Sonic Superstars is so close to being a Sonic classic

28.10.2023 - 13:09 / theverge.com / Sonic

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

With Sonic Superstars, I’m starting to get the feeling I’ve been here before.

In Sonic’s return to the 2D format, there’s a good game here with lots of moments where I was pleased to see the innovation of Sonic Team shining through. These ideas were, unfortunately, buried in slower-than-it-should-be-for-a-Sonic-game moments with technical issues and unintuitive boss fights.

For Superstars, I really, really wanted another Sonic Mania. That game was sublime, and I feel like both Sonic Team and Sonic fans have been chasing that high ever since. I can say Superstars did not deliver as Mania did but also did not frustrate me as badly as Sonic Frontiers did. There were no moments when I wanted to put either my controller or my head through a wall like I did with that damnable pinball sequence in Frontiers or the boss fight that glitched out as I was on the verge of triumph.

The frustrations of Superstars came in smaller bursts that took just a touch too long to surmount. There are platforming sequences in just about every level that required me to go through them again and again, often in peril of death, before I was able to punch through.

Sometimes, I would get bounced around by springy platforms, frustratingly arranged to block forward progression. Other times, the game didn’t adequately communicate what I was meant to do, leading to multiple deaths trying to tease out that information.

During the carnival stage, Sonic rides on rollercoasters to get to the next portion of the level. During one of those sequences, the coaster kept crashing, and I kept dying, only to realize the coaster was moving way too fast for me to see that I’m supposed to jump into little canon launchers to escape certain death.

The frustrations of Superstars came in smaller bursts that took just a touch too long to surmount

Despite my frustrations with some bosses — with one actually causing me to put down my Switch and walk away for the night — I really enjoyed the thought put into their design. Whereas in previous 2D Sonics, bosses were usually structured like, “Hit four or five times for the win,” in Superstars, bosses have phases that change up the flow of the fight. After a couple of hits, Robotnik switches up, forcing me to switch up, too. Sometimes, the new strategy for the next phase is easily intuited; other times, it is very not.

For the sand level boss, I only found out after eight or nine deaths that Sonic could bump one of the badniks it throws at you to damage the boss.

Innovation is very much on display in Superstars, but there could be more. I’m kind of tired of seeing