sonic colors - 6/10
i'm going to the one place uncorrupted by other playable characters... SPACE!
honestly? replaying this game (via project rerainbow for ultimate, but this review does not cover that), it's a bit better than i remembered. a lot more levels that i genuinely fondly remembered for fun spectacle or just outright being a cool level. however, a lot of what i remembered was still present and reinforced:
-the bosses are either piss-easy, or, if you're the boss in aquarium park, you're a boss set in the water, and are already a pain by default, but are then bogged down by a needlessly painful platforming and missile-guiding section that is required which chalks up an extra two minutes to the boss timer at least.
-there are so many stages that are shorter than a minute, even on a first playthrough. so many of these stages can even be shorter than 30 seconds! i know gotta go fast, but jesus.
-there are two separate autoscroller spring stages and both of them make me want to rip my fucking head in half because its utterly mindless slow nonsense that has no room in a sonic game because there is quite literally no way to make it faster
-related, there are an excess of platforming sections that take it upon themselves to make you wait for prolonged periods of time. stand on this switch to rotate some lava bars. stand on this platform whilst it rises. stand on this switch on this platform whilst it rotates. stand on this platform whilst it lowers. wait for these crash bandicoot sunset vista-ass walls to pop into the position you need. there is so much downtime of just pure wasted nonsense that, again, has zero place in a sonic game. this isn't something you get skilled at and are able to skip, either; these are mandatory parts of the level design.
overall, it's... fine? i wish that the original act structure that they wanted to do during development was still present, as i would far prefer 3 bigger acts of actual stuff happening as opposed to basically every given act 4 being either recycled content or fuck all happening for 30 seconds. or a fucking spring stage.
the writing, as i remembered, left a lot to be desired, too. i know that there's enough people already very outspoken about the pontac and graff years being just fucking utterly terrible for sonic stories, but i just want to succinctly say here that whilst this was the beginning of the end, it's not as offensive as i recall. still not great, though. it's taken a hard turn from "shonen that you watch with your kid" to "saturday morning cartoon you begrudgingly sit in on to make sure your kid doesn't choke on their cereal". and i don't mean a good saturday morning cartoon like batman the animated series, no, i mean some shit like that ghostbusters cartoon with the gorilla? truly asinine bollocks. characters lose depth in spades, others show up and become obnoxious mainstays from here, such as the barely amusing cubot and orbot (i think they provided the solid one joke that i laughed at in the game, when cubot muses on the morbid nature of them cleaning up a defeated boss robot).
the wisps are an okay mechanic for this game. not even too amazingly great, i think a lot of the places that they're used, they're frankly spoonfed to you and it's spectacle without substance in the case of a lot of their applications. why did they proceed to keep coming back?
i'm just glad that the comics eventually would go on to explain why, and give it some sort of explanation. the comics would also go on to actually be good sonic writing, even when pontac and griff still had dominion on the games until forces.
this game holds a strong ire for me as i see it as an emblem of sonic going into his true dark age; i am one of those people. i am a heroes through unleashed shooter, ride or die, and i think that these games in the 2010s are the ones that were truly kinda bogus.
