SONIC SUPERSTARS

SONIC SUPERSTARS is a side-scrolling Sonic game built around speed, jumps, and stage memory, with the newer gimmick of playing as different characters and teaming up in co-op. By our assessment, it works best when it lets Sonic’s old loop of fast runs, springs, rings, and hazards stay readable instead of turning into noise. The trade-off is that speed games can punish small mistakes hard, and the series has long been at its best when the level design is doing the heavy lifting. In practice it is about reacting quickly, learning where the game wants you to go, and trying again when a route goes wrong. Compared with the simplest classic Sonic formula, it asks for a little more patience with its set pieces and multiplayer focus. The result is solid genre work, not a reinvention, and the co-op angle is one of the main reasons to look at it.