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

Speaking as someone who loves S3&K and CD, that tracks up until Press Factory. After that, it becomes inexplicably boring and aggravating. The worst of Sonic Advance 3, distilled.

 

As already said, you can't prove subjective opinions. Good, bad, etc. Although, you can state that it is your opinion and that much is fact, but that's the extent of it. Everyone has different tastes. As I've ranted previously, I love extended boss battles. Some people don't.

What you can do, however, instead of attempting to 'prove' a subjective point is to try and let people know what you like about the game. And keep letting people know. There are too many clickbaity headlines out there about Superstars. Headlines that use words like 'embarrassing' or 'trash' or whatever to describe the game in the headline before an article or video review. Clickbait. Hit pieces. Trolling. Genuine opinions but written like the worst 4chan posts. A lot of these read like the ramblings of twelve-year-olds. Really amateurish shit that exists and is meant to illicit a reaction. The death of journalism. Unfortunately, people read that crap. So, by all means, spread the word of how much you like the game. Or write your own review. Maybe even try to get it published (long shot but sure). Edit: ...which is exactly what I am going to try to do.

 

I’ve found this game to be a bit of a mixed bag. I made the mistake of jumping into it straight from Mario Wonder, and it’s vary apparent Nintendo put a lot more love into their masco… Sonic Superstars just feels a bit lacking in polish and rather drab and unfinished/empty in places. I’ve been playing on Switch and it did feel very retro to experience some Megadrive levels of slow down when screen gets too busy or transitions between levels.

All in all, I’ve had fun so far, it feels like a budget game though and I’m glad I got it for 29.99 on Black Friday, even that seems on the high side, it’s like a £15 game really. Not the worst modern Sonic game i’ve played, but not topping Mania, for me.

 

The main reason I see Superstars getting so much mixed reception is because there's really nothing else on h
the market to compare it to? The closest thing is obviously Super Mario Wonder, in which case it's no question which game had more polish and effort put into it.

But let's assume, for whatever reason, you prefer Sonic over Mario. The only other games you can compare it to are other 2D Sonic games.

Superstars does some things better than its predecessors and some things worse. That's basically the best measure of quality someone can give it.

 

Game is back to being 30% off on Steam (through Dec 11) after reverting to full price for a couple days.

 

I think the game is good. The bosses are a big pacing issue but I think the game otherwise was pretty fun. The camera could stand to be zoomed out more in singleplayer, which would do a lot to keep the game from feeling so claustrophobic and haphazard. I thought it was quite fun in multiplayer.

 

I'm LTTP on this and I'm not sure if this was aimed towards me or towards Fadaway. I agree with your suggestion, but my response was mainly thinking about how the bosses could be reworked without having to significantly alter the core design of them too much (which I could had clarified). That is to say, it's a good approach to make Superstars' bosses more tolerable, but it's a shame it was never realized by the devs early on to try and apply it more liberally throughout the game's design.

I haven't played enough to elaborate, but from what I remember through watching other's playthroughs, there aren't any other levels in the game where there are "boss/enemy encounter Acts" with breather sections like that stage, are there? It really cements my feeling that the developers had a good grasp on things with the early stages of the game, but just lost the plot shortly afterwards.

 

I’m a little out of the loop: in what way is Knuckles nerfed?

 

He's not explicitly nerfed as much as he is innacurate and poorly implemented.

1. He won't climb walls if you're pressing more than one directional input. If you're slightly holding either left or right, he'll stop dead in his tracks. In practice, this makes it seem like he randomly stops mid-climb or that there's a delay between latching on and climbing.
2. If you stand up against a wall and try to double jump to latch on to it, sometimes the game gets confused and he'll jump off immediately on the next frame.
3. He can't bouncy extra high off enemies and item monitors with a well-timed glide.
4. He glides at a constant speed. In previous games, he accelerates as he glides and can end up going really fast.
5. After a glide, there's a HUGE delay before you can control Knuckles again. If you let go of jump mid-glide, you have (almost?) no control over his descent. He falls like a rock and makes tight platforming very stiff. And if you instead let him skid on the ground, he's got a very lengthy skidding animation. In S3K (but not Mania) you could spindash out of a skid.

 

Ouch. Some of those sound like bad bugs. I could see why the fast and high glides might’ve been skipped though.

 

It's especially odd because Tails has been **buffed**, and quite substantially. His flight picks up speed faster, and you can descend quickly by holding down, similar to Sonic Adventure. He's so good it honestly makes playing as him in the older games a little hard to go back to!

 

I do prefer Sonic over Mario. I like the physics Sonic games have and although Mario nowadays has physics I still like Sonic games more. I have always preferred Sonic over Mario since I played Sonic 1 on the Master System.
And that game doesn't have the physics of the Mega Drive Sonic 1 game. When I sold my Master System 2 and bought a Mega Drive 2 my appreciation of Sonic grew even more.
I have been a Sonic fan ever since I bought my Master System 2 with Sonic 1 and I will always be a Sonic fan. No (Mario) game can change that.
The Sonic gameplay is just too unique and no other game has replaced that for me. Sure, Freedom Planet comes close, but I still prefer the Sonic gameplay over that game.

 

It'd be nice if I could scroll through YouTube without seeing a video titled some exaggerated variation of "Superstars is Bad" in my recommendations.

Genuinely odd to me seeing some of the negative opinions on this game because I really dont think there's anything in Superstars that warrants such an extremely negative reaction.

 

After beating the main game and getting about halfway through the post-game content, I think I can safely say that some of the issues I (and others) have with Superstars stem from the same principle: while the classics allowed for people to play at their own pace for the most part, Superstars dictates the pace for you and adamantly insists you follow it.

The bosses are the biggest example of this, of course, since most of them only leave themselves vulnerable at specific times (with lengthy periods of invulnerability after a hit to prevent follow-up attacks). The thing is, I've seen some people say they prefer this over the way the classics tended to treat bosses - that is, frequently leaving themselves open to attack, which in turn can lead to players steamrolling them quickly. While I can see where they're coming from, and as much as I enjoy cheesing boss fights myself, I've come to the conclusion that the ideal might be to have bosses that can be demolished if the player is confident and knows what to do. That has to come from observing and learning patterns, timing, etc.

Mecha Sonic (or whatever they're calling it now) from Sonic 2 is what comes to mind here: you can get four hits in before it even has a chance to attack, but doing that requires you to know when that attack starts up. Even then, cautious players might shy away from doing too many hits in one go, lest they end up touching it while it's doing a spin jump. Of course, the difficulty is higher in that fight because you can't get hit at all, but I think this fundamental philosophy fits in well with the overall design of classic Sonic - you can rush in and try to destroy it as soon as possible, but doing so successfully requires practice and observation. Superstars' bosses tend to be much less accommodating of less stop-and-start play styles, and I think that's why a lot of people frequently single them out as a negative.

Another way this issue pops up is in the inability to get more than one Chaos Emerald per zone. Again, in the classics, it's possible to get all of them and go Super Sonic early on, but that requires skill from the player. (Depending on the game, that can include being able to collect at least 50 rings without getting hit or taking the initiative to explore and find giant Rings within the level. No matter what, though, the special stages are/should be challenges in of themselves.) It's a sort of "earn your fun" situation, and Superstars setting such a rigid pace for getting Emeralds hampers the player's freedom in that regard.

 

I love this!

https://youtube.com/shorts/0f1veTANq78?feature=shared

 

Avatar looks a bit OP, but besides that, I agree. They took the whole 2,5D thing too literal, though.

 

Official Sonic VR game then?

 

It's all about clickbait and money.

 

Yeah, I just saw a video titled "Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon just got ruined!" No one thinks that but of course, people would click on it to see why this person thinks something so ridiculous after update 4 fixed most of the things we were complaining about. It is a strategy used for people who don't post good content but want to bait people for views.

 

No but actually it does kind of suck, specifically the combat. As soon as you hit level 99 the characters who aren't Sonic just one-shot everything, meaning you just go through the motions with the battles instead of actually having to face any difficulty.