Sonic Superstars Review (Caelestis)
Sonic Superstars is, in a word, cheap. Not cheap as in "inexpensive" but rather as in "unearned in difficulty."
I got a physical copy for the Switch about a month ago and was let down almost immediately. Superstars can't quite nail the feel of 16-bit-era Sonic and so feels off, much in the way that 2D Sonic felt wrong in Sonic Generations. The controls are ever so slightly too slippery and everything feels just a bit too slow to be right. Sonic's appeal lies in going really fast and breaking things like he's some kind of Silicon Valley techbro, so inexact controls are a big problem. Impressively, the Steam version worsens this by having distinct pockets of framerate issues.
Easily the worst aspect of Superstars, though, is the boss battles. Like many others, I'm confounded by concept of boss battles that can take a good 3-4 minutes easily. Classic Sonic was built around hard-hitting, fast-reaction boss battles. Superstars's bosses have built-in invincibility frames after every hit, so you're not only discouraged to keep attacking, but rapid succession attacks only guarantee you'll lose your rings for absolutely no gain. The tedium is atrocious and is antithetical to everything about Sonic. Even more egregiously, a death in a boss fight makes you restart the whole thing. This isn't a problem in earlier fights, but when you get to the later bosses that drag out fights for six minutes and you have to restart from the beginning, you're going to want to chew through your controller in fury at how much of your time is being wasted, and when the later bosses start throwing insta-kills at you, you'll want to smash your whole computer.
And that's really the big problem: the game feels like it's mocking you for falling for its tricks. Didn't see that enemy just offscreen? Too bad. Got hit by that trap you literally could not see and were not meant to see until you collided with it? How unfortunate. Fell into a bottomless pit that looked no different from the other times you fell through the floor with no deleterious consequences? That's your fault. Classic Sonic, as with any platformer, encouraged you to memorize levels, but it never punished you quite so aggressively for not knowing exactly what lay ahead. Superstars kicks you in the teeth and gloats about how you don't already know the levels. Ultimately, you're encouraged to go very slowly, and that means you can honestly take upward of ten minutes in a single act. 10 minutes was a hard limit in classic Sonic and you had to try to hit 10 minutes in a classic Sonic game. In Superstars, you easily use up 10 minutes from trying to avoid traps or hitting traps anyway and having to go around them, and then messing around with a time-soaking boss fight.
This game is way too expensive for what it is, too. It's pretty short, its length only dragged out by its utterly obnoxious level design. It's also visually unappealing, looking like something that would have been impressive for, say, 1997, but not for 2023. I'd say this game has the aesthetic of a fan project, but as Sonic Mania proved, fans have a better understanding of Sonic than Sega does.
Bottom line: Sonic Superstars super-stinks.