

I'll give them props though for being the only set of characters where all of their upgrades felt useful and provided a noticeable change to the gameplay. Compared to the more fastpaced action of Gamma's levels that they lifted their gameplay from, their hitboxes are too big combined with how slow they move for it to be anywhere near as fun. They're really made to control like you're piloting a big tank walker, feeling really clunky as a result.

Tails and Eggman were a pretty disappointing downgrade from Gamma's levels from the first Adventure. A level in a Sonic game should not take me 15+ minutes to complete, but then again maybe I'm just bad at this game. My main complaint for them would just be that some of their stages felt way too big as the game went on, making finding three items across how huge the fields end up turn into a real needle in a haystack situation. Knuckles and Rouge probably felt to best to play out of all the characters, which is probably just because they're the most normal of them all. The level design for these speed stages are also definitely creeping toward the 'hold forward to win' pattern the series would be so heavily critiqued for later on, though we're not there just yet. More than once the game would lock onto something I wasn't even remotely close to aiming toward, and Sonic or Shadow would just perform a weird midair turn to head toward it (usually ending with me dropping into a bottomless pit). The hitboxes for it feel really wonky, a lot of the time I'd activate it and go streaking toward an enemy only the take damage upon hitting it, or very clearly slamming into the designated weak point with no hit being registered. Technically you ARE able to control the camera, but that option might as well not even be there with how half the time it won't respond to your inputs and the rest of the time it'll snap back to what it considers to be the 'correct' angle the second you stop manually positioning it For Sonic and Shadow's levels, the homing attack still has a lot of kinks to be worked out.

The camera is by far your worst enemy here, I can't count how many times I died from it getting stuck in a wall and me consequently walking off the map because I couldn't see where I was going, or because I got sniped by an enemy offscreen that the camera refused to show me. 12h 5m PlayedA genuinely impressive upgrade from the first Sonic Adventure in almost every field, but still suffers from some really nasty gameplay issues.
