2025-01-05

Sonic Generations

Seems like every 3D Sonic game comes prepackaged with a tumor. Every part of the game where you’re not playing A Sonic Level is rarely fun. Adventure 1 had the excuse of being a little experimental, Adventure 2 made it clear that you’ll be spending 2/3 of the runtime playing very slow and boring levels. Sonic Team eventually settled on the 1/2 ratio, where you’ll alternate between Fun Levels and Shit Levels. The very easy criticism is the devs are stupid and don’t know how to make fun games, but I think this was born out of necessity.

These boost style Sonic games are bottlenecked by assets. The faster you go, the quicker the level is over, which means you throw away a GTA map’s worth of detail in 100 seconds. It’s really impressive how quickly the developers learned to take every single opportunity to slow down the pace, just to keep the game’s runtime from being under 59 minutes. 2D gameplay was a nearly invisible way to keep the game in motion while slowing down. This was employed in Unleashed and Colors, but Generations takes things a step too far.

I can’t help but identify every 2D portion of Sonic Generations as padding. I’m sure there are some good ideas/routes buried in here, but it is overall not fun. The physics feel bad, visual clarity is extremely low, and the general flow of the levels feel like they’re fighting against you. And it’s a lot more than half the game, since every 3D stage insists on spending some time in 2D as well. This is the tumor that is growing on the otherwise delightful package.

And I do mean delightful. At its best, this game has beautiful levels with very fun sequences and frequently gives extra route options. The boost level design is consistently top tier, some of the best stages in the series are in this game. The highs are very high here.

Progression is the biggest hiccup to first time playthroughs. You need to play through each level (once as 3D, again as 2D), and then you have to play challenges to unlock keys, to fight a boss. The bosses are neat references, and I only have small complaints here. They serve their purpose well. But the challenges are really poorly thought out. Each level has 10 challenges to pick from, but you only need to play a few. I never knew which ones to pick, and ended up optimizing for least annoying. I’m thankful you’re not forced to play all challenges to progress, but I never got an itch to go back and play the others. If anything, I would be going back to replaying the main stages for better scores. Challenges should be firmly optional content, reserved for people who really want to play more of the game.

I hate being negative but I can’t justify any compliments without an asterisk. The majority of Sonic Generations’s runtime is padding, unless you spend a few more hours replaying all the good levels. And there are some great levels, so you wouldn’t be crazy for doing so.

Score: 2/3. I generally recommend, but it really depends on how much crap you’re willing to put up with. Overall I think the higher highs just barely justify the quantity of midness in the game.