Just finished Sonic Superstar.
All in all, a huge "meh".
I was happy to see what SEGA should have done ages ago, meaning the classic Sonic gameplay in a 3D world.
I played on the Switch and man, graphics are fucking garbage, all textures are washed up and the worlds feel empty and lacking any kind of detail.
People are justifying this shit with the excuse that the Switch is not as powerful as the PS5 or Xbox series X but you don't need that much power to make a good looking 2.5 cartoony game.
Kirby Star Allies looked very good and it was an early Switch title, so no reason for this one to look as shit as it does, that is just the developers being shit at optimizing, lazy, and nothing else.
Gameplay is decent, physics are very similar to MegaDrive Sonic games and Mania.
The bonus stages are way too fucking much, one on every stage like in the MegaDrive games was enough, but here you can play sometimes 3 in the same level and that breaks the game flow too much, and it's not like they are any fun to play.
Speaking of breaking the game flow, the new power-ups were totally unnecessary and require you to select them with the right stick first before pressing the button to activate them and once again, this breaks the pacing of the game way too much.
The level theming is really uninspired, while they are supposedly all "new" zones, they are nothing we haven't already saw thousands of times in Sonic games, with only the 3D pixel world being actually original, that was pretty cool.
There's a stage with a timer that you need to constantly reset to zero by pressing some buttons that you can sparsely find in the level, if that wasn't lame enough, you can't even play at your own speed because the level is full of timed platforms and obstacles, so lots of times that timer goes to zero and you die simply because you were waiting for that fucking timed obstacle to activate and clear your path, fucking infuriating.
That level is so shit that make you want to just run to the end without collecting anything, but to make things worse, the layout is so fucked that you often don't know where the fuck you are supposed to go.
The animated cutscenes are actually very good.
The final boss battle is way too tedious, it goes on and on and on...
It's not even a matter of difficulty, it's goes on forever and takes way too many hits to go through its various phases.
There's a new character to unlock that is uninspired garbage, looks like some shit that Chris-chan would come up with, she's the classic "let's take the Sonic design template, now change the color, the clothes, add some spikes and boom, new character!"
At this point they should stop making "new" character if they all look the fucking same.
When it was announced i wanted to be optimistic about it, but modern SEGA is fucking garbage, every shit they develop is subpar garbage, you can't even expect them to put some serious effort in their biggest series.
They really should have let the Sonic Mania team develop this one, it's not the worst in the series but painfully mediocre, too bad because the potential was there, but SEGA can't do nothing that isn't half-assed.