A Black Falcon
Member
No, it's not bad. Average, yes, which is pretty "bad" for a Genesis Sonic game, but it's not a bad game compared to other games, beyond the greats like Sonic, Mario, and such.
Certainly true, the absence of obstacles and enemies is one of the biggest problems with the game.
Replaying levels you've already played? No, you don't do that. Once you beat a stage you don't play it again. It is true that you play the levels in the five worlds in a random order, and that's another one of the games' biggest problems, but you shouldn't play levels again. What you will do is go back and forth between the five worlds, playing the next level in the randomly-selected world you're going to based on what you've beaten already in that world. The problem with the randomizer is the even difficulty between all the worlds, not what you're talking about here. Only the levels withing each world get harder, more so than each different world -- which means five levels about even, and five tiers of "difficulty".
It does make things slower than traditional Sonic, but it's an interesting idea which I think they implemented decently. They could have done better, but also could have done worse.
Yeah, the level designs are the games' biggest problem. I think it comes from the random-order issue -- because you play the worlds all at the same, they decided to have all of them be about equal in difficulty, which means that there's much less of a difficulty curve than you would have in most games. Making this worse, of course, are the incredibly boring and repetitive level designs that are mostly just empty. This was perhaps done to reduce the number or places where you could get frustrated from throwing yourself into obstacles because of the two-characters-connected-by-a-spring mechanic; by having few pits, spikes or other obstacles, and enemies, you can just fling yourself around most of the time without worrying about some random bounce killing you. That's nice in theory, but the problem is that it results in really boring stages to play.
Still though, I do like the concept, and the game looks good and plays well. Overall though, I have said before that I wish that they had made an entire game of just the bonus stages -- that'd have been awesome! Or at minimum ditch the random-order thing and bring back progression from stage to stage. Also make the levels shorter and less boring. Add more obstacles too; yes, it could cause frustration, but that'd be less bad than the degree of tedium in the game as it is. But the basic concept was worth trying. Sure, it's not as good as traditional Sonic, but sort of like with Ristar, Sega wanted to try something similar but different, a bit slower-paced but with connections to Sonic. Ristar ended up better than Chaotix for sure, but Chaotix isn't awful, just somewhat boring.
