Sonic Colors Ultimate

 I am sure you have heard plenty of this game lately. Glitches being shown off, reviews bashing it, and a generally negative opinion. And I wish I could say the same, I was geninually looking forward to this game, and planned this whole months theme for this game and one more that is coming soon. This will not be a review or rather a recounting of my experiences. 

When this game was announced I was excited not only to revisit it but also to own it. I only owned the DS version when I was younger and I remembered it fondly, renting the Wii version from time to time, and even though it was short I had a blast. This made me optimistic for more Sonic ports and remasters or even other SEGA franchises. But what greeted me before I even got my hands on the game were reports of a buggy mess and I was willing to give the game a try myself. What I found only saddened me.

I could not finish this game due to glitches, and frame stuttering, and I played on PS4 because I thought it would perform better. And I was wrong. I played four worlds all the way through before I could not take anymore and put the game down. From audio glitches, to constant stuttering and control issues, including but not limited to Sonic stopping completely and most times taking damage as a whole/

One of the few bright spots is that there are infinite lives, which even though that makes rings mostly useless, is needed for the state this game is in. The glitches led to more deaths then I could think, and made the game just not fun to play. This game is fairly short and I was close to the finish, but the glitches fought me at every turn until I gave up. Every time I was having fun the game would bring me back to its sad reality and in the current an almost unplayable state. You can play it, though I have heard tales of soft locks, crashes, and lost save files but gave up before I could encounter those, there were plenty of hurdles that did impede my enjoyment. 

I wanted to love this game so much, and I am sure with the patches that were promised, there is a chance to like this game someday. But right now it feels like the people who bought this game are bug testers for a company that forgot to polish something that is a super old game. Choosing to remake it from the ground up and rush it, leading to the expected reaction from those who picked it up. There are viable signs of an enjoyable game under the mess, but the good outweighs the bad too much. The game fought me at every turn, and every time it ran well, it disappeared as quickly as it settled. 

I did not finish this game or get far enough, do enough things to feel right scoring this. But I hope the lack of score and traditionally review are evidence enough to how I felt. I will not be coming back until there is enough patch work to make this game stable and playable. The parts I played that ran smoothly on rare occasion made me smile, I was having a blast. But before that moment could stay, the game threw something in that wiped the smile right off my face. I am not mad, just disappointed and hoping that SEGA fixes and learns from this.