Sonic Generations (2024) ★★★★☆

Sonic Generations was the first real 3D Sonic game that I every actually played. It’s what got me back into the series as an adult. In the years since I have gone back and played or replayed every game represented across the levels featured in it, and it still stands as a triumphant monument to the series and a wonderful love letter to two decades of games. It’s honestly surprisingly how little they touched it for this rerelease, but mostly they didn’t need to; the game still looks fantastic.

I will admit that the cracks have started to show in the gameplay. While Sonic Generations stood as the definitive version of the boost gameplay for a long time, Shadow Generations showed that it’s possible, and desirable, to take off some of the guardrails, give the player a bit more control and a bit more expressive movement and have everything feel more fluid. The 3D levels in Sonic Generations are still a joy to replay, practise and learn to execute perfectly, but the amount the game tries to steer the player and keep them on that perfect path feels very clunky and disjointed. Similarly, in the years since Sonic Generations’ original release, Sonic Mania reminded us what 2D Sonic games are actually meant to feel like and Sonic Superstars, for its flaws, demonstrated that it is possible to bring that feeling in three dimensions, though I think the use of 2.5D level layouts and background layers in Sonic Generations is still unmatched in the series.

The changes from the original release that are there are mostly perfunctory. The control remapping to bring it a bit closer to Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations make going from one Generations game to the other a bit smoother, but they are very half-baked. You can use B to homing attack now, but it’s also still mapped to double pressing A as well and then the drop dash has also been mapped to double pressing and holding A, making it very easy to do by accident.

The drop dash itself is a strange addition. It feels odd and out of place in the 3D levels when the boost is already available and with the way the game swaps physics and acceleration on the fly in different areas make it feel horribly inconsistent and confusing to use. It should have a more natural place with baby Sonic but, but is outclassed by the absurdly overpowered spin dash this game has, which has not been modified at all. The script changes and rerecorded dialogue are hardly a downgrade, but also make such a minor difference that it hardly seems worth the effort. I don’t really care that it was technically a continuity error that Tails didn’t recognise Green Hill Zone in the original script and the fact that the final boss, easily the low point of the whole game, is not changed at all is baffling. Even the awful achievement to beat it without getting hit is still in place.

The chao hunt added to each level is the one really substantial change and it was a nice optional challenge that incentivises some more careful exploration, though less vague hints in some levels would have been nice. The game does have so many little detailed areas and environment details when you stop to look around, even though everything else in the game is telling you to blast forward at maximum speed.

But that chao hunt and the modernisation of the controls (and removal of a separate, buggy, launcher and configuration tool) is definitely not worth breaking a decade of progress the modding community has built around this game. The one real shame about this remake is Sega’s practise of delisting old versions of games, making the version with so many level packs, character swaps and countless other mods for it locked behind buying a large bundle of other Sonic games that most people are not going to be aware of.