This is not the time or the place to bring up that I said I wasn’t going to buy it. Nor is it the time or the place to say I played and completed the 3DS version, which was pants, already. All it is sufficient to do is say this: Mistakes Were Made.
Let us begin with how rubbish the 360 version is. Let us say how many times I ran through walls or fell through the floor and died. This many times: 7. Let us now say how I died once for no discernible reason, by having lots of rings, running along a badnikless corridor, and suddenly the game loaded again and put me back at the most recent checkpoint. Let us also tell you how at one point I couldn’t progress on the Planet Wisp level because even though I had the Rocket Wisp power, pressing Y did nothing, and I had to quit and reload the stage. Let us tell you all these things.
Let us now complain about the Modern Sonic levels. Let us anguish over how, despite being far, far better than most Modern Sonic games previously, they still end up not actually being very good. Even the very best Modern Sonic level (Green Hill Zone) is worse than the very worst (Crisis City) Classic Sonic level.
Let us take a moment to recount the horror that is the requirement to replay bits of previous levels, as “challenges”, just to open up the Boss Gates. Let us try hard to forget the Vector the Crocodile level challenge, for it is the worst piece of videogaming created in the last 25 years. Let us never have to homing attack musical notes while the camera spins like a drunken mouse dancing on a Wonder Stuff LP as it plays, ever again.
Let us burn from our eyes, and especially our ears, the array of beastly chums Sonic has dragged along. Let us hope in the next game when they get sucked into a Time Vortex, that time they stay gone forever.
Let us briefly mention how poor the bosses are. Let us also mention how they get worse through the game, and how with all the amazing bosses Sega could have plucked from the Sonic series, they managed to pull exactly none of them into Sonic Generations. And the final boss is a shambling, random mess of polygons and purple with graphical glitching and seemingly irrelevant controls.
Let us list all of the good things about the game: The music. The nostalgia. Some of the Classic Sonic levels. The inclusion of the original Sonic game. This is all.
Somehow, this version was even worse than the 3DS game. It improved in some ways (Classic Sonic remains Classic Sonic, so the later levels still feel like two different Sonics – this was not the case on the 3DS), but broke it in others (mainly the Boss Gates and the challenge level completion requirements).
Let us say this, however: Sonic Generations is the best home console based Sonic game in years. Given the other games out in that time, though, that’s not really a complement.