#arzest

After the success of Sonic Mania, Sega has greenlit more projects set in Sonic's "Classic" era (along with an annoying insistence on segregating certain characters and elements to either Classic or Modern), such as comics and this game. Sonic Superstars sees Sonic's original character designer Naoto Ohshima reunite with the series via his new company Arzest. Now Arzest (and their predecessor Artoon) are known for games popularly thought of as mediocre, including the recent Balan Wonderworld. Personally I'll defend Yoshi's Island DS and Hey Pikmin, but is Superstars their best game yet? Eh, maybe.

Unlike Mania which directly aped the Mega Drive games, Superstars is built in a 2.5D engine. The graphics are 3D models and high definition, and they're delightfully colourful and chunky. Also unlike Mania, the levels are all new and original, although several are takes on existing ideas. There's some great new concepts in here though, like an El Dorado-inspired stage, a neon cyberspace zone, or a time-reversing collapsing base. One stage even puts you into a brief but fully-fledged Fantasy Zone homage, with two shmup-style bosses!

The big new gimmick is up to four-player simultaneous co-op, expanding on the Sonic & Tails gameplay of Sonic 2, 3, and 4 Episode 2. Of course Knuckles is along for the ride, and unlike Mania, Amy is finally—finally—given her due as a full playable part of the core cast (I guess they added her to the classic games in a rerelease of Origins too). You can choose any of the four in story mode; Tails is recommended for beginners but his flight is a little stilted and requires mashing. Knuckles has the powerful climbing and gliding abilities but they also feel slow, with sluggish animations between states. Sonic has the drop dash and that's it, while Amy was far and away my favourite to play as with a snappy double jump that gives you some quick height without losing momentum, with the added benefit of her hammer bypassing some enemy protections. She's great, especially in this classic design... also there's no dialogue so there's no opportunity for them to ruin her character with poor writing choices.

The plot, such as it is, involves Robotnik searching a new archipelago for ancient power, bringing along Fang from off of Triple Trouble, Drift 2, and The Fighters in a long-awaited return. These nefarious nasties have drafted the clumsy armour-clad Trip, a local who turns out to be an adorable and good-hearted lizard who becomes playable in her own mode after you clear the main story. This functions as a hard mode with remixed versions of the same levels, while you make use of Trip's abilities: an Amy-like double jump, and a more powerful form of Knuckles' climbing.

Another feature with a lot of promise is Chaos Emerald powers; this time around, after nabbing one from a special stage (a 3D grapple-chase affair) they bestow activated abilities specific to each gem. Some are cool and widely useful for letting you gain height or cross gaps, like becoming an air-dashing fireball or growing a vine to climb. Others are narrowly context sensitive, like revealing hidden platforms or letting you swim in water. There is at least a prompt for when one is particularly suited to a situation; otherwise they're a bit fiddly to activate. On the whole I don't feel like these abilities live up to their potential, but I applaud the effort at introducing new mechanics, and making the Emeralds useful beyond unlocking a true ending.

You do get a super form of a sort when you have them all, but only Sonic goes truly Super. The others just glow a bit, a copout on the level of the spheres for Tails and Knuckles in Heroes. Trip on the other hand gets the coolest effect of all, turning into an invincible dragon who can fly freely! This really helps on some of her more difficult levels. When both stories are cleared, we get a Last Story much like Adventure or Rush, where Super Sonic alone has to fight a big dumb-looking dragon. It's fine.

Now that I've set up what the game is, time to tear into it a little. I found even on single player the screen feels scrunched in; you would think the benefit of this graphics engine would let them scale out a fast-paced game for better visibility but I guess not. Sometimes you jump into the background and it briefly feels much better, but these segments don't last long. The problem is even worse in co-op; I played a short local 2P session and we were both constantly leaving each other behind, and when a character goes off-screen they have to respawn next to the leader. At least this goes for deaths too, with your punishment only a short delay before you can pop back in. Also, no life system! Thank you Arzest!

In addition to special stages accessed through hidden giant rings, you get Sonic 1-style bonus rounds when you pass a checkpoint with 50 rings. They're ok I guess, but optional. Then there's similar-looking warp portals that appear sometimes for some reason, which take you through a brief autoscroller and plop you out somewhere else in the level. I wasn't sure why these existed frankly. On top of this, in stages you can sometimes get fruits that you can exchange for access to another minigame in the hub screen, an autoscrolling collect-em-up. All these sub-games and such can feel like they break the flow, unless you ignore them. Only you can't ignore the Emerald stages, in fact you have to remember which zones you already got an Emerald from if you're going for them all.

The reward for most minigames (and hidden in stages) is medals, which you can use in the shop to buy parts to customise a robot avatar. I was intrigued to see a Sonic game revisit Forces' dress-up system, but the medal costs are steep and the part selection limited, with unlocks trickling out slowly. At least Amy now has a metal counterpart like the boys, and one boss memorably takes on the form of your custom bot. But you can't play as them in story mode, only in the battle mode. Unlike the base game, this has online support and up to eight players, and you duke it out in randomly-selected competitive rounds. Against AI players it's a bit brain dead but may be fun with other people. Who knows? It wasn't super appealing to me, which made the whole medal and shop mechanic (and some of the DLC) feel a bit superfluous to my experience. [The DLC otherwise is just skins for story mode, and I didn't use them...]

While I liked the look of the game, especially the backgrounds which have a lot of depth, you do occasionally see some seams. Level geometry joined inelegantly together, curved boss arenas that don't display important active elements in their backgrounds, the occasional broken graphical effect. You can play the campaign going directly from one level to another, but the loading transition is very stuttery. Once the level music failed to start after a powerup theme ended, so I was playing in silence. The game leaves a sloppy impression at these times. I also found the soundtrack to be unmemorable, with some tracks like the hub theme being way too short a loop.

I've left it as late as I possibly can to talk about this: the bosses. These are universally slow and painfully boring. You're often just waiting for them to begin their designated vulnerability period, landing a single hit, and then waiting through the next long, long attack pattern. Sometimes Amy or Trip with their double jump—or a well chosen Emerald power—can get an extra or early hit on them, but it's not enough. You can sometimes spend as long in a boss fight as you do playing a level, and there's a lot of them. Some zones only have one act, and several act 1s in two-act zones also have a boss! Other acts have chase sequences, such as Fang following you on his hoverbike, and these are even worse.

And then there's the final boss of each story, the biggest offender of all, where each near-successful attempt took me nearly ten minutes and it's easy to die to various instant-kill attacks and hazards. The big dumb dragon is also boring, with the added stress of managing a very limited ring count lest you restart the whole fight again. The bosses are a common criticism for this game and it's easy to see why: the best of them is merely fine, while the worst are crimes against game design. They drag the whole experience down substantially. It’s a real shame.

Honestly I’m playing it up a little, they’re easily the worst part and the final boss literally took me hours of frustrating attempts, but because I was bracing from being warned just how noxious they are, I found them to be slightly more tolerable than what I expected. But that’s not saying much. They suck.

The problem I have with the way the game looks is the lighting. Let's take this screenshot as an example:

I want you to ask yourself: where is the sun positioned in this image?

Let's look at Sonic. On Sonic's body, the sun is above him, to the right, slightly in the background. The top edge of his head has the highlight, which fades in to a shadow closer to the camera.

The shadow on the grass suggests the sun is in the same position, but shining from the foreground. The shadow is being cast going in to the background, away from the camera. This is the opposite of Sonic's body.

This rocky outcropping near the top of the image is receiving very intense edge light from both the left and right sides, but barely from the bottom.

Under the grass at the bottom of the image, we see light shining up from below this rocky arch. You could say that maybe it's light reflecting off the water (caustics), but it lacks the caustic pattern and is pure white light, when the water itself is teal. Caustic reflections also generally don't carry 25+ feet away like this does.

The palm tree fronds are receiving light from the same direction as Sonic is, but the trunk is being lit like the rocks are, which is to say its edges are lit up, even in places that should be in shadow.

This is what's known as "rimlighting." It's an important detail in photography and 3D graphics rendering, because it creates a strong outline for characters and important objects.

The catch being rimlighting is one of those things that works when it makes sense. In photography, getting a good rimlight requires very carefully positioning physical lights in a scene, and that light obeys the properties of reality.

What Sonic Superstars has done is grab a very basic rimlight effect that applies a cheap, colorless halo around objects using a shader. It doesn't obey the properties of real light, it just makes everything look weird and inconsistent, giving it this awkward glowing outline. This type of effect was common in Wii games from the mid-2000's. For example, Super Mario Galaxy uses this type of rimlight quite a lot.

Galaxy gets away with it because it's a game set in space, and these bright glowing rimlights help characters pop out from the dark space backgrounds. And, on brighter levels, the rimlight intensity is reduced considerably:

Sonic Superstars has applied its rimlighting in a very haphazard, cheap, ugly way. Some have called it "Generic Unity Rimlighting" because a lot of low-effort games use it to bad effect. And, as far as we can tell, the game is being made in Unity, because the debug menu uses the default Unity background color.

The whole game's lighting situation just looks muddy and dark and confusing, when I think the ideal should be something like New Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze.

Lighting is a bit flat, but everything is bright, clear, and consistent. Superstars is very messy and dated looking by comparison. And the above two games are like 9 years old!