Fast, furious, 3 buttons, simple moves, complex manuvers, need of extremely good reactions. Its sonic! and its great!
the "tension guage" and the timer encourage you to go fast. Not to mention its easier now. The tension guage detects your tricks (you can do tricks in mid air or on rails), kills of enemys, and you getting hurt. It can be used for an unstoppable speed boost, only beaten by the dreaded pit and wall. This speed boost can get you into the special stage, thats a halfpipe like sonic 2. But this time your stylus controls sonic. You put it where sonic needs to go, its very simple. Also, you can attack enemys and hit objects that put you into a 3 second select the number minigame.
The timer doesn't do as much.
There are also 2 characters, one for boys mainly, and one for girls (blaze). The primary differance is that one of their R attacks are unstoppable, but only in one direction.
Using R, you can do a vertical or horizontal jump in midair. Vertical is an unstoppable attack for blaze, and horizontal for sonic.
These simple yet furious controls make it so the game still goes fast, and in fact makes it go faster.
The point is that sonic is simple, fast fun. A superb game by most standard. The main drawback is value, as this game gets boring after a couple hours, but is good in 2 days.
Also the 3d graphics are slick. Quite slick indeed. As good as i could imagine.
The tracks are good as well.