Sonic Superstars (PS5)

After Sonic Mania proved to be a remarkable return to form for the classic side-scrolling Sonic the Hedgehog formula, fans were practically begging Sega to make a sequel. Unfortunately, it seems Sega feared doing so would feel like a rehash, the development team responsible eventually parting ways with the company to pursue new projects. Sega hadn’t given up on the idea of another game in a similar mold though, and while bringing in the developer Arzest was a gamble considering a track record of titles like Hey! Pikmin and Balan Wonderworld, it ultimately proved to be a pretty worthwhile bet, Sonic Superstars not able to reach Mania’s heights but feeling like it can balance the distinct and familiar pretty effectively.

Sonic Superstars doesn’t really come out and tell you much about it’s story, even the animated opening cutscene more about showing that once again the evil inventor Eggman is using innocent animals to power his conquering robots while Sonic and his friends are here to put a stop to it. However, Eggman does seem to have a bit of a shift in his usual direction, this time heading to the Northstar Islands to capture fairly large creatures to power tougher machines while the bounty hunter Fang the Hunter assists. There is a new character in strange armor named Trip assisting Fang in his duties, but her name proves to be a suitable one as her clumsiness often undoes his tricks and traps. A few cutscenes and situations here and there actually work to show off Trip a bit more, there being a little bit of a through-line for her even though the game keeps its plot wordless to the point the final moments can feel a bit out of the blue. However, it’s easy enough to figure out you need to save the animals, stop the mad scientist, and collect the seven powerful Chaos Emeralds to help save the islands, not much more necessary to know to enjoy an adventure that feels old school even with the clean and colorful 3D models on show.

When the action kicks off in Sonic Superstars, you’ll find yourself running at high speeds through large Zones, each one having an act or two as well as the occasional character-specific stage that makes use of their unique abilities. While Sonic the Hedgehog himself is a bit of a template, his only special skill being able to quickly build up speed with a Drop Dash rather than needing to charge up in place, the other three playable characters feel like they have unique helpful skills to handle the game’s platforming stages. Tails can use his namesake like a helicopter to fly about fairly well but not particularly fast, Knuckles can glide through the air and cling to surfaces so he can scale walls, and Amy comes with the incredibly useful double jump that almost feels like it can work to alleviate some difficulty since it is quick, comes with a powerful hammer spin to harm enemies, and isn’t as slow as Tails’s flight. While Sonic can take on every regular level all the same as his allies, you’ll definitely find them far more explorable as one of the others, because Sonic Superstars has some incredibly dense and layered stages despite the emphasis on speeding through them. Multiple paths exist in most every level and branch off often, it not that uncommon for a stage to have you going both right and left to further pack more into the level space.

The dense levels end up quite a treat because of their size and the variety found within. If you die and get sent back to checkpoint or pop back into a level to try and find collectibles, some stages can feel like a very different experience just by taking new routes, and sometimes if you don’t like the look of some challenge ahead, you can even double back and pick a different path to see if you can handle it better. Not every level is so open to exploration and there are funnel points to show off certain elements, but Sonic Superstars manages to achieve an impressive mix of allowing you to race through a level at intense speeds, use that speed or your character abilities to reach new places, and have levels with recognizable obstacles that you don’t just blitz past without addressing. While some of these are unique environmental pieces like the water slides of Lagoon City Zone or the vines that fling you around in Speed Jungle Zone, some don’t demand as much attention despite being unique. The snake body you run across Sand Sanctuary Zone reacts to you landing on it but can be run across if you don’t want to use that to your advantage, but then there are also just simple design challenges like needing to get up a set of ramps while avoiding flaming barrels tossed at you by robot seals. Some of the later levels can perhaps get a little heavy-handed with a gimmick, but the late game also whips out some of the most creative twists that it’s hard not to be delighted or impressed by. Some levels have some memorable and exciting music backing them too, the overall soundtrack not demanding much attention but tunes like the main theme, Pinball Carnival, and especially Sand Sanctuary definitely do their job well.

For the most part, a stage in Sonic Superstars is going to be about using level geometry to build speed while avoiding hazards and smashing robots, your characters utilizing a Ring-based health system where you only perish if you’re hit while carrying none yet the abundant pick up is found often throughout the levels. If you get hit, you drop them all, but you can try and scoop some up if you’re quick and continue on. This thankfully serves as a cushion for some of the moments enemies are a bit aggressive or a gimmick gets a little too rough to handle, but grab 50 rings and hit a checkpoint and you can jump into a bonus game. In this game, you fall through giant mazes trying to earn medals, and while a good deal of work was put into making plenty of unique designs, the medals you grab are actually kind of weak rewards. Medals only work as currency for customizing a robot you use in the multiplayer battle mode. While you can tackle the main adventure cooperatively, the battle mode is a free for all playable online or in person where everyone plays as a strange humanoid robot in what amount to minigames. Some can be about running around a space grabbing rings, firing on each other with rather puny short range electric attacks, or trying to survive in a level falling apart, but they feel oddly low energy and a bit lifeless thanks to the generic designs featured. It certainly feels tacked on and beyond a small touch in the main game it’s almost worth ignoring customizing your robot entirely, but there are thankfully more worthwhile things to find in levels in the adventure beyond the unexciting Medals scattered throughout.

There are no lives in Sonic Superstars and the timer won’t kill you even if it goes red, meaning you can take your time and try and find extra goodies in stages or take risks knowing you won’t lose much progress. While things like a ring magnet or bubble shield can help, what’s more important to find are the seven Chaos Emeralds, these not only needed for unlocking the game’s final story stages but also each comes with a unique power. You do need to play a strange minigame to earn these emeralds, the player thrown into a space filled with orbs in the air that you swing from to try and catch the Emerald, but thankfully even though it goes from easy to a bit aggravating later in the adventure as difficulty amps up, the large rings you jump into in order to play the games can be found in multiple places not only in a level but across the entire Zone’s slate of stages. Once you have an Emerald though, you get a power that will refresh each time you hit a level checkpoint. One allows you to sprout a beanstalk that carries you upwards, another turns you into water so you don’t need to fear drowning and can even scale waterfalls, and while some can feel almost too situational, the game includes moments where it suggests you use them so that ones like the power that reveals hidden platforms aren’t just guesswork. They likely won’t be a huge part of your playthrough still, but with some of them even Sonic can reach out of the way places or you can overcome an obstacle with a bit of clever power use.

Almost every level in Sonic Superstars caps off with a boss battle, and while some might weave them into the running and platforming a bit like an early encounter with Fang the Hunter, others often involve identifying a boss pattern or vulnerability and striking when the time is right. There is a good range of powerful robots to face in these sections that mix up their exact format a good deal, some involving a restricted arena, others let you hit them whenever you overcome their platforming challenges, and some are strange formula shifts that play differently from the rest of the adventure. There are definitely some tough ones and a few that don’t communicate when you’re meant to hit well, but at first, the game’s forgiving lives system means that even the meaner ones won’t be too difficult to overcome eventually. However, as you near the end of the adventure, suddenly Sonic Superstars takes such a shift in difficulty it almost jeopardizes the whole experience.

The final few major bosses you will encounter are an incredibly odd break in form, taking an unusual amount of time to defeat, dragging on as you wait out attack patterns for small windows of opportunity, and you are expected to clear multiple phases without a checkpoint to break up the fight. However, despite this being true of the final foes faced in the main story, they at least work as a tough finale to sign the game off with, but it’s not actually the end yet. Clearing the game unlocks what is essentially a hard mode, the player going through the levels now with additional obstacles and enemies but thankfully with all the emeralds and character abilities at once to make clearing it actually not that hard. This mode definitely benefits from stages having so many routes to travel and the second run is a rather fresh one, but this second story doesn’t feel like it gets through with an unqualified recommendation because it chooses to make its own unique final bosses even more tedious and difficult. The final boss of the second story has instant kill attacks to dodge while taking, by my count, 18 hits to take out, the windows of vulnerability only coming at specific short moments. It is undoubtedly a slog and not even the final boss overall, although thankfully the true final fight is more manageable despite also having its slow moments too. It really is a shame these grueling unexciting gauntlets cap off an otherwise entertaining experience, likely denying some players finality not even for fights that are entertaining in their difficulty. Memorization can at least help to speed them up, but these drawn out fights really do dampen some of the enthusiasm players will have when the experience had been going so well before this unfortunate coda.

THE VERDICT: The Zones of Sonic Superstars provide a wonderful mix of speedy platforming and exploration thanks to their dense designs that allow the player to find routes that feel brand new with what dangers and gimmicks they feature. The multiple characters open up new ways to navigate and the Chaos Emerald powers are useful if underutilized, the main adventure shining thanks to strong level design even if the battle mode feels incredibly uninspired by comparison. A few unfortunate bosses nearly tank the stories with their tedious length, but you’ll get a good deal of enjoyable high octane Sonic action before the ill-advised design approach taken with the finales.

And so, I give Sonic Superstars for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. It’s not often a final boss puts an entire game’s rating in jeopardy, although technically in Sonic Superstars, a few different final bosses exist and none are handled very well. They are such strange outliers in a game that is otherwise rather well handled, forgettable battle mode aside. So many of the levels feel rich with opportunity that makes replaying levels to look for Chaos Emeralds or clear the second story entertaining rather than repetitive, the alternate paths containing meaningful variation rather than simply being a few different paths to the same outcome. Bosses begin as good tests of figuring out the ideas at play whether they be running fights or stationary arena battles, and the multiple characters are great for getting the most out of the level density while also adjusting the difficulty a tad for moments before the final encounters. The final bosses mistake the time spent fighting them with making them seem tough and important, many of the fights still being reasonably long and able to get through their unique elements even if you slashed the amount of hits it takes to beat them in half. Checkpointing really feels off in the fights though, almost all these final bosses having points where one or two could be placed if the game didn’t want to compromise the slow crawl to victory through a fight that loses its luster well before you’ve cleared it. It doesn’t tank the entire adventure to have these weak capstones, admittedly most Sonic the Hedgehog titles have pretty bad final bosses and most don’t have things in place like infinite retries to help you conquer them. Most of your time will be spent with an effective Sonic adventure that really invites curiosity without sacrificing speed, that being the Sonic Superstars experience that is worth playing.

It is likely those bad boss fights will taint Sonic Superstars’s reputation and legacy despite being a fraction of the time you spend with it, and perhaps that’s a lesson the development team needs to learn. They had an enjoyable side-scrolling Sonic adventure in hand, one that wasn’t a retread or hollow imitation of the old formula. It’s a game with neat concepts and solid stage layouts, although it might evoke the old Sonic adventures on Sega Genesis in a rather strange way. Many players no doubt found themselves stumbling at the end and never clearing those games despite enjoying them, Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 not afraid to use mean tricks to hit you with a Game Over and force a full game replay. That doesn’t make the finale featured here acceptable, but it might be the right mindset to approach Sonic Superstars with, because you’ll get a whole lot of good before facing an unfortunate end to the action.