Review #827: Ridge Racer V

 More polygons, more tracks and even more ridges!

 And so, with the newest Playstation system at the time cam a new entry in the series, Ridge Racer V. It's pretty good, not much has changed since the past game, and thankfully, we keep analog support and split-screen multiplayer, which shouldn't need mentioning, but since Unbounded removed offline multiplayer....

 So, modes, the usual: Grand Prix, which is a collection of various sets of races, Time Trial, VS Player and Free Run to run by your lonesome, trying out cars and tracks. The game has 7 tracks that can be played in reverse, but... they are pretty lazy, man. Every track, sand the 7th one, is based on the original track of the original game, and they share parts between each other, so how each track looks kinda blends together. The seventh track is a giant oval. By now I should know not to expect much variety, but considering how good RR 7 had it... On the other hand, Grand Prix is pretty interesting. On the first GP you can play at the start you get to choose a car, and depending on the car you picked is which cars you'll unlock. So if you want to unlock more cars you have to play the first GP with another car, and then play the other GPs with the new car you unlock and so on. You can also unlock Duels against other, special cars, and once beaten you unlock them. Oh! And by playing a lot(accumulating 1500 miles) you can unlock Pacman and his ghostly enemies! Playing the game you can also unlock different color patterns to customize your cars with, which is a simple but welcome addition. Lastly, this game's soundtrack wasn't as good as the ones from the other RR games. It's still really good, but not AS good.

 At first I hated this game. I played the first Grand Prix and it was SO slow. And then I unlocked the advanced Grand Prixes as well as a faster engine for the car and... the drifting was SO bad, it felt very stiff and sluggish. And yet... I managed to get the new timing right and I learned to like it.... and then I discovered that my car was of the GRIP type. Turns out that the car I chose for my first GP, which was a DRIFT type, unlocks a GRIP advanced vehicle. As soon as I finished the game, I went back to the first GP and picked a new car and, after finishing this slow first GO, unlocked a advanced DRIFT type car, and boy oh boy, it was buttery smooth. I went from HATING this game to LOVING it so hard.

 And it's true, the driving is still based around drifting, and somehow it feels better, tighter and more responsive than in R4. GRIP type cars were never my thing, but once again, after I learned how to take curves with that car I started to like the game, but, DRIFT cars is how you should play the game, they feel so fast and drifting through corners is so much fun.

 I think that Ridge Racer 4 was a better product, it had more variety with its tracks and the soundtrack was a bit better, but as far as gameplay goes, I think Ridge Racer V is a competent upgrade on that front. It's not a huge evolution of the formula, but it feels tighter and more responsive, while the new graphics, as jagged as they are, convey a better sense of speed. All in all, a decent follow up and another excellent entry in the series.
8.0 out of 10

Review #826: Rune Viking Warlord

 Featuring Odin's floating head!

 I love early PC-to-PS2 ports, such as Rune: Viking Warlord over here. The slippery movement, the poor performance and the somewhat muddy textures that didn't make the jump to PS2 intact. It may sound like a diss, but it's anything but, I find it super charming. Rune was an action/adventure game on the PC that was well received enough to get a port to PS2, and it's more than just a port, we get new levels as well as the multiplayer mode that would be part of the PC game's expansion.

 In the game you play as Ragnar, the last surviving Viking of his tribe, who is rescued by Odin... kinda, kinda because while Odin protected you, now you must get out of Hel yourself. What follows is a story of revenge, you as Odin's Champion vs Loki and his own champion. The story is simple and unintrusive, there are very few cinematics in the game, and it's mostly just Odin's floating head checking up on you. The game has about 8 different sets of levels, it starts off in Hel and then you'll go through goblin caves, snowy mountains, viking castles and even dwarven enclaves.  All in all, it can probably be beaten in about 8 hours. I played the game on medium and it was relatively easy most of the time, a few awkward jumps over botomless pits here and there, but it doesn't get hard until the very end, which is ironic considering you get a massive power up.... but you'll need it, since you'll be fighting the hardest enemies in the games in large numbers.

 Combat is quite clearly the focus of the game, and it plays like a PC game, while combat takes place in close distances, strafing around the enemy and mashing the R1 button is the name of the game, like any PC game of its era. It's not elegant, it's not deep, but it's fun. Ragnar can carry Maces, Axes and Swords, a shield as well provided you aren't using a heavy weapon. And even between these types of weapons you can carry many of each, so in actuality Ragnar carries about 15 weapons: 5 swords, 5 axes and 5 maces. While weapons get progressively stronger, there's a point to carrying the old weapons: Each one has a unique Rune power, which consumers energy from your rune gauge. Ragnar can throw his equipped weapon by pressing triangle, which is necessary a very few times to solve some puzzles, but by the end of the game I threw away my weaker weapons since cycling with the L1 button was a bit boring, however, since powers are unique... I was compelled to keep the fourth sword, since its vampiric rune power proved invaluable a couple of times.

 Rune energy is extremely valuable, for you can only recharge it by finding yellow runes hidden throughout the level, which also means that you can't use your runic powers wily nily. Hidden through the game you may also find the elusive blue runes which permanently increase your health bar, or the more common red run that activates your berserk mode on the spot. Berserk status can be reached in two ways: By finding the aforementioned rune or by landing hits on enemies, once the red bar fills to the top you enter Berserk status. Berserk lasts for a few seconds, and you are invulnerable throughout its duration.

 Level design is what you'd expect of a PC game of its era, a tiny bit mazelike with a ton of levers to find in order to open up doors or extend bridges. Think something like classic Doom but without the keycards. There are a few puzzles here and there, but they were pretty easy to figure out. That said, the Snowy Mountains felt a bit poorly made. You have to realize that the blowing wind will carry you through gaps, and you also have to figure out that you must jump into the crevice for the wind to carry you. Then there's another segment in which the icy road cracks below you as you run, and if you fail to react and get to safety... you'll fall into currents that'll push you back to the start of the section, which quickly got boring. Platforming is as lackluster as you'd expect, which is why fact that there are so many bottomless pits or murderous lava is so surprising. But the worst part about it... the game has obscenely long loading times, and if you die, for example due to a spotty jump, you'll have to sit through another loading screen. No bueno!

 I had fun with Rune, but I'll admit that the frequency and length of the loading screens do put a damper on the experience, but luckily, that's the game's biggest problem. The combat itself is fairly shallow but also very charming, I enjoyed this throwback to an older era of PC games, I find these kinds of ports very appealing, and as janky as the game is by today's standards.... I still think there's something a bit timeless about strafing around skeletons while madly slashing around.
 7.5 out of 10

Review #825: Ys - Memories of Celceta

 This is.... what? Ys IV's third version?

 I really haven't played as much Ys as I would've liked. I loved Oath in Felghana on PC, which was my first Ys game, and I enjoyed Ys I & II on the DS, but as far as Ys goes that's all I have played... so far. Ys: Memories of Celceta is another once-exclusive of the Vita that is a sort of-pseudo remake of Ys IV. Look, Ys' timeline is weird and a lot of games got remade, some more than once, and it really doesn't matter since Ys is, according to the lore, a collection of stories about Adol, so, in a way, all versions of the same game can coexist as different versions of the same tale. I'm telling you, this is one of the weirdest JRPG timelines to keep track of.

 In a weird twist, Ys - Memories of Celceta could very well work as a your entry point in the series. Not only does it start off with an amnesiac Adol, but throughout the game as you pick up your memories you'll get a look at Adol's childhood and why he decided to became an adventurer. But getting this mute hero's memory back is but one story thread, the bigger story thread concerns Adol and a man that claims to know Adol, Duren, who undertake the town's mayor request of exploring the nearby forest and charting a full map. As you go through the city you'll discover towns, some which Adol visited, some he hadn't, as well as meet new friends and foes. To be honest, characters are pretty one-note and the plot isn't very interesting, but it's serviceable. What really drove me when playing this game was me wanting to explore the forest, not caring about how the story developed because it was so dull.

 The game's world is large enough, and while it seems like the forest is open for you to explore in any way that you want... it actually isn't. There are plenty of barriers that require a character ability or an artifact ability to proceed, so while you can take your time to explore, and you should since you get money and item rewards for charting the map, most of the time there's only one road that'll take you where you need to be and others that you'll eventually get to go through. I liked it, charting the map was fun... although the map percentage is busted, if by the end of the game you haven't got the full 100%... well, have fun revisiting every area hugging every wall, because the black fog also counts towards the map's percentage. Ridiculous.

 There's plenty of sidequests to partake in, so it pays to revisit every town after you triggered a new story event. Although it's better if you wait until you get the Golden Wing, an item that lets you teleport to ANY stone tablet you've found. At first you can only travel between tablets of the same color, which makes backtracking a bit of an annoyance, but once you get the golden wing, you can, at pretty much any time, open the map, press R and just pick where you wanna warp. As for side quests, they come in various flavors: Slay a monster, gather a material or a set of materials, help a vendor tend to his store... there's quite a bit of variety. As you go through the game, you'll come across minerals, plants as well as beast parts from fallen enemies, these can be used to refine or strengthen your weapons or use them to trade for money, which is surprisingly hard to come by. By the end of the game you'll have a six man team and it'll be very tough to maintain your healing supplies, since no character can heal, as well as everyone's equipment up to date.

 Combat is fairly fun in this game, it takes place in real time. While you have six party members, your party can only be made up of three, although you can pause at any time and swap party members. You take control of one character while the AI takes control of the other two, and you can press circle to swap between active party members. AI allies deal less damage, but also take less damage and can't die, since their health bar never goes below 1 HP, so you don't really need to babysit them. What takes the most getting used to is how loose the combat is, even your basic square attacks will propel your characters forward. And it's weird at first, but eventually you'll get used to moving all over the place as you fight. Every character has a different weapon type: Slash, Blunt and Pierce, and some enemies are weak or strong against a certain type. I didn't care about this system, and bosses don't have any weakness or resistance, so I just played with the party I wanted to play with.

 But that's only half the fun. You also get a dodge and a block button, and if you time them right you'll get a Flash Dodge or a Flash Block, which will slow down your enemy for a few seconds, allowing you to retaliate with free hits. And if that wasn't enough, every character has access to a ton of special moves, although you can only equip four at a time, used by holding R and pressing the face button they are assigned to. Special moves can level up as you use them, and they run on a 100 energy gauge, skills costing 40 energy at most. You can recover this energy by landing hits and defeating enemies. So, basic hits charge your energy for your special moves, and special moves, in turn, fill another, yellow gauge, once full you can press the L button to unleash a powerful super move. It's a good system, and it's very dynamic too, since you recharge your energy by landing hits you are encouraged not to store your energy for 'tougher enemies'. And tougher enemies there are! Besides bosses, you may come across particularly tough monsters, which you can try to avoid or try to defeat for a higher amount experience points than regular enemies.

 One of the game's biggest problems is how annoying it can get to proceed through the environment. First, the 'puzzles' which aren't actually puzzles, y'see, each character has a different ability: Ozma can strike walls, Karna can shoot daggers, Duren can pick locks. The 'puzzles' are as simple as selecting the appropriate character, pressing triangle and watch what happens. You don't have to think too hard, although, to be fair, the final dungeon does have a few brain teasers. Regardless, this means that if a character isn't in your party... you have to pause the game, enter the party menu and swap them in to do their trick, then go into the menu, go into the party section and swap them out again. This is a regular occurrence with artifacts, you'll come across a steep wall that you must run through, or rocks you must break, or need to get smaller to go through a cranny... Once again, you have to enter a menu and equip the appropriate artifact. At least artifacts get a shortcut, you can press the tiny red button on the HUD with your finger to open up the item menu, from which you can use healing items or swap your equipped artifact.

 I liked Ys: Memories of Celceta, and... it kinda rekindled my interest to invest in the rest of the series, like, I really want to get a physical copy of Oath in Felghana for PSP. But I digress, Memories of Celceta is a fine RPG that fails to stand out, but succeeds in being really fun.
 7.5 out of 10

Review #824: Killzone Mercenary

 The Vita at its finest.

 I had never played a Killzone game before, and my, oh my, what a fantastic first impression Killzone Mercenary makes! It's not just a great little game, it's also a brilliant showcase of what the Vita could've done. I've been playing a lot of Vita games that... didn't look all that great, like Mortal Kombat and Ys VI, and as good as Ridge Racer looked it struggled to maintain 30 fps. But Killzone Mercenary looks almost as good as a PS3 game, and maintains a steady framerate to boot! This is the future the Vita promised. This is what the Vita could do.

 The game pits you as mute hero Danner, a merc for hire that is currently hired to battle the Helghast, space nazies, through small skirmishes that begin with him and another buddy rescuing a ISA commander. I knew very little about the series' lore, and while the game didn't really ease me into it, I had no trouble following the story. The story is quite cliched, so much so that its twists fail to impress, but very early into the game I realized that I wasn't here for the story, I was here for the gameplay. The story's main drawback is that it's told mostly through boring de-briefing segments before each mission, working as a sort of veil while the game loads, and you can skip them as soon as the game does so. The game comes with two modes, a 9-mission long single player campaign as well as a online multiplayer component. You can replay story missions, and after beating them for the first time you gain the option to replay them with three different sets of mini missions for better money rewards, mini-missions such as scoring X amount of head shots with X gun, only using X guns, finishing the mission in under X minutes, etc. Considering that the story campaign is lengthy enough, I think it's not a bad offering.

 Mercenary follows the modern FPS blueprint to a tee, regenerating health, two weapon maximum and melee kills in one hit. That said, since you play as a Merc, the entire game is built around money. Killing enemies, and how you kill them, reward you with money, achieving certain milestones, such as killing everyone stealthily without being noticed, or using a certain type of weapon for a long time, will also reward you with money. You can then spend this money on new weapons, the only way to swap them, get new armor, get a drone or get grenades. The thing about the armament in this game... there really isn't a 'best' weapon or 'best' drone or 'best' armor, every piece of weaponry has different stats and functionality, so it's not like there's a 'best' gun. This means that it's easy to get a loadout that you really like and never change it, heck, you can do just fine with your original loadout. I never changed my armor since the starting piece was perfectly balanced with resistance and mobility. This also means that money quickly loses its purpose, and while you can use it to instantly refill your ammo and bring your drone back from its cooldown period.... you can just as easily refill your ammo from fallen enemies. This is probably why there's a small fee for re-equipping armament you already purchased.

 The game has this beautiful weight to it, running and jumping around feels so satisfying thanks to this. It also makes the game a bit more slower paced than you'd think at first glance, but I really liked it. Controls... do the best that they can. For example, since there are not L3 and R3 buttons, sprinting is done by pressing circle while moving, and crouching is done by... pressing circle while standing still. It's not ideal and may ruin your stealthy approach, but it's not awful. Being an early Vita game, it has a lot of mandatory touch controls. You can disable in-game touch button, which is neat since it cleans up the HUD, but it also means that the ammo counter is gone, because it's tied to one of these buttons. What where they thinking? I learned to live without knowing how much ammo I had left. Regardless, this doesn't do away with every touch feature. Menus are entirely touch based, but since they don't have scrolling, they work much better than they did on Ridge Racer. There are a few in-game hacking mini-games that are entirely touch based, and are quite dull to be honest, but most of them are optional. While I claimed that melee is a one-hit kill, I lied a bit, the melee button triggers a 'swipe the screen' QTE, which can fail if you swipe the wrong way. As a hater of all things touch/motion that aren't optional... I learned to tolerate them because the game was just THAT good, which is pretty much exactly like what happened with Uncharted - The Golden Abyss.

 On one hand, Killzone Mercenary is the perfect showpiece for the Vita, but on the other it's also a great first person shooter. Not only does it look amazing, it also features very satisfying gameplay, I mean, every headshot you land turns into a delicious pop of their heads. They could've gone with an upgrade system to make money matter a bit more, but I'm not complaining because the game is great as it is, and definitely one of the finest games on the system, no wonder Call of Duty and Resistance on the Vita reviewed so poorly, this game set the bar too high.
 8.0 out of 10

Review #823: Ridge Racer(Vita)

 Ridge Racer 7 - Shareware Edition

 These last couple of months I've been finally delving into Ridge Racer, and now it's time to delve into the black(est) sheep of the family, its Vita release. What this game is, in a nutshell, is like a demo of Ridge Racer 7, you get the same amazing gameplay, but 10% of the content... unless you pony up some cash for the DLC, which I'll never.

 What you get with this pathetic little cart is 3 courses and 5 cars. That's it. It's pretty much on par with the classic Ridge Racer games, but that era was long gone by then, so there's absolutely no excuse. I'd like to say that the picked 3 of the best tracks from RR7, but every track in that game was a winner, so I can't even claim that, but at least you can play all three tracks on reverse, I guess. The Single Player content is pretty much non-existent: Spot Race, which is a basic 3-lap race on any course you wish and Time Trial. The rest of the modes are exclusively online, which is pretty much dead so they don't count. You are meant to play the single races on the same three tracks over and over again, which will slowly upgrade your car, making you faster, while the CPU racers get stuck with their old machines, making it easier and easier. You also rack up points which you can use to add abilities to your car, such as change the way Nitro works and how you charge it. I mean, I was done with the game less than an hour in, but soldiered on through two more hours because Ridge Racer 7 was amazing and this game is pretty much a demo for RR7.

 The game comes packed with 7 different songs, and these are the best songs in the entire series. And that's saying something considering the entire series hasn't disappointed me yet with their OSTs. The graphics are quite good, all things considered, but the game struggles to maintain a 30 fps, I mean, it's acceptable, but sometimes it'll drop a few frames even when you are driving by your lonesome. Since this was an early Vita release it HAD to use its features, which means that the menus are exclusively touch-based and they are rather finicky, they should've gone with big, static buttons instead of menus and options you can scroll through. I mean, just like with the framerate, the menus are acceptable, but they are far from being an ideal in-and-out of the game.

 Despite the game being a complete failure as far as content goes, the game plays exactly like Ridge Racer 7. You got your big emphasis on drifting, you get a three-tier nitro gauge that fills as you drift and can be used with different multipliers: Use a basic nitro, X2 nitro or X3 nitro, managing it at your leisure. Even with a mediocre framerate the sense of speed is fantastic, and the amazing soundtrack makes it an easy game to get lost into. They also added a new blue/red static filter every time you collide with something which felt quite cool.

 This game presents me with the same conundrum the classic RR games did: The gameplay is top-notch, but there is no content. However, the truth is that it was easier to be more forgiving on the older games due to the era they were released in. That said, the fact is, this game has three completely unique tracks and a more refined driving system. That's why I'm gonna go with a 5.0. It has pretty much no content, true, but the gameplay is fantastic. I managed to get three hours worth of fun out of a measly three tracks, so that's gotta count for something.
 5.0 out of 10

Review #822: One Piece - Pirate Warriors 4

 A Pirate I was meant to be, trim the sails and roam the seas!

 While I only got into Pirate Warriors with 3, I could instantly tell that it was good stuff. One Piece and its creative character design and powers made for fantastic movesets in a Musou game, and the lack of a proper jump wasn't as bad as I feared when I first heard about it when the first game came out. One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is here, and boy, they have changed things up, there's a jump button for one, as well as other mechanics that make it fairly experimental as far as Musou goes.

 As per usual with the Musou games, there are three modes: Dramatic Mode, which is the game's story mode, Free Mode, which lets you play Dramatic Mode with any character and without cutscenes and Treasure Log, which is a collection of about 99 mini-missions under silly circumstances while random mini-scenarios occur, such as having to fight any of two combatants or having to rescue a villager from a random character. The story mode is a mixed bag. It features 3 pre-timeskip scenarios: Alabasta, Ennies Lobby and a mix-mash of the Sabaody Archipelago arc and the Marineford arc, as well as 3 post-time skip scenarios: A mix of the first post-time skip chapter when the Straw Hat Pirates reunited with the Dressrosa arc, the new Whole Cake arc and a new, made up version of the Wano arc. As any connoisseur would know, One Piece is fairly long and a LOT of stuff happens between these arcs, so the game tries to condense as much as possible the in-betweens through cut-scenes. New comers will probably have a hard time keeping up, core characters such as Chopper and Brook get some pretty shallow introductions and barely any scenes afterward. On the other hand, the cutscenes are really good and do a great job of adapting some key scenes from the series. There are a lot of them too, so while every scenario is divided into 6 12 minute stages, there are so many scenes to watch that it'll bump up your play time, which isn't a bad thing when it's so entertaining to watch, at least to someone that knows One Piece.

 Basic gameplay remains the same: You vs thousands of brain-dead enemies and stronger generals. Y is a basic attack string that can be peppered with X button presses to produce more powerful attacks. The first change is an emphasis on air combos, B is now a jump button that can be pressed mid-combo to launch enemies up into the sky, and A is the power charge, a dash that deals low damage and can be used to cancel your attacks...or jumps. So you can push an enemy into the air and tie combos along, by power-dashing, your limit being a Stamina gauge, which refills over time. The other change was to the Super/Musou attacks, as they have no dedicated button... or slot. Each character starts off with four special moves, at least one of them being a Musou attack, which are used by holding down the R button and pressing any face button. Each character has MORE than four of these abilities, but you can only equip four at a time, and gain more by leveling them up. Not every character has the same surpluss of abilities, Luffy being the one with the most, from form changes(Gear 2nd, Boundman, etc) to Super moves. These R-button abilities refill as you deal and receive damage. It's an interesting idea, and works quite decently. You could equip four Musou/Super attacks if you want, at the cost of taking longer to refill, or you could use some quicker but weaker super moves, heck, you don't really need to equip a Burst(Such as a form change) at all!

 The leveling up system is completely different, you no longer gain traditional experience points, but rather spend earned money and coins, the latter mostly from defeated enemies, on growth Maps, to obtain stat gains, extended attack strings, new moves and even passive skills you can equip. There's one shared growth map and two exclusive maps per character. The three-tiered enemy life gauges I hated from PW3 is gone, but bosses now have armor gauges that you must deplete in order to deal more considerable damage, but these gauges regenerate every time you destroy them. The game claims that the new giant enemies can only be harmed when they are attacked, but I could deal damage just fine even when they weren't doing anything, which is a good thing, since otherwise they'd be a bit of a bore. To be honest, I'm not fond of this new armor gauge, but I prefer it over the three-tier life gauge. A new aesthetic change is that you can damage the environment around you, sometimes you can even destroy entire buildings. It's not a game changer, but it's a nice detail.

 There are 13 new characters, made up from Kaido, Big Mom, some of the Pirate Super Novas and all of Sanji's siblings, his father isn't playable, for whatever reason, though. Sounds pretty neat right? Well, in something I haven't seen since the classic PS2 era, they actually removed characters. Garp actually got turned into an NPC, which is completely ridiculous since he used to have an entire moveset. Enel, my favorite villain, got removed because who knows why, Moria and Perona are gone too. And the Strawhats? Only Luffy, Zoro, Sanji and Usopp get their pre-timeskip forms, which, once again, is ridiculous since the other pre-timeskip characters they had movesets in Pirate Warriors 3 and they even have their models/skins in this game. And while it's true that this game is using a new graphic engine, old characters animate pretty much exactly like they did in the previous game, so what gives? Yes, characters have expanded movesets thanks to the R-palette, but keep in mind that, sometimes, these moves used to be X-combo enders in the previous game. There's no excuse other than laziness, and don't worry, they'll nickel and dime you with 9 DLC characters anyways.

 Speaking of no excuse, the targeting system still sucks. It's been a long while since Musou games haven't had a decent targeting system, but in this game it was particularly egregious. The lock-on camera loves to get stuck around, and sometimes, even get stuck in angles you can't see the enemy you are targeting. Their solution was to make it so that if you press the Power Dash button while standing still it'll automatically take you to the targeted enemy. But it's not a decent a solution. If they are gonna cut corners so bad they'll better fix the most basic of mechanics. And the loading times are pretty darn long too.

 As many corners as they cut, the sad reality is that this is still one of the most fun series of Musou games. Honestly, the crazy powers and the ways these characters move are a perfect fit for the genre. The new changes they made to the mechanics feel like a step in the right direction, and the aerial combat was way more fun than it deserved to be. I love the Musou game, but they are very shallow affairs and they never change too much, even with the new additions this game still follows the same blueprint very closely, so removing characters doesn't sit very well with me. The new aerial combat also really brought to light how much they need to work on the targeting system. When it's all said and done, Pirate Warriors 4 is still a choice game when you feel like playing Musou, when you just want to turn off your brain and feel like a one-man army. But it can be better.
 8.5 out of 10

Review #821: Sonic Mania Plus

 This settles it once and for all 2D > 3D.

 Sonic Mania Plus is the truest example of a modern classic, it feels exactly like the old, classic Genesis Sonic games and looks like them too. The most intriguing thing about this game is that it wasn't developed by Sonic Team, but rather by a team of fans that earned their chops by producing hacks for the original games, then developing official ports of said original games and culminating with Sonic Mania, a completely original new game endorsed by Sega themselves. This is the Sonic game for scorned fans, for people that longed for a return to Sonic's golden years.


 The game is more meaty than what you'd expect. The main game is made up of 12 zones with 2 stages each, as well as a secret final stage if you manage to nab all 8 Chaos Emerald by finding the hidden 3-D rings that take you to a bonus runner stage in which you must catch a flying UFO. These 12 zones are a mix of remade old stages from Sonic 1-3 as well as beautiful and creative new zones. The whole game should take you about 3 hours to complete. If that wasn't enough, the game can be played as Sonic, Tails, Sonic & Tails, Knuckles, Ray or Mighty, each character having a little something that makes him different from the others. Sonic can perform a new Drop Dash, being able to come out of a jump into a spin dash, Tails can fly, Knuckles can air-dive and climb walls, Ray can glide and Mighty is the "I win" character, get a ground pound and invulnerability as long as he is turned into a ball(Spin dashing or jumping). There are not a whole lot of character exclusive areas, but each stage has a ton of alternate paths and routes, and considering each character has slightly different abilities... I'd call it a win. Finally, there's an Encore mode, which changes stages a bit, but only a bit, however, it adds a new ending and drops the life system entirely, now instead of lives you rescue every playable character and you play as a pair, being able to switch between both at any time. If you die, you'll play as the next rescued character on your roster until you've got none left. It's a nice twist on the formula, so even if stages weren't changed too much, you get an entirely new way to play the game, one that has you, potentially, playing as all characters. Lastly, there's a set of multiplayer mini-games.

 Gameplay is classic Sonic at its best. Full disclosure, while I've played every Sonic game... I've always been more of a Mario fan, and the only classic Sonic I've ever beaten is 1. Regardless, if you like Sonic's brand of running and jumping you'll love this game. A few stages have very light puzzle-like segments, but nothing too taxing, just find the correct bumper to jump on or figure out how to reach enough speed to clear a wall. Every stage ends with a boss, and they are pretty simple too figure out too, well, most of them. I had a bit of trouble with a few bosses, but no hurdle was too high. All in all, I think the game offers an adequate challenge. The game runs on the classic lives system, as long as you have lives left, if you die, you'll pick up from the last checkpoint you touched, run out of lives and it's back to the start of the level.

 As you should know, Sonic runs on rings. As long as you've got at least one ring, if you tough an enemy or an enemy hits you, you'll survive the hit but lose all your rings, although you are given a short window of time to try collect a few of them back before they disappear. Get hit without a ring and you die. If you manage to retain at least 50 rings when you get to a checkpoint, you can jump into it to trigger a classic blue-orb catching mini-game, and it's in your best interest to try to win these, because you'll get medals that will unlock little bonuses, like Sonic's Sonic CD abilities, the Debug Mode and the 'and Knuckles' mode that let's you play as Sonic & Knuckles.

 The game is absolutely beautiful. Every new sprite and every new animation made for this game are nothing short of amazing, featuring some very smooth animation. It's incredible how they managed to make such tiny sprites look so GOOD. The music too is brilliant, it's very jazzy and it certainly adds to the experience. As I played through the game it transported me back into the 90's, which is incredible since I skipped the SNES and GENESIS during said era, going straight from NES to N64. That said, as good as the game looks, a few stages were so detailed that it was hard to distinguish if parts of the environment could harm me or not, like the moving flowers on the flying Desert stage, as well as a set of crates on, I think, Studiopolis Zone, which I wasn't sure if they were part of the background or not. None of these few confusing spots actually resulted in me dying or getting hit, so it's not a big issue, but I think they could have done a better job with color-depth and detail to make it more obvious, which is kind of a necessity when your game is based on speed, I think.

 Now then, taking into account that I love Mario and am somewhat indifferent to Sonic.... I felt like a few stages dragged on for too long. Hell, I feel like the entire game might be a bit too long, although this one might be on me since I decided to finish the game in one sitting, and once I started to feel a bit bored I still soldiered on. Still, other retro games of similar length, like Ninja Warriors or the faux-retro Shovel Knight and Blazing Chrome didn't tire me so soon. On the other hand, people that actually enjoy Sonic get a game that plays just exactly how they like it that also lasts a fair amount. Not to mention, a ton of added replay value thanks to multiple playable characters and the multiple routes per stage.

 So... here's the thing with Sonic Mania Plus, it's a game that so closely mimics the older games that old fans of the hedgehog will absolutely adore it, but it also means that it won't make Sonic any new fans. I can appreciate the game for what it is, an amazing throwback to the classic series, but since I've never been too much of a fan of this speedier, looser take on the platform genre... it didn't completely win me over. I liked my time with the game, but I'm not sure if I'll be coming back any time soon. Still, what really matters is that fans of the Blue Hedgehog will get exactly what they want and then some.
 7.5 out of 10