Of course, things become more difficult as your velocity increases, though the Chaos Emerald you get for completing the frantic dash is well worth the effort. Collecting blue spheres increases your speed, while picking up rings increases your available time. The difference here though is that you’re attempting to catch up to a speeding UFO. Like the ones found in Sonic CD, you’re tasked with racing around a 3D track. On the other hand, Special Stages are much more successfully implemented. It isn’t enough to make them unplayable, but there are times when you’ll feel unfairly punished in a minigame that was already incredibly tough to beat. The “Blue Sphere” stages – complete with their checkerboard world – make a return from Sonic the Hedgehog 3, though the timing of making the turns is tricky, thanks to a slight bit of controller delay. Some nice touches – having to play on the background plane for sections of the Metallic Madness Zone for example – are surprisingly well done.Īlongside the standard side-scrolling stages, Bonus and Special Stages take notes from earlier games. The new zones are generally a great success and blend beautifully into the mix, to the point that your brain tricks you to try to remember which of the old games they came from. Not every decision is a winner, I guess, though the disappointment of not being able to use Sonic as payment to play a slot machine to win rings (or spike balls, as was more often the case) is mitigated somewhat by the inclusion of a lottery machine though, so don’t worry.
Bafflingly, the outstanding Casino Night Zone has been left out, but the generally frustrating and disappointing Oil Ocean Zone has been included. Old favorites such as Chemical Plant and Stardust Speedway appear alongside brand new creations such as Mirage Saloon and the fantastic Studiopolis. Twelve zones are on offer, providing two acts apiece, and can be played by either Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, or Sonic and Tails together. It’s a love that bleeds through in every pixel, every new enemy design, every new stage, and every crazy new method of transportation. That’s a blessing, given the clear love that the developers have for the original titles in the franchise. Sega seems to have – by and large – left Christian Whitehead, Headcannon, and PagodaWest Games to their own devices here. For players of a certain age, everything is right with the world that first time you fire up Sonic Mania, but the franchise’s spotty post-Genesis history doesn’t ever allow you to truly relax, as you wait for the hammer to fall and for Sega to have insisted on including something that ruins it all.įortunately, that blow is never struck. It even kicks off with a slightly remixed jaunt through the classic Green Hill Zone – complete with that iconic music – which opened the original game and introduced everyone to the spiny blue speedster. The game looks like it used to, the controls feel like they used to, Sonic moves like he used to, the soundtrack is just as kick-ass as it always was, and the physics and momentum work exactly as you remember. 2010’s Sonic The Hedgehog 4 was the closest they had come, but as the over-nostalgic praise rained down from the media, anybody who had played the original games felt disappointed from the get-go at the shoddy physics and a momentum system that was a million miles away from feeling right.įast forward to 2017, and I’m happy to say that with Sonic Mania – thank heavens – Sega has finally done what everybody wanted them to do, by making a Sonic game that feels like it was made in the early 90s. Given the number of failed attempts and bizarre turns that Sega has taken in an attempt to recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the original chain of Sonic The Hedgehog titles, fans of those early games have all but given up ever getting it right.
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