Sonic and his furry posse haven’t had the best run in recent years, but the ailing hedgehog finally returns in good form for his latest outing. Sifting out most of the cruddy elements from recent games that soured longtime fans and pushed some folks away for good, the development team hits a real sweet spot with Sonic Generations. Blending the tried-and-true classic 2D Sonic gameplay of the ’90s with a refined, tighter version of Sonic’s recent 3D jaunts yields a nostalgia-laden experience that favors blazing speed over schlocky gimmicks. When you add high replay value and a heap of extra goodies to that winning formula, you get one of the better Sonic games in recent memory.
Generations stars not one but two different versions of Sonic that coexist simultaneously in the same realm as a result of the game’s time-bending plot setup. An upbeat picnic party gets ruined when a dark, powerful menace sucks up all of Sonic’s pals and scatters them through time and space. Left stuck in a void, modern Sonic meets up with his retro self from the 16-bit era, and the two team up to recover their buddies and set things right. The story is laced with pleasantly light humor and serves as the vehicle for bringing the old and new eras together. Saving your friends trapped in time on the hub world requires you to warp back to memorably reimagined stages culled from past Sonic games. You have to tackle every level twice–once with the old-school Sonic and once with the modern Sonic–and that might sound like a cheap way of extending the adventure, but each hero’s run offers a very different experience.
