 Sonic Superstars doesn't feel right. And I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I don't like to make and play any videos, I don't like to grumble, but I had the chance to play the Sonic Superstars demo this week, and I know that if I hadn't played it and if I were on the fence about it, I'd want someone to tell me their honest opinion on the game, especially given how on the fence I've been about Superstars since it was first revealed. So, a quick bit of context. This weekend was EGX, a gaming expo in the UK that I attended along with a few friends. There were a smattering of indie titles and a few more well-known publishers, but the two big booths were Sega and Nintendo. When I asked if I could record gameplay footage, the staff at the Nintendo booth were tremendously helpful, even going so far as to get me on the booth with the best filming angle and to adjust the camera for me. When I asked if I could film gameplay at the Sega booth, I was told to film around the booth generally, but that I could not film any actual gameplay, which is why this footage is a bit odd, sorry. Sonic Superstars was naturally the first game that I queued up for, because I am a Sonic fanboy at heart, and this was the game that I cared most about experiencing myself. If you watched my reaction video when the game was first revealed, first off, thank you for coming back for some reason, but secondly, you'll remember that I was worried that Superstars would end up being the new Sonic the Hedgehog 4, an attempt at a retro revival with more modern graphics that ultimately fails to nail the old-school feel of a Sonic game. A lot of people misunderstood that video and assumed that calling Sonic Superstars the new Sonic 4 was a compliment. Sorry, I should have made things clearer. My concern with Sonic Superstars upon seeing the first trailer mostly came down to the presentation. Takashi Izuca has spoken about how the developers chose the game's art style because they worried that pixel art will data game make it old-fashioned, an opinion that I flatly refute. The look of this game made me think mobile game, and I've not been swayed from that opinion by seeing more footage of the game that's purportedly leaked in the past week, although I would also believe that the supposedly leaked footage I saw was made by a fan as a joke, which, well, says a lot about what I think of Sonic Superstars art. But, as much as I love a really good-looking game, such as to single out my favorite retro revival, Wonder Boy the Dragon's Trap, I'd be very happy to get on board with Sonic Superstars if the game felt like a classic Mega Drive era Sonic. I've said that from the start. If Sonic's momentum is right, all is forgiven. I just want to curl into a ball, roll down slopes, whiz through loops, and have a good time. And, well, it's clear that that's where they were going for with Superstars. The vague mechanics I want to hear, certainly more so than Sonic 4 or Sonic Generations, it's close. Close enough that more casual fans may be perfectly satisfied with it. But it didn't do it for me. I'm sorry. Really, I am. I didn't want to say this. As someone who plays Mega Drive Sonic games as a kind of meditative experience at this point, as someone who's won several Sonic speedrunning competitions, although I have been beaten repeatedly by Webster, check his channel out, Sonic Superstars just did not feel right to me. I've got several theories for why that is. Having only played the demo at a convention, I can't speak for the whole game, but I can try to explain why it didn't click for me personally. When I first got to sit down and pick up the PS5 controller, I chose to play the jungle level and then picked my character. It won't surprise regular viewers to know that I chose Amy. I've been campaigning for her inclusion in this kind of game since before Mania launched. And, oh, why is Amy so slow? Her acceleration is a bit laggy. Immediately, I felt that this was a game that needed the drop dash, a move that Amy lacks. Faced with the prospect of playing the whole demo like this, I couldn't do it. I restarted, picked Sonic, picked the beach stage, presumably the first stage in the game, and hoped for a better experience. It was better, definitely. But it still felt like the muscle memory within me was fighting this thing. It was kind of like, okay, as a European, I first played Sonic in PAL format, which is slower than NTSC. Then when later ports came out, I experienced Sonic at the NTSC speed he was supposed to be played at, the speed that he's played at in all of the versions of the game released in the United States and in Japan. Now, going back to my original PAL Mega Drive in the cartridges feels a bit sluggish. That's how superstars felt to me, like going back to the PAL version of a game that should be played at NTSC speed. Smarter, more knowledgeable Sonic fans than me will go through this game with a fine-toothed comb once it releases and provide details on Sonic's momentum versus the classic games, and if they come back and say that my complaint is all in my head, I won't actually be surprised. Because in part I feel that the problem is with the level design and the game presentation. The camera zooms in and out as the level progresses, and at times it feels too cropped in, too claustrophobic. It makes it hard to see what's coming, which increases the chances of hitting a road bump or a set of spikes or a badnik. What's more, the level design is dense and cluttered. I don't know if it's just because I know that Naoto Oshima worked on this game, but it put to mind Sonic CD, and my endless desperate attempt in that game to build up speed, as is required for the central gameplay gimmick, only to hit an obstacle and have to start all over again. It's a lot like that, except when the game says, okay now go fast, at which point you're shot through a series of predetermined ramps that you have little to no control over. It's like the game doesn't have space to breathe, there's too much going on, and the result is I didn't feel the satisfying dopamine hit that comes from getting up to a solid speed and cruising through levels on mental autopilot. The special stages and minigames don't help. By this point I'm the kind of player who doesn't usually jump into a star ring above a checkpoint unless I need to, because it slows down the progress of the game. Naturally, though, for this demo I wanted to see everything there was to see. One minute Sonic's doing his best Spider-Man impression, which is basically just a series of homing attacks with delay, the next he's bouncing through special stages reminiscent of Sonic 1. If you like these diversions, there is a lot to enjoy here, and when you get an Emerald you get a new power, which impacts the regular gameplay in... marginal ways. The problem with all of these additional game modes is there's a noticeable loading lag when transitioning between them. It may only take a second or two, but it adds up when you're coming in and out of these special stages regularly. It just feels like another impediment to what I want to do in a Sonic game, which is build up speed and zoom around fast. It's particularly worrying that I was playing this on what I assume was a PS5, given that there have been early rumors that the Nintendo Switch version of the game isn't exactly in great shape. If even the top-of-the-line version of Sonic Superstars has this admittedly extremely minor loading issue, I worry for this game on less powerful hardware. Do you know what usually loads a bit faster than 3D character models? Pixel art, but maybe that's me just being bitter. But okay, hang on, time for a tangent. Here's a quote from Takashi Izuka about why they chose this particular art style for Sonic Superstars. Quote, After we had made Sonic Mania, we wanted to take the side-scrolling platform action gameplay in a new direction. In the early days, we did have an idea of maybe having hand-drawn animations as a concept, but when we thought about it, the 3D models we could really get to mimic the pixel animation and the pixel art. So we set out with the 3D models to really animate the game and have the game look and feel and animate just like the classic, the original Sonic the Hedgehog game. End quote. Which...ugh. We were so close to getting a hand-drawn Sonic game. Something like the fan game Sonic 2 HD or Sonic Freedom, which just look gorgeous, just brimming with character and vibrancy and life. But what Izuka is not saying here is that throwing in a 3D character model from various potentially murky sources is an awful lot cheaper than hand-drawn animation or pixel art, which both take more time and care and attention. That's why Sonic Superstars has all those extra skins, all the weird LEGO ones or Amy in a slightly different dress. That, I suspect, is the real reason for this particular art style. Budget. Oh, and those new powers granted by the Chaos Emeralds? They're tremendously clunky, infrequently used and just a bit of a distraction. I got the Emerald that lets you jump up waterfalls, forgot about it entirely until the game prompted me, and then found myself clicking through a radial power wheel with the triggers before I could use it. Was there really not a better control scheme for that? But I digress. My point in all this rambling is that I needed to know for certain before buying Sonic Superstars whether it would feel the way I wanted it to, and while I've only played a limited demo, it's enough for me to feel like this really isn't the Sonic game for me, and that's a genuine shame because I wanted it to be. I wanted to love this, I wanted to get as much out of it if not more than I did from Sonic Mania. There is hope, I suppose. I'm very interested to see what modders do with this thing, as is often the case with Sonic games. I wonder if a few tweaks to the physics will make this feel a little more like I wanted to, or if it can be used as a launching off-point for fan games that are somewhat more to my personal liking. My experience in playing the demo then confirms the thing I've long suspected. Sonic Team and Sega may be doing their best, but they're not the experts on this particular subject matter. The people who have the best understanding of how to make Sonic games are Sonic fans. That's the moral of the story, I'm sorry I don't come with better news. But, little teaser for you here, I did also play Super Mario Wonder, and it doesn't feel fair to give Sonic a kicking when I was also left feeling like I didn't need Mario Wonder in my life. So, next time, hopefully coming in the next few days, the second part of this video. My problem with Mario Wonder, and why I won't be buying that game at launch. It's only fair, right? Except, oh, I hate making negative videos.