Is Sonic (or at least Shadow) back?
Sonic Generations was okay, but Sonic X Shadow Generations is excellent. It's the most fun I've had playing a Sonic game since Adventure Battle 2 on the Gamecube. The game picks up all the good parts of the Sonic games released in the ten-plus years since the original without relying on the gimmicks that have let down so many games in the franchise.
The most crucial part of any Sonic game is that the stages feel fun. That should almost go without saying, but a fair share of games broke this rule. Stages can feel like a chore to get through sometimes, too fast-paced to rely on anything but speed and luck to get through on time. That's not the case here.
The levels remain speedy, but the movement is fluid. There's almost always a path to follow that's easy and one that requires some well-timed and precise movements. Unless you're a Sonic veteran – which I am deficiently not – you're unlikely to hit an S rank on your first pass on all the stages. Coupled with the collectables littering the stages, I ended up playing through each stage several times.
I particularly liked the style of the 2D levels in the Shadow levels. Mixing 2D and 3D levels was the main gimmick of the original Sonic generations, but there, the levels felt almost like separate games. Little Sonic ran through 2D levels. Big Sonic ran through 3D ones. There's the same 2D and 3D split in the Shadow levels, but things feel a lot more cohesive. The camera work in the 2D levels means that while Shadow runs along a 2D frame, it doesn't feel like the traditional side scroll of older games.
The hub world is a nice little break between levels. Sonic Frontiers went a little over the top in my mind with the whole open-world setup. Stages were positioned too far from one another and it left the experience feeling empty. Seemingly learning from that experience the hub world here is much more condensed. Ramps and small challengers litter the stage adding plenty of optional extras.
There are a handful of NPCs across the hub world, and thankfully, they're not obtrusive or annoying. The collection quests for machine parts, for example, involve a couple of robot NPCs. They're easy enough to ignore if you're not interested in helping them. All of this extra stuff, the NPCs, the collectables, they're fun additions but keep the main gameplay the focus.
Overall, Sonic X Shadow Generation has clearly learned from the eight different Sonic games that have launched since its original release over a decade ago. Throughout that bunch, there's been interesting ideas and some flops, but this release, and in particular the Shadow levels, seems to have learned from the best parts of what came before. There's still room to grow here, but if this is a sign of the next ten years of Sonic, then I am here for it.
Bring back the damn Chao Garden though, damn.
