Sonic Colors Ultimate - Switch Review
"I’d honestly rather play Sonic Forces."
“Sonic The Hedgehog hasn’t had the best transition into 3D”. There, I said the thing, I said the thing every Sonic review is forced to say. Sonic Colors Ultimate is a remastered version of the original Sonic Colors released back on the Nintendo Wii over 10 years ago. Still to this day, fans consider this entry to be one of if not the best modern Sonic games to be released. Seeing as I’ve never played the original, I’m excited to see if these praises hold up or if it’s just nostalgia talking.
The Good
The trademarked Sonic gameplay is here in all its glory. Run fast, go through loops, collect rings, find the Chaos Emeralds and defeat Dr Eggman. No guns like Shadow The Hedgehog, no motion control swordplay like Sonic and the Black Knight and definitely no abysmal Werehog combat like Sonic Unleashed. Just the good ol’ Sonic we know and love.
Sonic Colors Ultimate includes some new features like tokens that can be spent on cosmetics for Sonic that are hidden around all the levels and Rival Rush mode. This lets you race against Metal Sonic on a selection of levels, giving fans of the original more to do than just play the game again.
TL;DR
- Good old fashioned Sonic gameplay
- New collectable cosmetics
- New modes to challenge veteran players
The Bad
I’m sure some of you may have seen some of the seizure inducing glitches that were going viral. I want to clear things up by saying that those clips were done using a Switch emulator so it’s not representative of the final product, however these glitches are still easily replicable on physical hardware, albeit much less severe. While I didn’t experience any graphical glitches, just about every level I ran into had some kind of audio glitch.
Disclaimer: Sega have made a statement saying that they are working on fixing these issues in the future so there's a chance this may be fixed by the time this review goes out.
While the graphics and audio have received a significant upgrade, the cutscenes are straight lifted from the original Wii version. You’ll be playing this game in beautiful HD and then out of nowhere, you’ll be thrown into a cutscene from 2010 which, even at the time, was suboptimal. I’m not really a guy who complains about graphical fidelity but this was incredibly distracting.
Now this is going to be a hot take - I hate the Wisps. Ok no, that's not fair, I hate that every level is designed around having every Wisp power unlocked. What this does is make the early game an absolute slog to get through before you can actually start having fun exploring the levels for secrets and better ranks.
TL;DR
- Egregious audio and visual glitches
- Jarring cutscenes
- Levels designed around all unlockable powers making the beginning a chore
Final Score: 4/10
Really, this is what all the fuss was about? This is what Sonic fans have been telling me I’ve been missing out on? Say what you will about the weirder entries in the Sonic franchise but at least they tried to do something different. I’m sure in 2010, this was seen as a good step in the right direction but for someone like me who is experiencing it for the first time with this re-release, I’d honestly rather play Sonic Forces.
Thank you for checking out our Sonic Colors Ultimate Switch review, thank you to Sega (via Five Star Games) for providing the review code and thank you to our $5 and up Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
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