Sonic Superstars Review (Dima064)
Completed as of writing this review: 100%
I can say a lot of things about this game or say nothing at all but one thing is certain:
It's not worth the full price!
Now with that out of the way, let's set this aside and let's say we all bought this game for cheaper. Then I can confidently say that this game is pretty good! This is a good enough spiritual successor to the original quadrilogy. The physics are accurate, each zone has it's own style, gimmick and in most cases good music! The art-style and the new or returning characters are charming in their own way. New abilities are also nice to use and can be quite helpful. The difficulty is not that hard and not too easy either. Amy as a playable character is also fun to play as. By the way, there are occasional moments where there is a unique act for each character and to me that's pretty cool. Also the throwback to Fantasy Zone was a nice touch. A pretty solid experience for a fan of 2D games all around!
That was all I could say that was good about this game. Unfortunately the flaws are here and hard to ignore, so let's begin!
Where to start... If you try to play this game once and forget about it after, you will have good impressions of it. It doesn't really overstay it's welcome, as it's easy to ignore the problems I want to address. But, because I was playing this game several times and 100%'d it, it was not so easy to ignore it's flaws. The stages list is really good but there will be times when there is only one act per zone and those acts can drag for a long time. Not only that but some zones have long acts as well. And it doesn't help that bosses can also get tiring, as the timings of when to hit them are very far apart. You will definitely get bored attacking them, they can drag for 3 minutes maximum. Some of them also have instances where you will die instantly, so they will get annoying quickly.
While playing, you can get an occasional bug or two in your playthrough. Either the music will stop until you do something to make it play again, or the physics may get confused and you will die after that. It can also happen due to this PC port's problem with stuttering. That's most likely the issue with the engine but it was still annoying to have those cases when you die only because the game stuttered once and your character has teleported to their doom. Worth a mention, the PC port is optimized fine but also has problems where the game will softlock in the character select screen and it also has very poor anti-aliasing (as if none at all).
Now the multiplayer - it sucks. I don't have any idea how could've they mess up this badly. If your friend goes off-screen for a centimeter or two, they will despawn. This makes multiplayer not fun at all if one of you prefers going fast, since you know, you're playing a Sonic game... There is also a problem where the game can get confused on who is the first player - controller or a keyboard. Battle Mode is lackluster, only worth a try and then you can forget about it.
The 100% is pretty tedious and infuriating at times. The achievements are pretty old-fashioned in a way that there are unnecessary ones for attacking the enemies "this" number of times. The golden-badniks were a chore to look for, especially in Press Factory Act 1, as this is a labyrinth stage. By the way, this stage is by far the worst. The Trip's story is not that different, so I think it's completely unnecessary to require her before the secret final boss . The final bosses are also an another can of worms. They are too annoying, drag for too long without checkpoints and generally are not fun to beat. Trip's final boss especially is atrocious with it's insta-kill moments, which there are A LOT of. Same can be said about the boss after all this. It didn't even feel rewarding to complete those. It's also confusing on where those things come in the story, as the game struggles to connect the dots.
Now, is this the true Sonic 4? Absolutely not. To me, since this game was developed by a Japanese studio, they were only familiar with a cutesy interpretation of Sonic as a character. I don't mind this game feeling safe and cute but I also prefer Mania more because of this fact. Mania has been able to remind us of why we like to play Sonic so much. Superstars feels more like Sonic 1.5. I would even go as far as to say this game is one of the generic ones in the series. It also looks like a 7th generation game to be honest. Like you can clearly see there is not much interesting to look at in the background for example. Reminds me a lot of Sonic 4 Episode 2. The new abilities are fine but they made the shields practically useless. And the music is very hit-and-miss. We all know why, but let's just say that having MegaDrive's synth is not that creative. Those synths were in the classics because there was no other choice, not because they wanted it this way. And some composers struggled to understand that. And on the side note, the Time-Attack is fine.
I know this review looks like I'm yapping too much but I treat it as such, because the publisher is out of touch in understanding why this game has mixed reception. Being just a Classic Sonic game is not enough if we're talking about the price. But if you're getting it on sale, it's good, but not worth it if you're not a fan of 2D Sonic in the first place. I think I made myself clear why that is...