A much needed step in the right direction.
Lets start with the good first – the Sonic levels. These are all set in the daytime & all have a great, colourful & bright look to them. Full of loops, springs, excessive speed & rails to grind on. They mostly consist of holding right & basically watching the game play itself but they are still somehow enormous fun. They are long, adrenaline fuelled rollercoaster rides. Jumping on a spring, landing on a rail that does a corkscrew, boosting into a robot then running down a vertical wall to a loop in front of a fantastic backdrop that range from jungles full of waterfalls to running through tree tops all accompanied by great music is the norm in these levels. & they never fail to impress or raise a smile. & yes you did read that right, great music. The rock soundtrack has finally gone & we have a great score that has much more in common with the classic Sonic games. Excellent.
But from here on its downhill. The Sonic levels for a start are far from perfect. Although they are fun, they are just too fast & you are just basically watching the game play itself while you hold right with the odd boost jump into enemies. Sonic used to be just as much about platforming as it was about going fast. There used to be balance, the last decent Sonic game - Sonic Adventure managed to juggle both. This doesn't. Some of the levels have a frustrating amount of bottomless pits too. Causing no end of random & unfair deaths as you are travelling too fast to do anything about them. Only being passed from trial & error.
Next is the Werehog gimmick. You're probably aware by know what this is. Sonic turns into a big furry wolf/hedgehog hybrid at night. This is due to dark Gaia that Dr Robotnik (Not Eggman!) has released from the core of the Earth. Yep the story is madness but doesn't matter in a game like this. Anyway, these stages are about as frequent as the Sonic levels except for they are about 3 times longer & about 10 times more boring.
These area lot slower & focus more on actual platforming & combat. Which in theory sounds like the perfect compliment to Sonics mad levels. But they aren't. Its 3 parts combat & 1 part platformer with the odd sprinkling of insultingly easy 'puzzles'. With the combat being incredibly tedious & nothing more than bashing the buttons until health bars go down. Joy. Sure there's extra moves to be learned as you level up (yep you level up now) but you'll find one or two combos that work & stick to these as the rest will either make the fights last even longer or make you get killed from there sheer uselessness. There's also QTE critical hits you can use to finish off enemies, including bosses, God of War style. But even these get very boring, very quickly.
Speaking of God of War. The Werehog levels as a whole borrows heavily from that. From level design that consists of a lot of walking along beams & ledges to puzzles that just require block moving & levers to complete. You even have to grab the bottom of doors & hammer B to open them. Unfortunately it doesn't have any of God of Wars magnificence. Lacking in every area from tedious combat to uninspired level design with little to no variety in areas or enemies.
Progress through these levels is equally laborious. Requiring nothing more than walking to an area, being locked in by purple shields or locked doors, having to kill X amount of enemies to unlock it, move block, jump a couple of times to new area, get locked in, kill X…… You get the idea. They are by no means awful or even bad. But they are mediocre, dull & tedious.
But even worse is progressing through the story & unlocking levels. The first requires going to incredibly dull city areas, walking around & talking to people. These parts are just depressing & mind numbingly boring. No one has anything interesting to say & you really are just going through the motions until you get what you want – another daytime Sonic level. It could have been improved by just dropping the hub areas altogether & just putting you in one stage after another, loosely joined by the odd, short cut-scene. The time spent creating these crappy hub areas could have been much better spent on creating some more daytime stages.
The next pain in the backside are the sheer amount of collectables. Not really a problem if they weren't forced. But to unlock levels you have to collect medals. Sun for day stages & moon for the night. These are an incredibly cheap way of artificially extending the games lifespan & make you have to repeat levels numerous times to progress. Sure they reward exploration but the night stages are so dull you wont want to explore & in the Sonic levels you'll be travelling too fast you'll often miss them. Its not as simple as going back either as that will most likely cause your doom or simply be impossible due to walls. So nothing else you can do but restart the level. Very annoying.
The game likes to leave a sour taste at the end too. The last level & bosses are some of the most frustrating tasks ive had to endure in my years of gaming. Causing many cheap deaths with countless restarts, going on for far too long & having way too many annoying QTE moments, it goes out on a massive low.
But none of this is awful, apart from the city areas but these are small anyway. Its just so, so. A bit….. 'meh'. With the odd great daytime Sonic levels raising it just above average. Some even making you forget or overlook all these problems, even if just for a short time. But these can be quite depressing themselves in a way as they show just how fantastic a Sonic game could be if Sega listened to the fans, just stopped with the gimmicks & gave us a full 2.5D Sonic game. A damn shame.