4/5 ★ – MatthewB_03's review of Sonic Generations.

It's sad that in the last decade, we only got 3 great Sonic games - Colours DS, Mania and Generations. But at the same time, that makes me appreciate those 3 games so much more and whilst we're all waiting for Sega to reveal the next game (which let's face it, will probably be Mania 2 or some shit), I go ahead and replay those to find out what made them great. I replayed Mania a few months ago and it's just as great as before, and the same applies here Generations is a notable step forward from both Unleashed and Colours. It runs at a consistent 40fps opposed to Unleashed's 15 and Colours' 30, it looks gorgeous and its controls are tighter. The levels reward you for thinking outside the box. You wanna jump off the path and boost across the water? Nice, you found a cannon that skips a segment of the level. You wanna trust that ramp that appears to just send you into the wall and trick off of it to get extra height? Nice, you found a collectable on a rail you can grind on and also shaved a few seconds off your time. You wanna hop over the spring, almost fall to your death but then air-boost at a perfect time to smash through some glass? You found a red ring and saved a LOT of time. There's always neat shortcuts that are satisfying to find and pull off, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's more for me to find despite this game being almost 9 years old. The best thing about the levels is seeing these stages be remixed in both layout and sound to fit an entirely different gameplay style yet still keeping the original vibe of the stage The story is lackluster but who expects Sonic to be full of expert writing? The plot works and that's all it needs to do. Sure, the ending could've been a bit longer, there could've been a few more cutscenes, there could've been more Sonics but the final product is what we have, and thankfully it's not horrendous The game is like 3 hours long, and sure that's not impressive, but there's a ton of stuff to collect. There's 45 challenges with both Classic Sonic and Modern Sonic, so that's 90 in total. Some of them are really fun, some of them are infuriating, but none were bad, and that's surprising because there's so many of them. In each level, there are 5 Red Rings to collect and unlike Unleashed, these are purely optional. You'll get rewarded with concept art and music from all games across the series, and for fans of the franchise this is a great reward. And if you collect all 5 Rings in a level then you get rewarded with a new Skill to equip. And once you've collected all them, you can try S-Rank all the stages (which isn't too hard for me because my childhood was playing this game all the time) I could talk about this game for so long. It's the best Sonic game without a doubt. It's just so fun to blast through, plus on PC there's so many mods and some of them are great. I'm hoping Sega will reveal something great for Sonic's 30th Anniversary next year but my hopes aren't high at all 8/10