Got to be honest, every single piece of pre-release footage made me think this game was going to suck total ass and get like sub-50 on Metacritic (for whatever that is worth) and upon playing the game it seems I was half right.
The Cyberspace levels are sub-Forces(?!) quality. Sonic has no momentum— he stops immediately when you let go of boost, you don't have to manneuver him at all except in the sense that you have to override your memory of playing good Sonic games where part of the fun was having to work with the physics. The homing attack is the hardest momentum-kill it's ever been and is slow as fuck... remember in Generations when you would retain momentum at least a little bit and Sonic would do a cool move in the air? Now it takes five years for the impact animation to stop playing and Sonic returns to zero momentum for it. Good work Sonic Team. While I'm at it all the animations are peak jank. Everything in this game is mad jank. It's not quite on the level of Sonic Boom but this game feels a million times worse to play than Sonic 06. Modern Sonic Team games have tended to at least have some flair to them, even Forces, but this game has that Unity asset store feel to it like it's a fan game or something, especially in the open world.
The combat is as it seemed in the pre-release footage... there are enemies that are sort of designed to have weak points, but they're completely braindead and barely amount to more than button-mashing, at least so far. The move where you draw a circle around a group of enemies seems like the sort of concept a game designer would come up with in desperation, like when they really need to add more to the game but they don't have any good ideas. Never mind whether it adds anything to the game or is fun to execute or anything. Also the big bosses so far are awful.
The concept art meme posted a couple posts up is how the game looks. We knew that already but it needs to be repeated because it really beggars belief that this is what they went with.
But y'know, this is an open world game and you get to collect generic collectibles (and they really couldn't be any more generic, half the art in this game feels like placeholder shit) so naturally game reviewers will rate it more than it deserves and desperate Sonic fans will claim to have broken the cycle with what is probably the worst mainline Sonic game since Shadow the Hedgehog