So I've pretty much beaten the game aside from, well, beating the game. At the very least I've played enough to give my opinion on it. It's a pretty good game, truth be told, but
your mileage will vary depending on how much you wanted it to play as Sonic The Hedgehog 3&K-2 and how burned you feel by 'momentum is earned'.
Sonic has a lot more weight to him than before, meaning that he decelerates much harder and faster than he accelerates. What this does in practice (especially for speed runs) is place much more importance on using the air dash and homing shot to position yourself in the environment. It feels like a real hybrid of 3D and 2D Sonic, with the route and input memorization of the 3D games injected into 2D gameplay. If you aren't holding down a button in one direction, Sonic will basically come to a complete stop 9/10 times. The game could do with a little bit more inertia, but I don't feel like the game necessarily should replicate the physics engine of the 16 bit games down to the very decimal place. After having played those classic games for so long, it is refreshing to get a flash sideways version classic Sonic in Sonic 4 that is very similar but distinctly different.
The level design is probably the best works that Dimps has ever done on a Sonic game (Enemy placement as well... but that's not saying much). The most mentioned is probably the 2-3 instances in the game where they basically throw you at a line of Bubble robots and it's the equivalent of a QTE to react in time or take damage.
The levels have great high-medium-low path segmentation and opportunities to switch between. There is a little bit of 'oh this looks cool but as long as you hold forward in this one quasi scripted part, you will be fine' but for the most part there's a lot of gameplay involved in the levels.
The music isn't actually all that bad as Lost Labyrinth and Mad Gear are quite good but there are more than a few songs that just don't sound right. The composer sure likes to use very similar sounds in a song, that can then become a bit too busy when he ties them all together.
When it comes down to playing it, Sonic feels a little sluggish, but you're suppose to be making use of the air dash ability to compensate for that, so I'd say it's by design. Air Dash is basically a far more gameplay heavy,finicky, and versatile version of the boost button from Sonic Rush. It feels awkward at first but if you stick with it you'll be constantly using the air dash to maximum your trajectories to hit barely reachable platforms and repositioning Sonics jumps to get to that next part just a little bit faster. I like it and it works well with a heavier Sonic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbfqEavISbA
That's the thing about Sonic 4, it isn't the originals, although I'd say it's much more at home as Sonic 4 than as a Sonic Advance/Rush entry based on quality, thematic appropriateness, and level design (Even though level design is a fusion). If you're trying to play Sonic 4 like Sonic and Knuckles it just won't feel right and you'll wonder why the devs made some of the decisions they did, but you're suppose to take a look at the new abilities, like air dash, and try to use them properly. You don't even really notice the uncurling, or the lack of inertia once you get going fast.
Boss wise I really with that Robotnick was invincible when pulling out his second from for each encounter, and it would have been nice if some of his EGG Station boss mechanics were in the original boss levels themselves to increase the challenge.
tl,dr
The special stages are HARD. Fuck em!
7/10
I liked it a lot, but there's a lot of room for improvement.
At its core
this is probably the best Sonic game that Dimps has ever made and
is also possibly the best 2D retail Sonic game (if not 2D Sonic game period) since the classics (although not by a large amount as there are some outstanding fan efforts that people should check out, and I there's a small handful of Sonic fangames that are arguable better).
Sega1991 said:
I'm not saying that different is bad, though. Sonic Rush is not a bad game. The Sonic Rush physics are appropriate for the type of game they were designed for.
The problem rears its head when Sonic 4 tries to be "like the old games" in a physics engine that was not designed to appropriately handle that kind of level design. Hence, you homing attack a spring that takes you across a pit, and instinctively let go of the analog stick because, typically, even in the Sonic Rush games in which Sonic 4's physics engine is based upon, holding a direction after being sprung will usually make you overshoot/undershoot your destination.
Except that in this case, you're supposed to be holding the direction, otherwise you'll never make it far enough. The game makes zero indication that this is what is supposed to be happening, and Sonic stops moving, falls straight down, and dies.
That is bad design. Not just "different" design, but BAD.
The example you is more to do with Sonic 4 having the reverse rule in place. There are some rare instances of level design where they do have you overshoot (but you sometimes have the chance to recover via homing attack) if you hold down and some instances where not holding it down will kill you (even rarer), which is a bitch move.
The general rule of thumb for Sonic 4 is that you do hold down the button. This isn't a problem with designing the levels like the old games. They designed the environments with holding down in mind. If anything it's the title and thematic style of the worlds that are tripping you up to not hold the button down, not the level design or physics engine.
