Sonic Superstars: A New 2D Sonic Game (Fall 2023)

Gotta say it does look better than before. I might even prefer how it looks with the softer colors and lack of DoF.

 

The more I look at this game's design, the more I realize, yeah that's probably the Naoto Ohshima influence alright: rather than being Mania 2, this game feels strongly like it wants to be CD 2 but used Mania as the springboard to accomplish it. The exploratory level design, the fascination with gimmicks that will stop a level cold in its tracks to do the next neat idea it cooked up, the very gimmicky and slow boss fights with surviving until the next opportunity to hit them rather than allowing you to blitz them down? It's all basically one giant CD focus that just happens to actually have speedy bits in there.

 

"Release day" critic aggregate standings:

Opencritic: 76 "Strong", 33 reviews, 67% of critics recommend

Metacritic (PS5): 77 "Generally positive", 35 reviews

 

Y'know, the craziest thing about Sonic Superstars coming out is that there is no more Sonic game news or a game to speculate about.

Just waiting now.

But this waiting feels infinitely better than the same thing after Forces.

 

After playing the first playthrough in co-op...the single player camera feels way too zoomed-in. Anyone else feeling this too or am I just a high-fov PC gaming elitist?

 

I completed the main story. This game is just about everything I could have hoped for. I have had no performance issues during gameplay; excepting the visibly hitching loading screen animations (which could be because I'm playing on a hard drive rather than a solid state drive), it was buttery smooth the whole way through. I am very much satisfied, and yet still I seem to have more to play.

Like others have said though, it seems to take heavily after the Advance series just as much as it does the classics, but it's rarely obnoxious about it. There have been plenty of moments where I used the good ol' classic physics to accomplish a navigation goal, and overall the movement feels great in the hand, which I am very happy about. Tails is insanely OP and I love him to bits - if you get sick of waiting on bosses, you can just cheese some of them with Tails's Swirling Butt Appendages Attack. Also he's friggin' adorable.

There is just one moment I can remember that stands out as unfair: there's a bit during a character encounter where the navigation gimmick doesn't seem to function correctly or otherwise what you're supposed to do is extremely poorly conveyed - I tried so many things, to no avail, so I had to use a well timed classic physics jump to bypass it.

I'm not a fan of the Sonic 4 styled music where it appears, but it's never so horrendously bad that it actively bothers or distracts me, so I can deal.

The forced Epic crap can go die in a pit, though. I was probably never going to try the Battle Mode anyway.

I was complaining to my fiancée about this, but I eventually got used to it. But I do agree - more view would feel so much better. There's bits where you go slightly in the background and have more view space and it feels so great! I wish I could have it that distance away the rest of the time too.

 

Ohshima saw how much Master King's Trial broke us and said "hold my beer". Seriously, the back half of the game is filled with cheap level design and my god someone teach this man what a fucking checkpoint is.

 

I've played both the PC port and the emulated 4K Switch version.

In truth, the switch version does scale pretty well. The visual compromises might look ugly in a low res screencap, but actually look good in motion since the game intentionally goes for a more cartoony aesthetic, which helps the whole thing blend together a lot better.

Even at low res, it works okay since the pixelated look actually does harken back a bit to the 16/32bit era, even if only by accident. Plus, most importantly, the gameplay was pretty much identical on all platforms.

I'd say any version is a safe bet, so long as you know the potential problems of each (probably more risks for Co-Op bugs on switch).

 

Nonsense; you'd have to be deaf to not at least notice the substantial music inconsistency whiplash going from (Potential music spoilers.) this to this, or this to this. Not a "minor and stupid" complaint whatsoever, a cohesive soundtrack has always been a key component of Sonic games since Sonic 1 in 1991, this level of quality difference is jarring and really breaks a consistent audio feel between different gameplay sections. It's like the tracks are from entirely different and unrelated soundtracks working with substantially different budgets / audio directions, in some cases the contrast in quality and sound design is nuts. Criticism of this is fully justified and reasonable.

 

Curiously, I thought they were too short and needed too few hits. Every single boss in the game was over long before I anticipated it to be.

I wonder if I was shipped the wrong build or what, because I see everyone complaining about the bosses being too long and I explicitly remember them taking 4-6 hits at most. Still haven't played Egg Fortress, but I think that's only one boss.

 

I'm gonna have to disagree with this, the Genesis era of all Sonic eras had the least consistency, between Sega of America completely swapping Sonic CD's tailor made soundtrack for one that didnt fit as well, to not really knowing what is the actual Sonic 3 theme and swapping out tracks for certain levels in later releases.

 

Are you using Steam? I had to launch the game from within Steam (not the Desktop shortcut) to get this option:

 

Fair point; but to clarify, what I was getting at is each soundtrack itself being consistent from start to finish. Of course, not perfect mind you yeah, but still leagues above whatever the clusterfuck soundtrack of Sonic Superstars is. I have very little qualms with different games going in substantially different music directions, my major issue with Sonic Superstars is that the audio design is all over the shop within the same game.

This extends beyond music tracks too, sound effect volume balancing is notably better and notably worse in different Zones.

Overall, audio needs lots of fine tuning across the board in Sonic Superstars, both in terms of soundtrack quality itself as well as general volume level balancing.

Additionally, I should perhaps reword some of what I said prior to something like "The Sonic series started out with a cohesive soundtrack per game, Sonic Superstars' soundtrack not being cohesive is annoying and disappointing." In hindsight, I didn't convey the point in my head very clearly when putting them into words.

 

if they take 4 hits, but each hit takes 20 seconds of doing nothing to wait for the boss to allow you to hit it because otherwise it's invincible or unreachable, it's inherently going to feel slow. even if it were only one hit, if to get that one hit you had to wait a whole long cycle of animations, it'd feel slow.

if you particularly want to nitpick this, people's complaints can perhaps better summed not as "the bosses are long" but "the bosses waste my time". Though I'd argue bosses like Sand Sanctuary or Golden Capital do count as long as well.

 

Compared to Mania, Origins/mobile releases or 3 AIR, the characters are arguably the exact same sizes and general positioning as any of the classic games, if not even slightly smaller. It mostly might be the angles of the 2.5D throwing off perspective and making it feel more zoomed in than it really is.

 

That's why the multi-phase ones need checkpoints. You can totally master phase 1, get every hit in perfect... but it still takes 5 minutes. And if you keep dying in phase 2 and having to do that first part over and over and over... it's not a challenge, it's just annoying.

 

I agree 100%, this has been an issue for the Sonic series in particular imo. The multiplayer camera zoom is actually really nice.

 

Xbox series x

 

Ah, yeah. Last night none of the DLC or extra content was working for me on Xbox. I shut down and was hoping it would be fixed by today. What a mess.

 

Ah, yeah. Last night none of the DLC or extra content was working for me on Xbox. I shut down and was hoping it would be fixed by today. What a mess.