Sonic Mania PS4 Review
Posted on: 2017-09-12
Our rating:
Sonic Mania is a blast from the past and it is a return to form for the Blue Blur, with its charming art style and great gameplay. This is a fantastic old school platformer that everyone should own, so go out and get it, you will not regret it.
Sonic hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to its most recent iterations, with the last major game Sonic Boom being a buggy and unfinished mess, and the ungodly radioactive mutation that was Sonic 2006. Sega have decided to not only reboot Sonic, but themselves as a company, with great success so far with the excellent Yakuza games we have got this year. Sonic Mania is the game that we deserve after all the years of the less than stellar titles; it is fan service at its finest, as it goes back to the old school look and gameplay of the Mega Drive Games like Sonic, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic CD.
Sonic Mania ditches the whole complicated story it use to have back in the 3D games and goes for the more simple stop the bad guys plot similar to most 2D platformers during the 90’s. What I like about this game is that it is very old school with its thinking as it focuses on the gameplay rather than trying to craft a complex narrative like most games of today, I don’t mind a good story in my games but I prefer gameplay over anything.
How does the game handle? Well if you have played Sonic 1-3 on the Mega Drive you’ll feel very at home with this game, as it goes for a mix of all three of those games with the graphical style of the 16 bit era. You have 12 zones with two acts within them, 8 of them are remakes of classic stages so you have different interpretations of Green Hill Zone and Chemical Plant Zone. The gameplay is fast and frantic with great platforming elements, it also gets challenging in the later stages as some of the bosses gave me a bit of trouble.
You can partake in special stages where you go through a 3D race collecting blue spheres where you can collect the Chaos Emeralds. If you collect all 7 of the chaos emeralds you can transform into Super Sonic, which gives you super speed and Invincibility if you have 50 or more rings. You have another set of special stages and these are for unlocking new content for the “No Save” mode where you can mess around with features that completely change the game, these can range from having Knuckles as your partner or the debug mode where you brake the game almost with weird creations.
The boss fights are a joy in this game, which is unusual as I never really enjoyed the boss fights in older Sonic games. You’ll fight Doctor Eggman in various scenarios as well as his new robot creations The Hardboiled Heavies. Each Boss fight is fun and unique; the highlight is the Chemical Plant Zone boss fight where you play a round of Mean Bean Machine which is a puzzle game similar to Dr Mario. It keeps you guessing what is going to happen next with each encounter and had me grinning ear to ear.
The presentation of Sonic Mania purposely evokes the look of a Mega Drive game, with subtle touches with new animations and effects that were not possible on the 16 bit hardware. The high definition resolution really makes the bright and vibrant colours pop out of the screen, as each environment is unique with its look. My favourite zone is Press Garden Zone with the mix of pinks and greens, coupled with the interesting slope design for high speed action. Animations look great for each character; they have more frames of animation compared to the Mega Drive, such as Sonic’s impatient idle animation looking more natural.
Sonic Mania is a blast from the past and it is a return to form for the Blue Blur, with its charming art style and great gameplay. This is a fantastic old school platformer that everyone should own, so go out and get it on your PS4, Xbox One or Nintendo Switch you will not regret it.
5/5
Article by:
Sam has lived in Bristol all his life. A keen cyclist he speeds around the city but video games are his bread and butter. Whether the old Nes and Snes games or the XBox One and Playstation releases he loves them all. Sam runs his own gaming blog called Bristolian Gamer where he had been reviewing indie games, doing retro reviews and venting his anger at the industry when it does wrong since 2010. Sam joined the 365Bristol team in December 2014.
