So I played Sonic 4, and may I just say; tons of fuckin' fun! This shit was oldschool sonic all the way. Right down to a bitch-hard final boss. Great stage gimmicks, fun as hell, and I still do love my casino levels!
If I did have one nitpick, the music is ass. One or two good tracks, and a fuckton of shit. The hell, Sonic?! How does a Sonic game, of all things, fuck up a soundtrack?! Yes, it feels Genesis-y, but they forgot that whole "melody" thing, and the boss musics are repetitive as fuck.
I'm sure Darkstorm will still find a way to hate it, though.
@Nobodyman:
Okay, so I just now fully completed Sonic 4 and got everything in the game. Here are my complaints:
-The wonky physics: Actually, they're not too bad once you get used to them, but Sonic's momentum and especially the homing attack really need to be worked on. As I said earlier, your reflexes may cause the homing attack to go off at inconvenient times (just before landing on a small platform) but another thing I noticed is that the target system is kinda weird. If you go too far above or beyond the target the homing attack, naturally, won't work. But the rub is that the crosshair will remain on the target making it look like the homing attack will work. Gave me a few surprises throughout the game.
I never ran into this, myself. Momentum issues were dealt with by starting a run with a quick homing attack, so that never became an issue. I never had the homing attack not work when the crosshairs were onscreen. Lord knows I'd be spewing some profanities if that were the case.
-All the levels are just retreads of old levels: Well, I guess you could say they "reimagined" them as they did add a lot of new features, but still the game could've done with some original level design.
I expect we'll see that in episode 2. This whole game felt like a "look, Sonic's back!" Right down to the special stages resembling the ones from Sonic 1. We were pretty much going back to the way the games were, and they threw some familiar stages to show that off. I figured they'd go that route when I saw the leaked stage names, so I'd say it's likely we get the familiar stuff in episode 1, and the curveballs in episode 2.
-The camera is too close: Now, this actually is a minor complaint since I did get used to it pretty quickly, but when I first played it it was noticeable. I'm told that the reason the camera was too close is because I'm behind the technology curve and the game was formatted for an HDTV while I have an SDTV. To this I say, "Eat my ass Sega." As well as I can remember, this is the only time I've ever had this problem with a game and I know I'm not the only video game user that hasn't hopped on the HD wagon.
There should be a way to switch that, I'd assume. I have a pretty big HDTV, myself, so I didn't have issues. So, I guess if that's the case, I can say if you DID hop on the HD bandwagon, you'll have no issues.
There's gotta be a way to switch to SD scaling, though…
But despite all those flaws, Sonic 4 is one of the better Sonic games to come out in recent years. Sonic still moves fluidly for the most part once you get used to it, the music and graphics are good, most of the levels are cleverly structured and invoke the exploration factor of previous platforms, and there are hardly any glitches. It's certainly better than Unleashed, but still doesn't reached the glory of the Genesis days.
Eh, felt pretty Genesis-like to me, but I was never a huge fan of the old games (I love 'em to death, to be sure, but I don't have the same view of them folks here seem to have. Plus I was more of a Mario guy back then…). There were many multiple paths, sometimes you'd go fast and sometimes you'd do some platforming, there's stage-specific gimmicks to break monotony, you fight Robotnik at the end, and it all controls nice and tightly. Felt like the old Genesis games to me.