Sonic 3 added gigantic levels with labyrinthine paths so numerous I could spend a half hour or more in just the first two levels alone. I could beat Sonic 2 in less than an hour by the time I had saved up enough money to buy Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, equally satisfying games. As a youth it was thrilling far beyond the Mario games I had trudged through on my best friend’s NES and SNES. Sonic 2 allowed for alternate routes, exploration, and a wild secret hiding behind the special stages. It was an instantly gratifying experience as it combined speed, momentum, and timing with the occasional need for careful memorization. But caring about the story in a Sonic game is where we part ways from the really hardcore fans, even if it’s not hard to enjoy things like the deliciously ‘90s animated intro.The first video game system that I owned was a Sega Genesis and the first video game I ever picked out for it at eight years old was Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The game does have a proper story, appropriately set after the events Sonic & Knuckles (the last great Sonic game of the 2D era). The Sonic games have never been particularly hard though, at least in terms of just getting to the end of each act, so that shouldn’t be a problem even for new players.Īs you can imagine, the game is filled with fan service, most of which will go completely unnoticed by ordinary players. Sonic Mania clearly doesn’t feel constrained by the Mega Drive titles, but it does nothing to try and modernise the game’s approach to things like lives or the occasional instant or unforeseeable death. The boss battles are also uniformly excellent, and again often more interesting than those in the original games. Meanwhile, the remakes are often noticeably better than the originals with, for example, the Chemical Plant Zone adding additional variety through special pads that can stick you to the ceiling or pools of goop that can bounce you to different heights depending on how you mix them when you jump on a plunger. We’re not sure why the game ended up being a mix of remastered stages and brand-new ones, or why this director’s cut adds new characters instead of new levels, but at least we can now say there’s been two top quality Sonic The Hedgehog releases this millennium, instead of just one.īut Sonic Mania understands this paradox perfectly, and new areas like the Wild West-themed Mirage Saloon Zone and TV-filled Studiopolis are almost indistinguishable in quality and imagination to the best of the Mega Drive games. The end result feels like some sort of school project gone wild, something enthusiastic kids have made while the teacher was away and which far surpasses anything they were actually supposed to be doing. And Sonic Mania is essentially a combination of those two obsessions. He and others (including Tee Lopes remixing the music) have been making ports of the original games, and creating their own fan titles, for years. The secret behind Sonic Mania’s success is that it had nothing to do with them and was instead developed by a group of fans led by Christian ‘Taxman’ Whitehead.

If you are a Sega fan you’ll know that between Sonic Mania’s release and now we had the predictably awful Sonic Forces, by the reliably unreliable Sonic Team.

Sonic mania reviews