I just beat the game, and I wanna talk about it. Might have minor spoilers but I'm not like summarizing the game or anything so you'll probably be fine
tl;dr it very good
so, let's get this out of the way first. I loved the game! I'm not one for numbers rating or anything but this game realy did a lot for me and I'd say it's easily the best game in the franchise since Sonic Unleashed, which is one of my all time favourite games. It's not perfect, but it's very good, and this game really feels like Sega were trying again with this, which after the last 10 years of largely half-assedness feels. SO GOOD
the most striking thing to me about this game is how expansive it is. Like this game feels massive, and it takes a long time to beat. My save file clocked in at 19 hours and 8 minutes after the credits. That is absolute bonkers for this franchise. I don't think that's a plus in and of itself, I'm generally a fan of shorter games, but I just find it noteworthy, and the game was interesting enough throughout its whole duration for it to not feel like it's all just filler, it kept me genuinely engaged and motivated throughout. There's a lot to do, though at times I found myself kinda aimlessly wandering around trying to find ways to progress, but it never felt like I was stuck for too long.
The expansiveness of the game is not just in the playtime though, the open world has such a good sense of scale. The landscapes and the structures feel absolutely massive. One part I particularly loved was the section where you had to climb up all of the huge towers that were scattered over the island, and the sense of height as you parcoured yourself up there felt genuinely impactful. But not just height, also large meadows, mountains, cliffs. Everything is so big, and it looks amazing! The game does such a good job building an atmosphere with this and it's just visually very pretty
I'm usually not much into bossfights, when I play Sonic games or any platformers really I typically love playing stages and then get irritated by bossfights. This ocassionally happened here, especially cause there was a pretty big focus on bosses. But I absolutely loved the way the bosses were being staged. The mini bosses (in physical size still fucking massive) felt like a very natural part of the environment and once again really profited from the game's amazing sense of scale. I didn't always enjoy the bossfights, but it always felt impactful and well orchestrated. And for the major bossfights, those are absolutely ridiculously over the top, with a fucking straight up metalcore soundtrack. Absolutely incredible but just so much pure stupid fun
Story, I'm not sure if the narrative is like properly well constructed or anything, I don't know if there are plotholes and if it makes sense, and I don't really care. What is important is it actually makes you feel something. It's a real story with real emotions and real character interactions and it knows what it wants to be. I'm so glad they ditched the barebones lighthearted story style of Colours and Generations, and had enough of a commitment to direction to avoid a tonal mess like in Lost World or Forces, and came out with a narrative that feels very genuine and heartfelt. It's on the darker, more serious side, but it's nowhere as over the top edgy as the games from the mid 2000s were. It feels serious, but it's tonally well balanced, there is a lot of fun to be had and the characters feel like themselves
Mechanically, yeah, pretty solid. The movement mechanics are largely standard Sonic boost formula, but with some tweaks to the button mappings and some of the movesets. Not my favourite, but still very enjoyable if done well, which it is here. All of the changes to the controls from previous games felt very sensible and worked pretty intuitively to me so I was able to adapt pretty quickly. The game is a bit weird with air momentum and jumping, but I was able to work with it pretty well rather quickly. There was some ocassional jank, like getting locked into weird jump angles and getting launched across the map, or skipping 2D triggers on the hubworld, making it very difficult to navigate through 2D platforming section with 3D physics and camera, but nothing major. Camera control took a bit of time to get used to, but felt pretty natural by the end at least. Also I'm a fucking Sonic speedrunner. It's not like I can't deal with a little bit of jank. It's fine. If you were going out of your way to look for flaws to make the game look bad you'd certainly find them, but that is not my goal and the majority of the time everything worked well and the movement feels mostly very natural and satisfying
One thing I'm not sure if I like it are the Cyberspace stages. Don't get me wrong, they're fun, but they're mostly standard Sonic Generations style 3D boost stages, with lots of reused environmental settings (we REALLY didn't need more Green Hill themed stages), and I'm not sure they fit well into the game at all. It does feel a little jarring in this game that is primarily centered around this dark atmospheric open world exploration. Especially since the atmosphere and environments are entirely different than in the rest of the game and since they only make up a very small portion of the playthrough so they do feel a bit like an afterthought and it would probably be better overall if the stages and open world were balanced differently or if they were replaced or tweaked in tone. I'm not really sure how I would like this to be done differently, but I know it does feel a little off. But hey, fun to play nonetheless
The question now that I've beaten the game, what will I do with it? I think I'll keep playing it for now, at least for a little while. I think I wanna try to get it 100%ed, and do at least some basic speedruns of the Cyberspace stages. I'm not sure if this is a game I wanna get fully into as a speedrun, though it is very tempting to get involved with the community and contribute to developing the run from scratch. But I feel like at the moment that is more FOMO and less an actual desire to speedrun the game. However, I am very excited to see what the run is gonna look like, and maybe, who knows, if I keep messing around with it, maybe I'll look more seriously into running it. But no concrete plans as of now. At the very least I'll hold this game in my memories as an amazing and fulfilling casual experience
Good job Sega / Sonic Team. I'm so glad I can say that again, you genuinely did very well on this one. Please more like this, this works