Sonic Superstars: The First Preview

ign.com:

Sonic Superstars isn’t the first time that Sega has attempted to recapture the magic of playing the original Sonic the Hedgehog more than 30 years ago. Just five years ago, in fact, Sonic Mania stuck that landing. So is there enough creative juice left in that IP tank to truly warrant another stab at rebooting the classic sidescroller? After blazing through four levels with Sonic and his cabal of colorful friends, each with their particular set of skills, signs point to yes — with a caveat. Ultimately, Sonic Superstars is just more Sonic with a facelift and a few new bells and whistles. The game is fun and tricky, great to look at, and speaks to those Sega Genesis memories lodged forever in my brain, but it also doesn’t feel amazingly novel. At least in solo play, that is.

Sonic Superstars shines in local co-op mode.. Up to four people can join, but even just playing with one other person, as I did, had me feeling like a kid on the couch, shouting at the screen with friends. Except this time, we’re not passing the controller back and forth; we’re all in on it together. The mechanics for keeping the team as one unit works surprisingly seamlessly. If one player gets stuck on an obstacle as another powers forward on unstoppable momentum, the player left behind is prompted to catch up with a button press and boom, their character of choice materializes back into the action.

Chaos Emeralds wait in portals at checkpoints, and in co-op mode, players swap turns at slingshotting through a sea of rings to collect the gem in the center before the clock runs out. It takes a second to get a grasp on this minigame, but the new powers from the seven Chaos Emeralds are well worth the effort. In Sonic Superstars, the most prized Chaos