Sonic Superstars Review

ign.com:

Most Sonic games put the pedal to the metal, having you travel at blindingly fast speeds while avoiding hazards on your way to the goal. Unlike its predecessors, however, Sonic Superstars trades that traditional breakneck pace for new abilities, more exploration, multiple mini-games, and slightly more challenging bosses. Most of that stylistic shift works well for the majority of Superstars’ roughly 15-hour multi-campaign story – the new Chaos Emerald powers are an excellent addition to the formula, helping you make the most of stages that focus a little less on sprinting blindly to the end the first time through and more on hunting down secrets as you do. But while this slightly different flavor of Sonic can be fun, I couldn’t help but feel like Superstars was missing the main thing I love about the series: Speed.

Sonic Superstars has three main game modes – a campaign with three individual stories that unlock subsequently after finishing the previous one, an eight-player battle mode, and a time attack mode. The story mode has you traveling across 11 Zones all over the new Northstar Islands, showcasing flashy levels that occasionally draw inspiration from other well-known stages in Sonic’s history. For example, the Speed Jungle Zone brings back the use of vines from the original Sonic the Hedgehog’s Jungle Zone, Pinball Carnival puts both a fun and spooky twist on Sonic 3’s Carnival Night Zone, and the Press Factory is a more industrial version of the Press Garden Zone from Sonic Mania. They are all incredibly charming, and while the backdrops sometimes make it difficult to differentiate what's in front of you, they nail the classic aesthetic Sonic fans like myself have come to love.

I don’t think any of the new stages