Perhaps most impressively, Mania threads the needle between memorable designs and clear presentation of where exactly Sonic and friends can jump and run.Īnd that's not even mentioning Mania's off-the-walls, bonkers-good soundtrack. Mania sticks to a classic engine, evidenced by a pipsqueak install size of roughly 220MB on PlayStation 4 (and I assume much of that is taken up by compressed audio), yet the color-explosion factor in this game's levels proves just how much game designers can pull off with old-hardware limitations. Plus, I'd be remiss to ignore how lovely the presentation is. And even if Sega, for some crazy reason, never patches the game, it still feels danged good 98 percent of the time. Programmers Christian Whitehead and Simon "Stealth" Thomley, who worked wonders for the series' Sonic CD conversion to modern platforms, deserve credit for the beat-by-beat Sonic feeling that Mania gets right. Mania just feels better than the other Sonics, from the good ( Sonic Advance 2) to the bad ( Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Episodes 1-2) to the ugly ( Sonic Generations' 2D levels). Until the bugs are resolved, I'm withholding Ars' full-blown "Recommended" sticker, because the joy of Sonic Mania comes from the feeling that fans can rest easy playing by the game's old-school, Genesis-era rules. I have sent questions to the PR team behind Mania about these bugs and will update this review with any response-or any news about patch timing, for that matter. This may be why Sonic Mania received a very last-minute delay on Windows PC. Additionally, I was able to glitch Sonic into some level geometry in unwelcome ways, including a series of turning gears in the Titanic Monarch Zone. But I can confirm that Mania's on-rails flying section in Flying Battery Zone, Act 1, includes serious positioning bugs that lead to unwarranted deaths-which depleted a ton of stocked-up lives on my save file and made the rest of my review session a nightmare to contend with, I should add. And I am fully aware that there are times when I died and instinctively shouted "bug!", even though I actually died due to sloppy play. Sonic Mania ships with at least a few bugs present, which I was not able to catalog fully or exhaustively while playing the PlayStation 4 version because most were difficult to reproduce. (While this may sound like the chase sequence from Sonic CD's bonus stages, it's actually quite different.) Advertisement These hidden levels move the camera behind your character as he runs in 3D, over a "Mode-7" styled plane, to chase a UFO holding one of the Chaos Emeralds. The usual hunt for the series' Chaos Emerald collectibles, on the other hand, is present and comes in the form of a new-to-the-series 3D chase sequence. I eventually opted to stop trying to catch 'em all and had a better time for it. These levels bail you out of the fun Mania action for 3-4 minutes each time you decide to chase one of these collectible coins (which can unlock options in the game's "extras" menu). And most of these levels require that you collect upwards of 100 blue orbs (not to mention an equal number of rings). The controls in these turn-90-degrees bonus stages feel far too rigid compared to the free-flowing, 16-bit run-and-jump physics that power the rest of Mania. Do this and a sparkly-star portal will warp you to a Sonic 3-styled bonus stage that lets you run around in pseudo-3D to collect a bunch of colored orbs. These bonus levels did not age well, Sonic fans. Mania includes a collectible-coin challenge scattered across all its levels, which you activate by hitting any checkpoint meter with at least 25 rings in hand. I recognize that arguing for a game this short to have even less content is weird, but the boss battles aren't even the worst of it. The obvious solution would have been to cut this count in half. Mania suffers from boss fatigue, with most of the fights either having boring patterns, easy exploits, or nasty out-of-nowhere kill conditions. The issue is that bosses here appear after every level, as opposed to the Sonic tradition of one boss every two levels. A few of Mania's bosses are superb, whether because they are epic (like a battle against a familiar Sonic CD foe in the Metallic Madness Zone) or because they're straight-up hilarious (including one throwback boss battle that I shan't spoil).
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