"You don't stop, you proceed, this game is what you need!"

Ok, we all know it, Sonic was slowly dying. Sega was creating more and more soulless characters, not realizing what the problem was - Sonic needed to get back to his roots, just having a simpler game, allowing you to get right into the game without wading through pages of dialogue. Everyone on the gamefaqs boards, several reviewers and lots of magazines all thought the same.

After 10 years, Sonic Team finally heeded our call.

This is, without a doubt, the best Sonic game since Sonic 3 on the Megadrive - and this is more than a small achievement

Story: 8/10

Sega has managed to take a decent story, keep most of the unnecessary characters out, make it short enough to keep interest, and yet make it deep enough to keep you going. Its not often ANY game manages to keep away from both of the extremes, but SR does it.

Gameplay: 9

There are two major complaints about the 2d Sonics, both of which have been addressed. The first is the Pain-in-the-ass speed up whenever you got hurt for any reason, which made the player feel bored. Although you still stop if injured, a small tap of the X button makes you shoot off in a giant burst of speed, ready to get back into the action. Of course, the game would be too easy if you could do this all the time, so they put in a gauge at the side of the screen. No power, no boost. However, this can be recharged, and this is where the other problem is straightened out - people believed Sonic Rush was too on-rails, so Sega put in more interaction in the form of tricks while you're in the air. Jump off a spring, and you can bust out tricks to refill your gauge and get points. This may not sound like much, but you wont believe how good it is until you see it.

The difficulty is perfectly scaled, breaking you in gently...apart from the F-Zone boss. He smashes the stage, breathes fire, shoots odd electricity cubes, and breaks the whole stage apart at the end if you don't hit him in time. No longer is it a difficulty curve, more like a DAMN VERTICAL WALL. I actually had to set it to easy to have a hope in hell of beating him.

One more thing that they have done is the Touch interactivity. Remember the Half-pipe areas? Now imagine if you could control them with a stylus, and you wouldn't believe how impeccably it works till you try it. It really is incredible.

Sound: 9/10

Dear god. The music in this is INCREDIBLE. It's fast and crazy like you may expect from a game like this, and never really gets annoying, even if the lyrics (yes, lyrics) make no sense (A popular joke on the Gamefaqs forums is that the final boss music "wrapped in black" is someone complaining about the lack of milk in his coffee :P ). The voice acting, however, feels forced and not very good. You don't hear it that much though, so I wont mark it down too much for that.

Graphics: 9/10

This is another game that has that whole “2-and-a-half-D” graphical style that New Super Mario Bros uses—the characters are fully rendered, but the enemies and background elements are basic 2D sprites. It is extremely functional, good looking, and works perfectly with no graphical glitches. The only reason this isn't getting a 10 is the fact that there is some nasty slowdown on rare occasions, like when you lose all your rings at high speed on the level “dead line” , because it sucks all your rings into a black hoe, and with all the rings getting shrunk around like that, it would be miraculous NOT to have slowdown.

Difficulty: 8/10

The difficulty curve is EXPERTLY scaled, breaking you in gently on the first level, and then piling it on as the levels go by. You really have to start to learn self restraint at times and not fly around the course like a madman — at one point, there's a platform you have to hit a switch to activate. If you're going too fast, you'll fall to either a place with less rings and is generally longer, or fall to your death. However, If you're too slow, the platform will activate but it'll just glide away without you, so you end up having to wait for the switch to be pressable again, which is hilariously infuriating.

There are also ranks to achieve for the competitive player, and these are horrifically hard to get. You generally have to be boosting all the time, doing tricks to keep boosting, and being sure to remember where spikes / enemies / items are. Its utterly insane how fast you can go, and it's one of the few games that actually exhilarates players when played properly.

Overall: 9/10

Overall, this is a very good game to get, even if you aren't much of a Sonic fan. It really shows that Sonic Team doesn't need all the random characters, full dialogue and 3d graphics to make an incredible game. Sure, it may not be Sonic 2 or 3, but this is an epic game well worth the money to get.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/13/07