Sonic the Hedgehog Review

The scope is not the problem. Three campaigns, a hub city with people to talk to, and Sonic's speed rebuilt for new hardware is a defensible plan for a fifteenth anniversary, and Kingdom Valley and Tomoya Ohtani's music show what this team could still do given time. The date is the problem. What ships loads constantly, sometimes twenty seconds at a stretch, between accepting a task, hearing the task explained, starting it, failing it and trying again, which turns the fastest character in games into a queue.

Sonic's momentum fights the collision, so speed puts you through floors and off ledges you were nowhere near. The camera trails every turn by half a second. Silver's telekinesis and Shadow's vehicle stages pad the running time with mechanics nobody had time to tune. Townspeople go unlabeled, transitions are missing, effects are absent where the cutscenes plainly expect them.

Then the plot builds itself around a human princess and closes on a scene between her and Sonic that the series spent the next decade stepping around, before erasing the whole story from its own timeline. All of it reads as a build three months from ready. Sega shipped for the birthday, and the series carried the damage for years afterward.