Most Sonic games put the pedal to the metal, having you travel at blindingly fast speeds while avoiding hazards on your way to the goal. Unlike its predecessors, however, Sonic Superstars trades that traditional breakneck pace for new abilities, more exploration, multiple mini-games, and slightly more challenging bosses. Most of that stylistic shift works well for the majority of Superstars’ roughly 15-hour multi-campaign story – the new Chaos Emerald powers are an excellent addition to the formula, helping you make the most of stages that focus a little less on sprinting blindly to the end the first time through and more on hunting down secrets as you do. But while this slightly different flavor of Sonic can be fun, I couldn’t help but feel like Superstars was missing the main thing I love about the series: Speed.
Sonic Superstars has three main game modes – a campaign with three individual stories that unlock subsequently after finishing the previous one, an eight-player battle mode, and a time attack mode. The story mode has you traveling across 11 Zones all over the new Northstar Islands, showcasing flashy levels that occasionally draw inspiration from other well-known stages in Sonic’s history. For example, the Speed Jungle Zone brings back the use of vines from the original Sonic the Hedgehog’s Jungle Zone, Pinball Carnival puts both a fun and spooky twist on Sonic 3’s Carnival Night Zone, and the Press Factory is a more industrial version of the Press Garden Zone from Sonic Mania. They are all incredibly charming, and while the backdrops sometimes make it difficult to differentiate what's in front of you, they nail the classic aesthetic Sonic fans like myself have come to love.
I don’t think any of the new stages will crack the top of my list of all-time Sonic favorites, but there are a lot of great additions to the series here, and I enjoyed that each one has a cool quirk to it. One has a giant snake burrowing throughout the level that gives you a slight bounce when moving along it, while another has patches of thick fog that obscure your vision, and the only way to gain partial vision is by running through a group of butterflies that follow and help illuminate the way. Golden Capital was a particular standout by having you flip the stage, swapping between the foreground and background, and showering you with rings every step. I also really enjoyed Lagoon City, which felt like a giant water theme park and made the best use of the new water power granted by one of the Chaos Emeralds. Things like this made me hope to see similar creativity in future 2D sonic games.
But while I undoubtedly enjoyed playing through these stages, they can have some questionable placements of hazards and enemies, and their choice to focus on platforming over speed is ultimately a disappointing one. There are multiple routes to take in each level: The higher you ascend, the faster the route, while the lower routes focus even more on the platforming side. At first it was fun to explore those lower routes, using different playable characters and the various Chaos Emerald powers to explore their less streamlined paths for secrets. But after discovering my only reward for that exploration was either more rings or a currency used on cosmetics in the lackluster multiplayer, there wasn’t much incentive to try and navigate the extra hazards and enemies.
That meant I eventually just wanted to stick to some good old fashion going fast, but even when I took the highest routes, I didn’t feel the speed I’ve come to expect over the past 30 years of Sonic. It wasn’t until after the 15 hours I spent clearing all the story content that I was able to go back and start to finding more efficient routes in order to get a better feeling of that speed. Still, that doesn’t help the fact that everything feels a bit too slow out of the gate for your first playthrough, especially before you’ve found all seven Chaos Emeralds and are able to go Super Sonic.
Collecting the Chaos Emeralds is more straightforward than ever this time, as the increased focus on exploration encouraged me to seek out the giant golden rings that hide them during my travels. Finding one sends you off to play a short minigame where you have to chase the Chaos Emerald by swinging from point to point until you catch up to it, finally unlocking it when you do. These ended up being the one minigame I didn’t mind stopping for as they were entertaining and also rewarded you in the form of new Chaos Emerald powers.
That’s right, Chaos Emeralds are no longer relegated to only granting Sonic the ability to go Super, as each one now grants a unique power. The Avatar and Bullet abilities became quick favorites of mine, as the former creates clones that race across the screen, destroying enemies, gathering rings, or breaking walls to open up new routes, while Bullet lets you launch yourself in the direction of your choice multiple times during its duration. Bullet became extremely helpful when playing as Sonic specifically, too, as he lacks the extra movement options you get when playing as Tails, Knuckles, or Amy. There is also a fresh addition to the cast in the form of Trip, a mysterious new character (designed by Sonic and Eggman creator Naoto Oshima) who initially travels with Fang before playing a more prominent role in the overarching story after finishing the first of the three campaigns.
Each of those stories pits Sonic and friends against Eggman and Fang, though Eggman does most of the heavy lifting. He’ll challenge you regularly with various egg machines shaped like clowns, dragonflies, giant mechs, and more, but some of these bosses seem to drag on and on. Long gone are the days of constantly bouncing off one of Eggman's machines to destroy them quickly and efficiently – many of the bosses in Superstars are either immune to regular attacks or will move to the background to continue after them, making them untargetable except for specific attacks you can counter. This isn’t an uncommon tactic for bosses in other games, but the issue here is how often you must dodge the same simple attack patterns before the boss goes down. Some of the worst offenders could double or even triple the completion time for their accompanying stage, which is much longer than previous Sonic games.
While Fang is only more of a hindrance in the first campaign, he truly shines once you get to the second. He might have some of the most challenging boss fights in any sonic game, with small vulnerability windows to take damage, multiple phases, and numerous one-hit kill attacks that ignore your collection of rings. This started as a welcome difficulty spike but became flat-out frustrating after fights started to drag on for four or fives minutes through multiple phases, forcing me to start from the beginning due to a lack of checkpoints. The final campaign culminates in a race against the clock battle in what I imagine was intended to be the final rush of the whole story, but instead it just comes across as tedious – a trait many of the more drawn-out boss battles share across all three stories.
One of Superstars’ best features is its phenomenal soundtrack, with music that matches the theme of each stage perfectly. Throughout my 20 hours completing all the story modes and practicing routes in time attack, I couldn’t find one that didn’t have me tapping my toes to their percussive and electronic beats. Nearly every track, with a special shout-out to Lagoon City Act 2, had me replaying their stages just to idle and listen to their music. (I just wish there was jukebox to listen to them independently.) Unfortunately, the sound design isn’t up to the same standard when it comes to the sound effects of various enemies, attacks, or moving vehicles you will ride. I don’t know who thought listening to the sound of constantly buzzing bees or lasers bouncing off of armor for minutes on end was a good idea, but I ended up muting my TV when I replayed certain boss fights in the second campaign to keep myself from getting a splitting headache.
Superstars also includes four-player drop-in/drop-out local co-op, but as great as this sounds, it could be better in its execution. Playing with just two players, we found the experience clever at its best and frustrating at its worst. The camera doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason for who it decides to follow – sometimes it would track me as Sonic as I sped past my co-op partner playing Knuckles, while other times, it would allow me to run off the screen while he climbed a wall. On another occasion, I didn’t quite make a jump while my partner did, but the camera chose to follow me to a worse path for some reason. This type of thing was a constant occurrence. On the bright side, players who get left behind due to the inconsistent camera choice only need to press a button to return with all their rings intact, but it was still frustrating to go Super Sonic only to lose it three seconds later because the camera decided to follow someone else.
Speaking of shortcomings, it’s a shame that Superstars doesn’t feature any accessibility settings, and many actions require repetitive button presses. This would be fine if it weren’t a common occurrence, but anyone who wants to make full use of flying as Tails needs to constantly press the jump button to ascend in height. There are also a few sections where you ride in a drill and have to do the same to progress. The worst offender is one of the later bosses that can capture you in an electric web, and if you fail to break free via button mashing, it hits you with a one-hit KO move. I don’t find button mashing very fun at the best of times, let alone when it’s used so frequently with no option to change to something simpler.
Outside of the story modes, the battle mode and Time Attack mode are pretty barebones. I don’t expect a lot from a Time Attack mode, and this one at least does have simple leaderboards to see others and your best times. It’s serviceable if you wanna see just how fast you gotta go, but it’s a bummer that you can only challenge the ghost of your own best times and not those who may have ranked higher on the leaderboard, which would be immensely helpful in learning the best routes to improve my own times.
As for the eight-player battle mode, everyone but the most die-hard Sonic fans will probably abandon it as soon as they finish their first match. You and up to seven others create a robot based on a variety of animals and Sonic characters (as well as Sega’s iconic Nights) to compete in three random minigames across various maps, which are equally simple and only mildly entertaining at best. I only saw four minigame options in the 10 or so matches played: A standard race-to-the-finish on a shortened version of one of the campaign levels, a Survival game (the best of the bunch) which challenges you to stay on crumbling platforms while avoiding rockets being fired at you, a game called Star Snatcher that has you running through an endless version of a stage to collect more stars than your opponents, and finally Zap Scrap, which has you blasting opponents with sparks of electricity for points. Zap Scrap has the most depth, as you can collect powerups to change your small projectile into a broad horizontal beam that travels the entire arena, but that doesn’t mean it stays interesting long
The higher you place after three rounds the more giant Sonic coins you’ll be rewarded with, which you can spend in the shop to customize your avatar. It’s fairly harmless, but the main issue with this cosmetic system is that the items you purchase cost between 10 and a whopping 200 coins, the former being for paints to change the color of your robot and the latter being unique accessories like an emergency vehicle light. This wouldn’t be a huge issue, but you have to buy paints for each part separately since they are single-use, which adds up pretty quickly.
You can also earn these coins during the campaign, as anytime you pass a checkpoint with more than 50 rings, it opens a portal that takes you into the classic Sonic minigame, where you must maneuver around the inside of a rotating set of blocks to reach the goal. You have to go through three separate levels, collecting those giant Sonic coins at the end of each. Twists are added to the formula as you get deeper in, too, such as special blocks that reveal new paths and hazards that end the minigame if you fall into them. These were fun initially, but as they began to repeat themselves, I started avoiding them sometimes during the first campaign, and then almost every time in the second and third, because they just slowed the pacing of a stage down even further.
