Last year, Sonic Colors showed me that 3D Sonic games could be fun again. Of course, this was the very same year that Sonic 4 dashed my hopes of a quality 2D Sonic experience. So when it was announced that the next game in the series would feature both styles of play, I was skeptical of SEGA’s ability to handle the classic stages.

It turns out they actually learned from their mistakes… well, most of them anyway. Sonic Generations, while not perfect, manages to be a rather successful blend of old and new Sonic gameplay that’s fun in spite of its shortcomings.

But it wouldn’t be a modern Sonic game without an attempt to explain why there are two Sonics revisiting levels of the past. And so silly tales of time travel and time eaters try their darndest to make you care about what’s happening. It all feels rather unnecessary, but it’s also fairly unintrusive, so each time a cutscene presents itself you’ll be back to playing the game before you know it.

The worlds of Generations are divided into three distinct eras starting with the SEGA Genesis and ending with the current console generation. At first, it seems like a brief setup with each Sonic only getting one Act per world (18 stages in total) with a boss capping off each era. But 90 challenge stages scattered throughout each world add much more longevity to the experience.

Anybody who played with the incredibly broken physics of Sonic 4 is undoubtedly wondering how classic Sonic controls. While it doesn’t feel exactly like playing the Genesis games, it does manage to feel surprisingly good. Momentum is actually kept properly without constant micromanagement and Sonic isn’t constantly unrolling his body to leave himself vulnerable; two huge problems with Sonic 4. It isn’t without its faults, though. Sonic takes an unusually long time to get up after being hit. But the controls do enough right to feel like a good approximation of the games everybody loves.

Modern Sonic plays about as good as he did in Sonic Colors (minus the powerups). That is to say he plays as well as the levels he inhabits. When it works, you get an exhilarating sense of speed while still having plenty of pathways to explore. But when it doesn’t, your clipping through the environment, getting the camera stuck behind an obstacle, or slowly walking backwards (involuntarily) down the side of a very tall building toward your death.

Sounds awful right? But just like with all aspects of the game, the good manages to outweigh the bad. These faults, though glaring when present, managed to happen pretty seldom in my extensive time with the game. Modern Sonic can still occasionally feel a little too automatic as the levels ping pong you around in a flashy display of speed. They didn’t reinvent his style of play. But it’s a further refinement of the previous games and there are usually enough branching paths and 2D sections mixed in to keep things entertaining.

Challenge stages have a surprising amount of enjoyable features, considering their optional nature. Some have you using the elemental shields from Sonic 3 to get past obstacles, even allowing you to unlock the shields as part of your customizable ability set for use in the main levels. Others have you calling in tails to help you fly through Chemical Plant or hitting buttons to toggle an array of walls and platforms in a psuedo-puzzle platformer stage. But they can’t all be good. With a full 90 challenge stages, there are some real stinkers, too.

Speaking of stinkers, the final boss of Sonic Generations is, by a wide margin, the lowest point in the game. It is a complete mess. It’s hard to believe it was ever playtested. The rest of the game’s bosses are generally decent, though a bit repetitive. If nothing else, they at least don’t reuse slight variations of the same fight over and over like Colors.

And of course, there’s the nostalgia. Ultimately, Sonic Generations is a celebration of the franchise and is jam packed with fan service. Aside from the stages themselves, there are plenty of remixes of classic and not so classic tunes, some of which are a real treat to hear (and some of which will at least give you a good laugh). You can also unlock extra artwork and music from across the franchise’s history that can be used in place of the default themes. Playing a level to Jet Grind Radio composer Hideki Naganuma’s Sonic Rush score certainly put a smile on my face.

Sometimes the choices of what to represent is a bit questionable. One of the worlds is taken from Sonic 2006 which is hated pretty unanimously and the rocket powerup used in the Planet Wisp stage is arguably one of Sonic Colors‘ least interesting items. But trips through stages such as the Chemical Plant (Sonic 2) and Speed Highway (Sonic Adventure) make up for these odd choices.

Aside from a few framerate issues in small sections of certain stages, Generations is delicious eye candy. The modern version of Planet Wisp in particular is absolutely gorgeous as you make your way through the alien vegetation in the early part of the stage. No matter which version of Sonic you’re playing as, there’s always a lot to look at to the point where it can occasionally be distracting. But one thing it is definitely not is boring.

The same can be said about the game itself. Even after finishing off the main game, it still had its hooks in me. The brief nature of the challenge stages have a powerful “just one more” effect. I found playing through the main stages a second time arguably even more enjoyable as I had a better grasp of how to effectively navigate them as fast as possible or take more time to explore and find hidden red rings.

Sonic Generations may not be as creative as last year’s Sonic Colors. It doesn’t really have any new mechanics to spice things up and all the stages are reinterpretations of existing material. But what’s there manages to feel tighter than its 3D predecessors and the inclusion of 2D stages that actually work are a welcome change. Is it still flawed? Sure. But I’d be lying if said I didn’t have a damn fun time playing through it.

This review is based on the PlayStation 3 version of Sonic Generations provided to the reviewer by SEGA.

Tags: 3D Platformer, PC, platformer, ps3, Sega, Sonic, Sonic Generations, Sonic The Hedgehog, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 10:30 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.