I have no nostalgia for Sonic. I had a SNES and followed that up with a PS-One and never owned any of the Sega consoles. Even when Sonic games went multiplatform I never bought any of the games. I might have spent a few seconds playing the originals whenever I would buy a Sega game collection but I never got deep into it because I didn't like the controls and why would I waste time playing Sonic when I could spend that time playing Comix Zone instead? So anyway, Sonic Mania was getting talked up as being a good Sonic game I figured why not? I only played through the game as Knuckles and ended up having fun despite a lot of frustrating moments.
I played through the game as Knuckles simply because he was the coolest looking character, and he ended up being a pretty neat dude. He can glide and hit people with his knuckles while he glides. He can also crawl up walls by using his knuckles. The levels all have tons of branching paths and I often felt like I had no idea where the hell I was going. That controls feel loose and the platforming is strange in that there are very few bottomless pits you can fall into (I think I fell into one my whole time playing the game). Usually missing a jump will simply lead to you going down an alternate path then the one you were on. It give the game a sense of momentum that you don't see in your average platformer.
Running around collecting rings can be a lot of fun as are the power-ups you can find scattered throughout the levels. Rings double as your health supply and running into an enemy or some spikes will cause you to lose all your rings while you have a few seconds to retrieve some of them before they disappear. Get hit without any rings and you lose a life, forcing you to start back at wherever the last checkpoint you hit was (there are several scattered throughout each level). Lose all your lives and you get a game over, forcing you to restart the zone. Zones in this game are broken out into two acts, with each act having a boss at the end of the stage. I had a lot of fun with all the boss fights but the checkpointing system can lead to some really frustrating moments. If you are struggling with the final boss in act 2 of a zone and you lose all your lives against said boss, you will have to start the zone all over again from act 1 before you get another chance to fight the boss. Each act can take a while to get through which means you could be looking at 10+ minutes of going through the same levels over and over again just to get another chance at fighting the boss again. Do this multiple times and it sucks all the joy that battling a challenging boss otherwise would have provided. A better checkpointing system would have done wonders to keep this from being a problem.
I also ran into quite a few bugs and glitches that led to cheap hits and deaths while playing through this game on the Switch. Every once in a while I would get sucked into a wall or killed by an invisible thing hitting me. Normally these things wouldn't be a big deal but when you combine it with the terrible checkpointing system then suddenly losing lives through no fault of your own makes the game that much more frustrating. A few times the main soundtrack would cut out and I would be left with nothing but the sound effects. There is also a minor bug where the game takes several seconds to pull up the Switch's menu when you hit the home button.
The game has a lot of variety in terms of both environments and sound design. Each zone has its own distinct feel and style with the soundtrack matching the visuals of each stage beautifully. There is also the occasional mini game that helps break up the action. One of the special stages has you navigating a 3D space trying to run over blue balls while avoiding the red ones. If you touch a red one you lose, and your movement gets progressively faster as time goes on. I found this mini game difficult to control and would usually skip them when given the option to play them. The other mini game is a runner that has you chasing down a robot in a 3D space as you collect spheres to speed up and rings which act as your timer. Run out of rings or fall off the edge and you lose. This mini game was a ton of fun and actually my favorite part of the game which makes it such a shame there are so few of them in the game. I wouldn't mind playing an entire game that was just made up of these kinds of levels.
For all the "gotta go faster" memes that Sonic has, throughout most of the game you are punished for recklessly speeding through levels. Trying to rush through a level by running at top speed is a quick way to run into an enemy or some spikes and lose all your rings and momentum. The game is more about controlled bursts of speed and using the characters speed to get through the platforming sections of the game. That said, the game does have a two player split screen mode that perfectly embodies that sense of speed that makes this game feel unique and different from other platforms. This split screen competition mode has you racing to see who can finish the level first. Having that other human you are trying to beat in a race causes you to throw caution to the wind as you constantly run into things an effort to run as fast as possible.
Both players are racing on the same map and this mode really helps to highlight the branching paths that each level offers. Both players could spend most of the level away from each other as you both try to speed through the stage using your characters unique abilities. However, not all the levels from the main game are selectable in this mode which is unfortunate because it means you will quickly burn through all the available maps. That said, I did still have a lot of fun playing through this mode and it led to many close wins and close loses. I think that the thing that makes this two player split screen mode as fun as it is partially because you do not need to worry about losing all your lives and having to redo entire levels when you die. There is no real punishment for losing all your lives in this mode besides losing the round. This allows you to be reckless and enjoy your speed in a way that the main game does not.
There is a lot of fun to be had in this game. The visuals and audio and even gameplay all feel like something that was ripped straight from the early to mid 90s. That said, the checkpointing system also seems to have come from the early to mid 90s. I cannot overstate how much that lousy checkpointing system will completely undermine any fun that was being had in the game and lead to moments of great frustration as you replay entire sections of the game multiple times just to once again reach the boss that killed you. There is a reason developers have turned away from unreasonably punishing checkpoints in pretty much all modern games. Add to that the bugs scattered throughout the game and it really weighs down an otherwise good game. A few tweaks and I think this game could have been something great. If there is ever a Sonic Mania 2 I will be there on day one.
