2.5/5 ★ – Protector_Of_Memes's review of Sonic Colors: Ultimate.

The colours don't feel so right. Soooo, Sonic Colours. It's now 11 years old. The game that alongside Sonic 4 Episode 1 and Free Riders kick-started the Meta Era. It now has a remaster. And holy shit, is it a mess. This review will just be going through the new stuff Colours Ultimate brings to the table, so don't expect a rereview of Colours, though I do find Colours to be better than the last time I played it. The most immediate change one can glance from Ultimate is the change in visuals beyond the increased resolution and framerate, most of it being a big dose of bloom that at times can get excessive, and the lighting isn't always up to par, making some Zones like Tropical Resort look weaker in the transition, which is pretty damning considering that Tropical Resort is the starting level and by extension, rather important for first impressions. Other Zones like Sweet Mountain are A OK with this change in looks, but it's still not the best, and for some reason Sonic's model is often brighter than it should be. Also despite having the raw assets for the cutscenes that could've been remade with the new lighting and framerate, the devs instead chose to AI upscale the compressed cutscenes used for the original, and it's kinda bleugh to look at once you notice it, in addition to them using the old visuals. The game also throws in some new gameplay additions, and overall it's hella mixed. To get the good stuff out of the way, the Perfect Homing Attack is a nice evolution of the mechanic, rewarding you with Boost energy if you time your Homing Attack just right, which can be done with not just enemies, but also springs and pulleys. Whatever problems I had with the accessibility of the Boost in the original have been remedied with this, and I wouldn't mind seeing it come back in a future title. Next up are the addition of Park Tokens, which allow you to purchase cosmetics like different colours and patterns for Sonic's gloves and shoes, alongside different auras and Boost effects. They're dotted about stages, and are awarded to you if you get an A or S Rank at the end of the stage, not just encouraging more exploration in stages, but keeping a tangible benefit for getting high ranks since lives have been removed. Another addition to enhance the exploration for players is the addition of the Jade Ghost Wisp from TSR, allowing you to home in on weird green orbs to phase through walls, but tbh, this is rather lackluster. All it really does is make it a bit more of a pain to collect all the Red Rings, even adding unnecessary backtracking in Starlight Carnival Act 3. And finally, there's the addition of Tails Saves. In certain pits, you can fall down and not die, instead Tails will pick you up, take his sweet time putting you back on solid ground, and reset the assets in the level which can be used to cheese S Ranks if you so chose. Gonna be honest, this wasn't necessary, as you now have infinite lives and a feature like this seems to be meant for kids who barely play games, or game journalists. Believe it or not, there's also the addition of a new mode called Rival Rush, though it's got to be one of the most half baked features I've ever seen in this series. What it amounts to is a time attack against Metal Sonic that you unlock once you collect 15 Red Rings in a Zone, and when you beat him, you get rewards like cosmetics, songs for the sound test, and often 50 Park Token. But upon closer inspection, it seems like it would've had a multiplayer mode with online functionality, as not only is there a normal Rival Rush song in the sound test, but the Park Token shop has profile icons you can buy, which serve no purpose in the Metal Sonic races. Would've been cool as an online mode, but instead it's just an excuse to shove Metal Sonic into the game. Before I get into what really bogs this remaster down, I should bring up that the vast majority of the OST, world map themes and Game Land notwithstanding, got remixes courtesy of the original composers with help from Jun Senoue, and being honest, most of them just don't compare. The original OST was already great, and most of the remixes are either on par at best or straight up weaker by comparison. Some of the instrumentation in the remixes for Tropical Resort and especially Sweet Mountain sound cheap, and the Act 1 remix for Planet Wisp is a little too high energy for what the original was going for, though if you didn't get the deluxe edition or buy the music pack DLC, you don't even need to endure it when playing through the levels. This then leads into an issue with these new additions in general, the fact that the game seems to be allergic to options. Beyond allowing button remapping, you don't get to toggle things on and off that most certainly could've used it to avoid them feeling like they're forced onto the player. No options to disable Tails Save, no option to only have the old or new OSTs, and for some baffling reason, the music and sound effects are on the same volume slider, which is bass ackwards considering that the sound balancing is off, and that's before getting into sounds bouncing between the left and right ears on headphones. And now ladies and gentlemen, it's the moment you've all been waiting for, the segment talking about the buggier side of Colours Ultimate and it ain't pretty. A large bulk of the glitches are on the visual side of things, including such highlights as the shadows of enemies moving at like 1 frame per second, some surfaces being so bright that Sonic's shadow outright disappears, level geometry like walls and a Ferris Wheel in Tropical Resort popping out within the view of the screen, dry land areas having the distorted water effect when you're underwater despite the original avoiding that entirely, smoke effects in Planet Wisp stuttering, which also happens to the background fish in Aquarium Park, and the UI even bugs out on occasion, from the icon for the Wisps vanishing for me in Sweet Mountain Act 5 after using the Pink Wisp near the end, to another bonus being displayed with the colour bonus points instead of colour bonus, and white squares on the Final Colour Blaster gauge for no apparent reason. In addition, there are times where the audio can flat out refuse to play, I've had it happen when activating Colour Powers, on the results screen where either the stage clear theme or the Theme Of Sonic Colours not triggering, and it even happened in the level select for Game Land. It's also possible for this to happen on the title screen or when triggering Super Sonic. Gameplay bugs are far less common, though I have noticed that the Hover doesn't always go through an entire ring trail using the Light Speed Dash without the move stopping without warning in Starlight Carnival Act 6, the Laser being able to be aimed straight up, and the Wisp Capsule at the beginning of Asteroid Coaster Act 1 being literally unobtainable, you always phase through it. To further add salt to the wound, the game also runs the risk of crashing, which did happen when I was about to finish up the Egg Shuttle and get the last trophy, and on top of that, it's also on record that these crashes run the risk of SAVE FILE CORRUPTION. Hope you didn't make too much progress on full completion if it happens, because boy oh boy would that be a massive pain in your ass. The optimisation also needed work, as it takes far longer to load a level than it did in the original (18 to 19 seconds loading up Tropical Resort Act 1 on a vanilla PS4), which is dumb considering the stronger hardware. If you thought this was already pretty damning, shit goes downhill even faster with the Switch version, which already doesn't have much going for it being at the same framerate as the original, but it's also had seizure inducing glitches in abundance for no good reason. The bulk of those have been patched out, though the black hole in Terminal Velocity Act 2 could run the risk of being a health hazard because of this. This is just rock bottom tier quality assurance, and it annoys me quite a bit that SEGA allowed this to be published, and even take content like cosmetics and the Planet Wisp remixes out of the base game so that they could be sold as DLC to milk every last drop of money they could from this game. Some would consider this to be Sonic Adventure DX 2.0, as that was a remaster with changed visuals that weren't as good, alongside being buggier than the game it was trying to remaster. Being blunt, Colours Ultimate is leagues worse than SADX, which at least gave us better character models for the playable cast, the addition of cutscene skipping, and proper incentives to go for full completion in addition to the framerate increase, and it was definitely fine for a time where Dreamcast emulation was in its infancy, and thus wouldn't be able to compete with SADX. By contrast, Colours Ultimate is a remaster of a Wii title, with said remaster somehow managing to not only fail to learn from the issues people had with SADX, but also adding a number of problems on top of that, in a day and age where GameCube and Wii emulation has been refined significantly, and with the options to apply a 60fps hack and HD texture pack. Even if the former has the odd quirk of its own, it's a lot more polished than what we got officially. After Rise Of Lyric, Runners shutting down from lack of profit, the Boom brand dying with only two to three years of life, Forces and TSR, you'd think SEGA would finally learn, but nope, they showed that they can't even remaster one of the more beloved games in the series right. Both SEGA and the higher ups at Blind Squirrel, the company that made this, share equal amounts of blame for how this turned out, and I doubt lessons will be learned because of how profitable Sonic is. The true Colours Ultimate is either the DS version, or the Wii version played on Dolphin with the 60fps hack and HD texture pack, not what we got for the franchise's 30th anniversary, and to me is the saddest part of all.