by in
Fun, Colorfull and Depressing
Sonic colors ultimate has been released on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC. It has been officially released for 3 days and I was able to complete it. Not a 100% so I can’t comment on the unlockables.
My experience with Colors before this was only Sonic Colors DS which I loved. And I was excited to play this one.
It started out fun but how farther I got more bugs and glitches showed up. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Let’s start the review.
Starting with the positives the game has been graphically been improved in some areas. Textures are higher resolutions and models are more detailed and have smoother animations.
And a lot of the songs got remixed. Because of this every act now has its own song while the original game reused music. My favorite new remix is tropical resort act 4:
The acts are mostly the same as the orginal as expected but some stages have also been changed slightly. The stages has been adjusted to allow the new wisp. The wisp in question is the Jade wisp.
The Jade wisp allows sonic to go closed off areas by zapping to green ghost spots. Or as Sega describes it: “This mysterious creature grants Sonic the ability to pass through walls easily and levitate like a ghost to reach otherwise impossible areas.”
In most places, they are only for some extra tails lives or park tokens. But in some stages they placed the red rings in new locations.
Talking about the park tokens, this is also a new addition to this remaster. These tokens are new collectables scattered around the acts and are the currency for the new customizable’s.
Sonic can now be customized to look as the player want.
The gloves, shoes, boost trail can be changed and particles effects around sonic can be addded. Plus the player’s icon can be changed. These customizations are a welcome addition and I would like them to expand on this idea.
Those were the positives and the rest from these are the negatives.
Starting with the last positive point. The customizations are able to get changed in this new menu from the option satellite. This new menu has great stats, records information, Super Sonic information and other stuff but this menu is really laggy.
It takes 3 to 5 seconds to change tabs. I point this out because this is the only menu that has this lag and is by my knowlegde the only new menu.
Another new addition is that lives are replaced for tails lives. When you die by getting hit by an enemy when having zero rings you die normally and get send to the previous checkpoint. And lose the red rings you collected so far. But no life because there are no normal lives.
But when you fall into a pit tails will put you on the last solid ground you were staning on.
This sounds great but comes with a bunch of glitches. First of all you keep your score, red rings and normal rings while the level restarts. This means you can keep collecting the same rings, red rings, park tokens and save lives over and over again. Which breaks the score system.
Then tails is supposed to put you on the last solid ground but this works poorly in side step sections and some 2d sections. In side step sections you lose the ability to side step and sometimes in 2d sections you will get 3d movement. Which doesn’t help the platforming.
And then elephant in the room the audio and visual glitches. It has been all over social media but this game has a lot of trouble with audio and visuals.
Instead of describing them all here is a video showing them:
All most all of these visual and audio glitches are on every platform and are not hard to encounter. I have seen them and kept showing up more after I finished tropical resort. This is not to say tropical resort doesn’t have them but they were harder to notice the first time.
The game also randomly crashed for me twice. There seemed to be no reason for them.
Another addition is Rival Rush. This is a good idea that is badly executed. In this mode Metal Sonic challenges Sonic to a race. One race per world. Metal Sonic isn’t an actual character though that races you and is more of a ghost trial.
In this video, it can be seen that Metal Sonic sometimes floats on moving platforms because his platforms were probably in a different location when his time was recorded. The video also shows the lazy UI added to game for this game mode.
When a new challenge appears it just immediatly shows up. No fading or some other animation. It looks like a virus pop up.
And when you start a challenge there is just no music. It all feels unpolished.
Overal Score:
5/10
It can be fun when nothing is going wrong. But when music starts acting weird or when background elements pop in and out it breaks the immersion really hard. It is a mystery why these issue showed up in this remaster of an eleven year old game.