![]() You get a holographic slipcase, Mega Drive reversible cover (complete with tongue in cheek reference to blast processing) and an art book as standard. Although owners of the original game can download the additional content as DLC, the physical release is a treat. As a result of fan demand for a physical release, the original game has been updated with a couple of new characters, an enhanced competition mode and a new version of Mania called Encore Mode. As for how Sonic Forces turned out, well you can read our review here.Įnter Sonic Mania Plus. Sonic Mania received stellar reviews, ended up on many top ten lists of 2017 and quickly surpassed a million copies sold. ![]() ![]() Things didn’t quite turn out that way however. Released only as digital download, the idea I suppose was to have Sonic Mania release first as an appetiser to trigger memories before delivering the main dish. The other was a Christian Whitehead produced (with Sonic Team support) fully 2D entry designed as a celebration of Sonic The Hedgehog’s 16 bit heritage named Sonic Mania. There was the official entry to the Sonic series the “big budget” Sonic Team produced: 3D epic Sonic Forces. But caring about the story in a Sonic game is where we part ways from the really hardcore fans, even if it’s not hard to enjoy things like the deliciously ‘90s animated intro.Last year, 90’s icon Sonic the Hedgehog celebrated his 25th Anniversary with a one-two punch of games. The game does have a proper story, appropriately set after the events Sonic & Knuckles (the last great Sonic game of the 2D era). The Sonic games have never been particularly hard though, at least in terms of just getting to the end of each act, so that shouldn’t be a problem even for new players.Īs you can imagine, the game is filled with fan service, most of which will go completely unnoticed by ordinary players. Sonic Mania clearly doesn’t feel constrained by the Mega Drive titles, but it does nothing to try and modernise the game’s approach to things like lives or the occasional instant or unforeseeable death. The boss battles are also uniformly excellent, and again often more interesting than those in the original games. Meanwhile, the remakes are often noticeably better than the originals with, for example, the Chemical Plant Zone adding additional variety through special pads that can stick you to the ceiling or pools of goop that can bounce you to different heights depending on how you mix them when you jump on a plunger. We’re not sure why the game ended up being a mix of remastered stages and brand-new ones, or why this director’s cut adds new characters instead of new levels, but at least we can now say there’s been two top quality Sonic The Hedgehog releases this millennium, instead of just one.īut Sonic Mania understands this paradox perfectly, and new areas like the Wild West-themed Mirage Saloon Zone and TV-filled Studiopolis are almost indistinguishable in quality and imagination to the best of the Mega Drive games. The end result feels like some sort of school project gone wild, something enthusiastic kids have made while the teacher was away and which far surpasses anything they were actually supposed to be doing. ![]() And Sonic Mania is essentially a combination of those two obsessions. He and others (including Tee Lopes remixing the music) have been making ports of the original games, and creating their own fan titles, for years. The secret behind Sonic Mania’s success is that it had nothing to do with them and was instead developed by a group of fans led by Christian ‘Taxman’ Whitehead. If you are a Sega fan you’ll know that between Sonic Mania’s release and now we had the predictably awful Sonic Forces, by the reliably unreliable Sonic Team.
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