izigame.me

NOTE: Do not buy this game at full price, it is not worth it, wait for sale (you can thank me later). If you want to experience this game and get most most of your money, cop the game when it is at least 50% off.
Review:
Sonic Superstars is basically a dollar store version of Sonic Mania. It wants to replicate what Mania did in 2017 so bad, but it attempts to do so without the same team that worked on Mania and because of that, the team struggles to understand what made Mania good in the first place. The game lacks all of the charm, passion, fan-fare, and stellar game & level design that Sonic Mania excelled in.
Superstars ditches the beautiful pixel art style from Sonic Mania and instead goes for a boring 3D Generations styled look for its character models and level assets in a 2D game. The result is an uncanny look for Classic Sonic that just doesn't work when trying to scratch that Classic Sonic feel and itch. Why Sonic Team/SEGA decided that this was a better art direction than what Mania did will forever puzzle me. What was wrong with Mania's pixel art style? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The level design is questionable, the boss fights drag on for far too long (especially the final fights), boss fights ruin the pacing of the main levels (the bosses should have been separate levels similar to Sonic 4), Emerald Powers and Co-Op Play feel like an afterthought and are poorly implemented into the game's design. The game physics feel slightly feel off compared to Mania, and the playable characters control sub-optionally for speed running/time attacking. The animated cut-scenes are a noticeable downgrade from the Mania and Origins.
Similar to every modern SEGA Steam release, Sonic Superstars has Denuvo DRM built-in, so don't buy if you computer barely meets the minimum requirements or is a potato. You will need a constant internet connection to play this game without being blocked from playing after a certain amount of time without being online, so playing on Steam Deck Offline is pretty much a no go, unless you have hot-spot capabilities on your phone. The multiplayer Battle Mode was dead on arrival and still is to my knowledge. There is no incentive to explore/optimize time attacks on the levels due to them feeling very lifeless and generic and the collectibles only earn you cosmetics for the aforementioned dead multiplayer.
The game is constantly held back by the fact that it is trying way too hard to be a traditional Classic Sonic game, because of this, the game fails to innovate on the Classic 2D Sonic formula. 2D Sonic has never been this lifeless and boring, go play any other highly regarded 2D Sonic game and you'll have a much better time. If your curious about how much this game fumbles the bag or just want a Sonic game to play to pass the time, pick the game up while on sale, but otherwise this game is pretty uninspired, forgettable, skip-able, and generally not worth experiencing. This is coming from a pretty hardcore Sonic fan too.