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

Complete change of subject here, but holy hell does Knuckles fixed gliding speed in this game suuuuuuuuck. Boosters will make him skid faster, but they don't have any effect if he's in mid-air. Not that I'm looking for the boosters on the ground to actually make him go faster, but it's just the fact that nothing changes his glide diet that winds me up.


Combined with his lengthy recovery animation and total lack of control upon glide-cancelling, he really isn't fun to play as. Such minor changes but they have a huge impact.

I'm so irrationally butt-hurt over the fact that my boi finally came back to the playable scene in all-new games twice in 2023 but he got butchered on both occasions. Discounting Mania, the last time he was playable in a platformer was 06 which also butchered him (and he was relegated to only 3 small sections).

Justice for Knuckles! I hope his TV is good.

A big part of the problem here is that Superstars isn't an online game. Or rather, the online functionality is limited to a shitty battle mode that literally nobody wants to play. With better online functionality, people might be inclined to play to unlock and show off skins. I'm sure that there must be some sort of competitive co-op far would work a treat for Sonic that was actually designed multiplayer. Superstars is a regular Sonic game with co-op tacked on in a way hardly any better than in Sonic 2. A co-op playthrough can even be interrupted by forced single player levels, and the unlockable hard mode story is single player too... It's almost as though the game that's been made and the game that SEGA want to sell are two different beasts.

Superstars even has a custom character designer, but it's absolutely rubbish and it's limited to that side mode nobody likes. Just so many obvious problems with the entire model of this game as a product.

 

That's the big miss right there. You have Superstars in the title. You could have easily supported this game post launch by introducing new playable characters from the franchise history via DLC. A Vector, an Espio, a Bean. Given SEGA's track record, they didn't even have to be good, they just have to exists. This game is just a whole sloppy mishandled mess.

 

Man I wish the solution wasn't "Turn the free multiplayer mode of a game into half a live service"

 

Now that I think about it, it really is a fuckin supernatural coincidence that 3 things released pretty close together (Final Horizon, Superstars, and Dream Team) all messed up Knuckles in some way shape or form. How does that even happen? At least Frontiers got a patch to fix Knuckles, but I'm starting to lose hope that Superstars will ever get major gameplay patches...

 

I'm only making a somewhat quick reply to the Sonic Retro Message Boards, if I were on this project from day 1 I suspect I could come up with a better model. And I'm sure someone on the dev team likely did come up with one. =/

 

I frankly completely agree with this, hate to say it lmao. It would've justified the whole medals mechanic and incentivized replay value, and for those who aren't interested can pay. Idk, seems fine to me!

 

I'm not a big fan of Superstars but they never advertised it as a Mania 2. They let us know from the beginning the Sonic CD director was involved which allowed me to temper my expectations quality wise, and I was proven right, in the end. I never got the feeling that it was supposed to be a Mania successor.

Also IHOP name is literally in the advertising for this event. And internally they're so tied to each other that SEGA called the costume "IHOP Amy" if that doesn't show that there was a special deal in place just for them, I dont know what will.

Unless you think IHOP did a series of special Sonic meal combos with the chance at an exclusive skin and a chance to get the 3 most recent Sonic games using their rewards program for something they very much know other companies will get their hands at? Maybe it will be released in other means outside the US but in the US? Even as someone who isn't in business I know that's very unlikely.

 

If anything, exactly how much Superstars isn't Mania 2 was a big talking point pre-release, since a bunch of people speculated that SEGA mistreating Whitehead and Thomley was the reason this game exists and Mania 2 doesn't, which just isn't true (both in that this game emerged organically from Iizuka and Ohshima, and that Taxman and Stealth denied allegations of mistreatment).

 

Playing Superstars makes me want better hubworlds in Sonic games if they're going to keep putting them in these games. Both Superstars and Generations have the most half-assed hubs ever, even if the one from Gens felt like a breath of fresh air after dogshit overlarge and hyperrealistic ones lmao.

It'd be cool if SEGA became more comfortable expanding the world in 2D games. Having some NPCs to interact with and light exploration wouldn't be the end of the world so long as you can quickly navigate to the next stage without it.

 

Superstars "hub" is needlessly annoying to navigate, which is an impressive feat considering it's just a straight path from left to right. The inclusion of automated platforming gimmicks that you can't jump over just makes it a bit of a ballache. I tend to just enter whichever portal I'm closest to and scroll between stages with the L/R buttons. A simple map of North Star Island, not dissimilar to S4, would have done the job nicely instead of the "basically just a menu" hub we actually got in Superstars.

Hubs are fun and I like them, as long as there's also a quick navigation method. Superstars hub feels like it was intended for more, because it's the stage for the secret final boss fight and has the Dark Dragon's egg. Almost everything plot-related in Superstars seems to have hmm cut from the final game. That, or it was just really badly planned.

 

ngl, this sounds exactly like the Generations hub world

 

It just seems like poor planning to me. I feel like they're really gunning for "classic" Sonic to have like no story, so they were happy to make a bland, abstract hub.

The difference between the two of them is that it takes fucking forever to get from one stage to the next for no reason. In Generations you could simply right from one stage to the next.

 

I yearn for Sonic World 2

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I was waiting for someone to say this.

The Generations hub is almost equally as naff, let's be real. But at least travelling from zone to zone is a fluid and straightforward event. All that separates Green Hill from Planet Wisp is a long a straight path that you can just run across, and even boost/spin dash through to go faster (meanwhile Superstars brings you to a standstill regularly and even has multiple fades to black). Gens does start to get worse once you decide to go after the additional missions and rival fights though. But as those are parts of the games that I rarely replay, they're not something that gets in the way for me so often.

In both cases though, yeah. The hubs are more of a nuisance than anything to be enjoyed.

 

They already made it, it's called + - Sonic Adventure  

 

Hubs are something that needs to keep a fine balance in Sonic games, they need to be engaging enough to not be a bore, but they also can't be too in depth or else you risk the player getting irritated when they just want to get to the stages.

Superstars' hub is just as good as that of Generations in theory, but it's spoiled by the weird transitions between areas blocking your way. It makes it way slower than it should be and defeats the appeal of the Gens style hub in the first place because of that.

 

The Amy skin got me interested in another full playthrough and I think the game is solid. It's not Mania level but it's also nowhere near close to the worse of the franchise.

That price tag though. For what you got I just don't think it was worth $60. The price you pay for something subconsciously has an effect on how you feel about it and I think if this game had been $40 from the start a lot of people's criticisms towards the game wouldn't have been as vocal because "it's only $40".

I think it's enjoyable game and doesn't "taint" the Classic Sonic brand anymore than any of the dozens handheld and console spin offs featuring him of varying quality.

Just wish they handled the rollout better.

 

You guys travel through the hub on-foot? I usually just hit up on the level I'm already standing in front of to bring up the menu, then hit left or right or the bumpers to jump to whichever stage I want to play next. In Superstars (but not Generations), you can even do this with levels you've unlocked but haven't played yet, so you never have to go through the hub.

But even if you did, I dunno, I feel like it's extremely straightforward. I get not liking something like Sonic Advance 3's hub, where levels are scattered all over the place and there's no way to quick jump, but having to take an updraft to Sky Temple, or a tunnel to Cyber Station isn't really too debilitating.

Maybe! But I don't think it would've made that much of a difference. Forces launched at $40, and I almost never saw anyone use that as an excuse. Hell, Sonic 4 was a $10 download-only game, and that sure didn't stop anyone!

I definitely feel like I got my money's worth for $60, but I know better than to think I'm a representative sample. I love old-school Sonic game design and old-school challenge, so even Trip's Story was a highlight, not a detriment. My biggest complaint with Superstars is that a handful of the bosses take too long, can't be cheesed with the emerald powers, and aren't tough enough to remain engaging in spite of it. Speed Jungle 2, Sand Sanctuary, Press Factory 1, and Golden Capital 2 might be a bit of a chore, but they're just four bosses to the many others I do enjoy.

Although, if they were going to take this approach where you can't just wail on bosses all the time, they probably would've been better-served to not adapt Sonic 3's "one boss per act" format, and return instead to "on boss per zone." Even in Mania, I remember feeling a touch fatigued by how often boss fights happened and how long some of them took.

 

The hub is a lot like the bosses. It's not that any one part in particular is that unpleasant, it's the jerkiness and feeling of "why am I waiting for this" between actions that makes it feel annoying.

 

As I said, the menu exists and I use it. But it's still something of a nuisance, even if only an incredibly minor issue taken on its own. The hub level existing in the manner that it does is just one of the many, many things in Superstars that all add up a annoying breaks in the flow of the game. As Shaddy says, there's a regular feeling of "why is this taking so long?".

There are several ways that in which the game provides an unoptimised and sluggish user experience. Like the way that the hub works, they're all pretty minor on their own but they do add up when put together. Other examples include:

• Playing the game in short bursts feels a bit laborious because you go through several layers of menus before you even get to play a single level. Not uncommon in a lot of games nowadays tbh but Superstars has to load for a few seconds quite often.
• Title cards appear late every time a level loads in; the music starts and the level is fully visible, then the title cards awkwardly and suddenly covers the entire screen, then the title card appears over the side of the screen as you would expect and the gameplay begins. Effectively this means that every time you load into a level, you get a false start. I noticed this in the early gameplay footage and just assumed it was incomplete/a bug because it's so damn janky.
• Lengthy bonus stages accessible at every checkpoint, each with a full results screen that can barely be sped up. The rotating mazes are actually fun in Superstars so I want to play them (unlike in S1 and S4). But coming in the middle of levels to take you out of the action for a full minute or two and then giving you a slow results screen just feels like too much. Blue Sphere in Mania had the same issue, moreso than in 3K. And as with that, the bonus stages don't do anything immediate for the player. All you get is tokens for the battle mode I'll never use.
• Same as above but regarding the Special Stages instead. Too much flare for a regularly gameplay interruption, but also something I don't want to cut out because they're fun.
• Those warp portals that randomly appear and throw you into brief skydiving mini games. Fortunately they're nice and brief, but they still take a bit too long (particularly in Switch) and feel disjointed.
• The boss fights. Good fucking LORD the boss fights.
• No matter what, picking an Act Fruit will always see you getting chucked out to the hub afterwards.
• Changing characters between levels is a slow process. You have to exit to the hub and sit through a fade-to-black to change characters. Look at how Mario 3D World did character changing between levels to see how it could be so much more efficient.

There's a lot of unnecessary "fat" in Superstars that muddies the entire experience. Some of it is in the gameplay, and some of it is more in the presentation/UX. It becomes more obvious the more you play the game, and the more you want to engage with it. Every time it gets going, you get forced to spend just a little too long waiting.