Sonic has been around for 20 years now and most people have very fond memories of his supersonic escapades and Sonic Generations is a tribute to everything he has accomplished.
Sonic Generations Review
The story for the game is not much but plays out as such; Sonic is celebrating his birthday with his friends when a mysterious time destroying enemy shows up and starts kidnapping Sonic’s friends through wormholes. Sonic gets sucked in as well and when he wakes up he is in some white-out dimension where everything has been drained of color and his friends have been trapped in levels from Sonic’s history.
He searches for his friends and finds himself, Classic Sonic along with a younger Classic Tails. Sonic and Sonic take to each other like Cory and Cory, and as awesome as Lost Boys is, I would rather play Sonic Generations. That’s how good it is. The two Tails put their doubled brainpower together and determine that Time Eater’s actions are tearing apart time. Both Modern and Classic must race through the displaced levels restoring color and time to normal as well as rescuing their friends using their supersonic speed.
Honestly, I can’t stop recommending this game to people! After all of the Sonic failures over the years, a lot of people have stopped caring about his games out of fear that Sonic would just disappoint them again. But after genies, knights and werewolves, Sonic has returned to his prime. Sonic Generations is pure nostalgic enjoyment polished with a minimal but satisfactory story. It was a nice touch to have all of the characters in the game having voice actors, except for Classic Sonic which makes me wonder if Jaleel White was otherwise occupied.
I spent my childhood playing Sonic on my Sega Genesis and I still remember getting frustrated with the game after a few hours and using the cheat code to just go straight to the final level and kick Robotnik’s butt or stacking my copy of Sonic the Hedgehog on to Sonic & Knuckles and playing the original game as Knuckles! Ah…good times were had by all. Sonic Generations bridges the game between past and future and reminds you what was once good can inevitably come back. I just hope that this has also reminded the people responsible for creating future Sonic games because if i have to play one more terrible Sonic game after this amazing work of gaming craftsmanship, I will have to disown my pet hedgehogs, Silver and Shaymin.
The 2D Sonic levels are exactly what I had expected Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode 1 to be like and was disappointed then. But now, Sonic Generations has given me hope again for Episode 2. The 3D Sonic levels return to the amazing game that Sonic Adventure and Adventure 2 were. Every Modern level has a classic throwback touch and shifts at some point into a 2D level for a period of time, but it doesn’t detract from the overall gameplay.
The main story contains a total of 18 levels; 9 each for Classic and Modern Sonic and each of the 9 worlds are pulled right from Sonic games of the past. The game also contains 90 challenge levels; 45 for each Sonic taking place in the 9 levels from the main story. The challenges range from races, speed challenges, or surviving with a set number of rings until you reach the goal. Upon completing any level, your score gets turned into points that can be used to purchase abilities, lives or even a “controller” that allows you to play the original Sonic the Hedgehog game.
The new Sonic abilities you can equip give him a bonus in levels, like stopping power, coin protection, extra speed, classic shields(Like Flame or Thunder), or even turning into Super Sonic! Now the game only has 4 boss fights, but it does have 3 rival battles that have to be completed to collect Chaos Emeralds needed to finish the game, so you could say it’s more like 7 boss fights.
The levels look amazing as some of them look like MC Escher made love to your Sega Genesis and 20 years later you learn about the love child and the music is both nostalgic and fresh. Most of the songs are remixed versions of the songs played in the original levels including a few songs by Crush 40 who have been regulars on Sonic soundtracks for some time now. All I really need to say is the soundtrack is amazing.
For all of you hardcore fans, there is a 20th Anniversary Edition that is available only in Europe and Australia but if you are a PS3 owner the game is region-free. It comes with a statue of Classic and Modern Sonic side-by-side, a numbered collectors ring like the ones Sonic collects in-game, 2 DVDs about behind the scenes of the game and 20 years of Sonic, a soundtrack CD, and a DLC code for 2 exclusive extra levels. I bought a collectors edition from Germany myself.
There are going to be people out there that won’t like this game, and I can’t dissuade them. But for me, Sonic Generations was everything that I had been asking for and I couldn’t have been happier. Sure it could have been longer, with more levels or bosses, but lets take this Sonic revival one step at a time shall we? We wouldn’t want to relapse back to terrible Sonic games just to try to please the naysayers.
