Sonic 4 style music looping over and over and over.
Back to the zones, Speed Jungle is second up and it's a blast zipping along the rails and jumping over enemies. You need some momentum to ride the rails properly so it isn't all automated sequences and it's a blast to run through. Speed Jungle also introduces us to a brand new concept in character specific Acts. Throughout the game you're given the opportunity to choose between a character Act or Act 2 for certain zones and these are pretty interesting. Speed Jungle gives Sonic a unique act that sees Fang chasing him down in a similar fashion to the Metal Sonic race from Sonic CD and throughout later Zones, you do get specific acts designed around each character's unique attributes and I think these are pretty cool. It does make some zones technically 3 acts long but I think it's nice that each character gets one stage dedicated to their abilities.
Then things start to get a bit weird with Sky Temple Zone. This is the first of a handful of Zones that are only one act long. To make up for this, the developers decided to make the levels super long instead, with these zones running past 7 minutes on your first run through. The issue with these zones is that they really start dragging on as level gimmicks begin to wear thin and you start seeing repetitive level design that is a little too similar to earlier parts in the stage making you feel like you're doing the same part of the level again 2 or 3 times. I'm not sure why they decided to make some very long acts but I think if Sega was concerned with length being an issue they could've done more regular size acts instead of these long ones that start to drag.
Continuing on we get some top tier zones again with Pinball Carnival providing the best music in the game and Act 2 bringing some lovely spooky vibes, Lagoon City borrowing elements from Hydrocity and Water Palace to make a good water level, and Sand Sanctuary providing a great desert level reminiscent of Sandopolis. This stretch of levels is where Sonic Superstars reaches its potential and gets to a level where I feel comfortable saying yeah, this is what I wanted from a modern classic 2D Sonic game.
And then we get to the back half of the game and everything starts falling apart. Musically the levels start going full Sonic 4 soundfont and while I still liked the music, it was a noticeable dip from the first half of the game. Level gimmicks start falling into obnoxious territory. Press Factory Act 2 for example borrows the gimmick from Sandopolis Act 2 where you have to hit a switch every few moments otherwise bad things start happening but here they decided it would be cool if they cooked Sonic to a crisp and insta kill you because that's fun right? Trying to explore a level with the threat of instant death constantly on your back is fun right?
Golden Capital Zone is where they start taking the boss lengths too far by adding in second phases to already long fights and not giving you checkpoints between phases because repeating the same portion of the fight you've clearly mastered already is fun right?
Cyber Station Zone is aesthetically the best zone in the game but suffers from being a long ass single act zone with a 2 phase boss fight at the end. It does feature fun gimmicks like becoming an octopus or a mouse and it's a memorable zone
Frozen Base zone is pretty cool though act 2 decides to incorporate a Sky Chase Zone like level and it's alright at best
The final zone, Egg Fortress zone also suffers from long and repetitive level design but the gimmick for it is really really cool and I loved seeing it for the first time. Unfortunately the final boss takes the worst aspects of long annoying attacking phases, a 2 phase fight without a checkpoint and marries it with potential insta death moments to make a really long and frustrating fight. If they hadn't taken the lives mechanic out of this game I think I might have dropped it there because all my frustrations were building up and the fun had been sucked out of the game.
However, I did persevere and was rewarded with a post game story mode. Without going into too many spoilers here, this post story mode takes inspiration from the Knuckles levels in Sonic 3&K where the level design is altered to suit a specific character and some story elements are changed up. Again, it's really cool seeing them take inspiration from things I adore about Sonic 3&K…. It's also heartbreaking seeing them fall short of hitting the potential of it. You see this post story mode has decided to act as a hard mode for the game too, so every single problem I had with the main game is exacerbated here. Level design now features tons more spikes and enemies along with classic Dimps style bottomless pits! Bosses now take even more hits to beat, wasting even more time waiting for an opportunity to attack them! The final boss is different but what if we made nearly every single attack an insta kill move? And that is where I put the game on hold. I'm just at a point in life where I don't have the time to repeatedly bash my head against a wall in hopes that I get everything right once. Having to spend 3+ minutes on phase 1 over and over every time I mess up once on phase 2 just isn't fun. I don't know why Sega have been on a recent punishing hard difficulty kink recently but stuff like this feels a little dated to me personally.
Unfortunately by not doing the post story mode, you don't unlock the last story fight with Super Sonic. I ended up watching that on YouTube and it seems alright though it does suffer from the same obnoxious stuff as other bosses in the game. I'll throw in one more nitpick before starting to wrap up my thoughts: why do Sega refuse to use the elemental shields? These are such cool power ups that reward skilled players for keeping ahold of them but Sega keeps defaulting to the plain regular shield and it's a little boring. Unfortunately I haven't tried out the multiplayer as it's mostly offline stuff and the battle stuff doesn't really interest me at all so I can't really comment on that side of things.
I picked this up on Switch so some performance notes based on my playthrough. It maintains a consistent 60fps at the cost of downgrading the background details a decent amount. I think it looks fine enough but there are some rough background and texture details here and there. Unfortunately I did find loading times between acts to take a little too long for my liking and I even had 2 game crashes while the game tried to load act 2 of a level. It's a little disappointing because you would think that 2D platformer like Sonic where it's gonna sell best on Switch most likely, the Switch version would be the base version and everything else built on top of that one but these issues do drag down the experience a bit on Switch unfortunately
Ok so I know I did a lot of ranting and complaining about the game but it comes from a place of love. I grew up with 2D Sonic to the point it is the longest thing I've loved in my life so when something comes so close to getting so much right, it hurts so much more when it falters and misses the mark. There's so much done well enough here that I can say it's a good game, it's just a shame that there's enough done poorly enough to hold it back from being great. And that's the thing with this series - every time it does a really excellent game, they always seem to stumble with the next one and then lose confidence in what they were doing right. It's frustrating being a fan sometimes but my unconditional love for Sonic means I'll be right here again when the next game drops hoping that the mistakes have been learned from and things are back on track.
For the most part, I think this does deliver what it set out to achieve. Arzest were able to borrow the engine used by the Sonic Mania team to ensure the physics here are as close to the original games as possible and I think they nailed that aspect. Sonic moves with momentum and slopes and rolls effect that momentum as you would expect. There might be some minor differences here and there but for most people I think they got it pretty much bang on. They've also listened to the asks of more playable characters by bringing Tails, Knuckles, and Amy along for the ride too. Tails and Knuckles play as expect with flying and gliding moves while Amy expands on her Origins moveset by adding a double jump in addition to her charged hammer move. Everyone plays and feels like how they should and I appreciate that.
After Sonic Generations, the series has had a bad habit of dipping into nostalgia and reusing old level themes or slightly tweaking old level themes and it had worn a bit thin. Thankfully every single zone in Sonic Superstars is brand new and it feels so refreshing. From the fast paced Speed Jungle to the ring filled Golden Capital, every zone in this game is brand new, with their own unique gimmicks and it is so appreciated after years of recycled ideas. The zones have a nice mixture of new and returning badniks and all the bosses are unique and on a surface level, that is exactly what I wanted from this game.
As we start to dive a little deeper however, the wheels begin to fall off. The game starts off with a strong first impression. We have our beautiful animated cutscenes back to introduce the story which sees Eggman hire Fang (returning properly after decades on the bench) to help him find some dragon creature on the Northstar Islands. The mysterious new character Trip is along to help Fang out and throughout the game, you'll see Trip messing up plans by accident and she's very adorable. I think she fits in right at home with the classic cast of Sonic characters and that is a huge testament given how many new characters they've introduced throughout the years that have just had little impact on me. After that cutscene we're fired straight into Bridge Island Zone, where the level design feels right at home and the music has that Tee Lopes oomph to it that made Mania such a joy to listen to. Everything is hitting the right notes and then you find your first special stage ring and the first oh…. of the game happens.
Chaos Emeralds are once again found in Special Rings hidden throughout a level like how Sonic 3 & Knuckles did it. Unlike S3&K however, you can only pick up one Emerald per zone, even after you've beaten the game you can't go back to that zone to gain an emerald. This is similar to how the Advance games did it and it's more a minor annoyance but I understand it's probably to stop people collecting all the Emeralds in 2-3 zones and blasting through the game as Super Sonic so I can deal with that design decision. The Special Stages themselves however are probably the worst we've ever had. They take place in a 3D space where you have to do a homing attack like thing to latch onto blue orbs and swing yourself to a moving Emerald. You get 30 rings (though this can be extended by collecting rings) and the first four were so easy to the point I was in and out in seconds and then the 5th one required an extremely specific strategy to get it and it became very frustrating very quickly when I spent the majority of the special stages for the bulk of the game failing on this emerald. 6 and 7 felt more like the standard difficulty curve that should have been done throughout.
Chaos Emeralds now give you unique powers you can use throughout a stage and they get recharged every time you spin a checkpoint. For the most part these are very ignorable and don't offer too much outside of helping Sonic reach paths he otherwise couldn't. You've got stuff like a rocket jump or vines that give you easier access to higher areas as well as the clone power that just sends a bunch of your character running across the screen defeating anything they hit and this was probably the most handy one out of the bunch. Again for the most part these were pretty ignorable to the point I only really started using them in the last couple of zones on my first playthrough.
Bridge Island Zone is split into the traditional two act structure and at the end of act 1 you have a chase reminiscent of the Sonic Adventure dolphin chase to kind of act like a boss but it's act 2 where we see our first boss of the game and some of the bigger issues start to rear their head. Bosses use some very Sonic 4 sounding music. It's got that awful soundfont along with the very short and repetitive loop going on. And that wouldn't be too bad but the bosses here are designed in a way that I would call antithetical to how classic Sonic should play. Every single boss in this game likes to do very long drawn out attack sequences that culminate in one window of opportunity to attack and get one single hit in because the boss gains Invincibility frames to ensure it can do another long drawn out attack phase. That's not how classic Sonic bosses should work. Bosses can have long attack phases BUT they should be vulnerable most of the time to allow more skilled players to pull off an attack in exchange for the risk of being hit and that allows bosses to be defeated quickly which is very much in tune with Sonic's momentum based gameplay. The bosses in Superstars kill all momentum and it sucks. I don't think boss fights should be taking 3+ minutes in a Sonic game outside of a rare occasion. It gets worse however as a couple of late game bosses decide to throw in a second phase… with no checkpoint, meaning that if you die, you have to do all of phase 1 again and that is extremely grating when you have that annoying Sonic 4 style music looping over and over and over.
Back to the zones, Speed Jungle is second up and it's a blast zipping along the rails and jumping over enemies. You need some momentum to ride the rails properly so it isn't all automated sequences and it's a blast to run through. Speed Jungle also introduces us to a brand new concept in character specific Acts. Throughout the game you're given the opportunity to choose between a character Act or Act 2 for certain zones and these are pretty interesting. Speed Jungle gives Sonic a unique act that sees Fang chasing him down in a similar fashion to the Metal Sonic race from Sonic CD and throughout later Zones, you do get specific acts designed around each character's unique attributes and I think these are pretty cool. It does make some zones technically 3 acts long but I think it's nice that each character gets one stage dedicated to their abilities.
Then things start to get a bit weird with Sky Temple Zone. This is the first of a handful of Zones that are only one act long. To make up for this, the developers decided to make the levels super long instead, with these zones running past 7 minutes on your first run through. The issue with these zones is that they really start dragging on as level gimmicks begin to wear thin and you start seeing repetitive level design that is a little too similar to earlier parts in the stage making you feel like you're doing the same part of the level again 2 or 3 times. I'm not sure why they decided to make some very long acts but I think if Sega was concerned with length being an issue they could've done more regular size acts instead of these long ones that start to drag.
Continuing on we get some top tier zones again with Pinball Carnival providing the best music in the game and Act 2 bringing some lovely spooky vibes, Lagoon City borrowing elements from Hydrocity and Water Palace to make a good water level, and Sand Sanctuary providing a great desert level reminiscent of Sandopolis. This stretch of levels is where Sonic Superstars reaches its potential and gets to a level where I feel comfortable saying yeah, this is what I wanted from a modern classic 2D Sonic game.
And then we get to the back half of the game and everything starts falling apart. Musically the levels start going full Sonic 4 soundfont and while I still liked the music, it was a noticeable dip from the first half of the game. Level gimmicks start falling into obnoxious territory. Press Factory Act 2 for example borrows the gimmick from Sandopolis Act 2 where you have to hit a switch every few moments otherwise bad things start happening but here they decided it would be cool if they cooked Sonic to a crisp and insta kill you because that's fun right? Trying to explore a level with the threat of instant death constantly on your back is fun right?
Golden Capital Zone is where they start taking the boss lengths too far by adding in second phases to already long fights and not giving you checkpoints between phases because repeating the same portion of the fight you've clearly mastered already is fun right?
Cyber Station Zone is aesthetically the best zone in the game but suffers from being a long ass single act zone with a 2 phase boss fight at the end. It does feature fun gimmicks like becoming an octopus or a mouse and it's a memorable zone
Frozen Base zone is pretty cool though act 2 decides to incorporate a Sky Chase Zone like level and it's alright at best
The final zone, Egg Fortress zone also suffers from long and repetitive level design but the gimmick for it is really really cool and I loved seeing it for the first time. Unfortunately the final boss takes the worst aspects of long annoying attacking phases, a 2 phase fight without a checkpoint and marries it with potential insta death moments to make a really long and frustrating fight. If they hadn't taken the lives mechanic out of this game I think I might have dropped it there because all my frustrations were building up and the fun had been sucked out of the game.
However, I did persevere and was rewarded with a post game story mode. Without going into too many spoilers here, this post story mode takes inspiration from the Knuckles levels in Sonic 3&K where the level design is altered to suit a specific character and some story elements are changed up. Again, it's really cool seeing them take inspiration from things I adore about Sonic 3&K…. It's also heartbreaking seeing them fall short of hitting the potential of it. You see this post story mode has decided to act as a hard mode for the game too, so every single problem I had with the main game is exacerbated here. Level design now features tons more spikes and enemies along with classic Dimps style bottomless pits! Bosses now take even more hits to beat, wasting even more time waiting for an opportunity to attack them! The final boss is different but what if we made nearly every single attack an insta kill move? And that is where I put the game on hold. I'm just at a point in life where I don't have the time to repeatedly bash my head against a wall in hopes that I get everything right once. Having to spend 3+ minutes on phase 1 over and over every time I mess up once on phase 2 just isn't fun. I don't know why Sega have been on a recent punishing hard difficulty kink recently but stuff like this feels a little dated to me personally.
Unfortunately by not doing the post story mode, you don't unlock the last story fight with Super Sonic. I ended up watching that on YouTube and it seems alright though it does suffer from the same obnoxious stuff as other bosses in the game. I'll throw in one more nitpick before starting to wrap up my thoughts: why do Sega refuse to use the elemental shields? These are such cool power ups that reward skilled players for keeping ahold of them but Sega keeps defaulting to the plain regular shield and it's a little boring. Unfortunately I haven't tried out the multiplayer as it's mostly offline stuff and the battle stuff doesn't really interest me at all so I can't really comment on that side of things.
I picked this up on Switch so some performance notes based on my playthrough. It maintains a consistent 60fps at the cost of downgrading the background details a decent amount. I think it looks fine enough but there are some rough background and texture details here and there. Unfortunately I did find loading times between acts to take a little too long for my liking and I even had 2 game crashes while the game tried to load act 2 of a level. It's a little disappointing because you would think that 2D platformer like Sonic where it's gonna sell best on Switch most likely, the Switch version would be the base version and everything else built on top of that one but these issues do drag down the experience a bit on Switch unfortunately
Ok so I know I did a lot of ranting and complaining about the game but it comes from a place of love. I grew up with 2D Sonic to the point it is the longest thing I've loved in my life so when something comes so close to getting so much right, it hurts so much more when it falters and misses the mark. There's so much done well enough here that I can say it's a good game, it's just a shame that there's enough done poorly enough to hold it back from being great. And that's the thing with this series - every time it does a really excellent game, they always seem to stumble with the next one and then lose confidence in what they were doing right. It's frustrating being a fan sometimes but my unconditional love for Sonic means I'll be right here again when the next game drops hoping that the mistakes have been learned from and things are back on track.