Don't know why the reviews for this are so bad. The levels are charming, the music is GREAT. I've always loved this game, been playing it since I downloaded it on the Wii Shop. Some people complain about having to install Java to boot this game. Oh no! Software has DEPENDANCIES? UNHEARD OF! When you launch the game it takes you to the Java website where it spoon feeds you the installation. After that it booted up just fine.

Don't listen to the miserable people. They just want something to cry about.

Yeah, that Backloggd review score is very telling, and there's a reason it took a grand total of 7 years for me to finally get around to 100%ing this game. Let's just jump in off the deep end and get into it.

Sonic 4 Episode 1 is a game that does not feel good to play. Really, it all comes down to the game feel of this one. Sonic is sluggish, he takes forever to get up to full speed, the animations give poor feedback and feel sluggish as well, and ultimately that was already the death nail for this game. You take a game like Sonic 3, a game known, in part, for its super intuitive, responsive controls, make a sequel to it where that is not the case, and you're asking for a bad time. Even the spindash feels slow as dirt. This is without mentioning that the game lacks the iconic gameplay element from the first three Sonic games of actual physics. In those games, Sonic could roll up and down hills naturally with real weight, it was such a huge part of what made those original games stand out, and continue to be known to this day. This game entirely lacks that, and in it's place we have that iconic image of Sonic standing sideways on a wall from this game. Sonic needed a few more passes through the basic movement department before any levels were designed around this guy, it's surprisingly rough. The only saving grace for this is, ironically, the fact that they've added the homing attack, originating from 'Sonic Adventure', to this title, which gives you an option to accelerate at a decent pace. Unfortunately, this homing attack is also arguably the aspect that ruins the game from a totally different angle.

So, they've messed up the controls. That's half the battle with a 2D Sonic game, but they didn't leave the level design untouched as well. Because you now have a move that lets you chain together enemies, the level design is now built around this in large parts, with you just spamming the homing attack in chains of enemies. Riveting. If the game didn't feel so stiff already, these segments could be a brief power trip, and could be quite fun, but the rest of the level design doesn't really make up for it. In large part, this game follows the 'Super Mario' level design scheme. In short, this scheme means each level is centered around one gameplay mechanic that continually gets tested and tried throughout the level, and it is basically never seen in levels afterwards. This is a fantastic way to design a video game, that's why the Super Mario series is so acclaimed, but the application with it here brings a few problems. First off, being Sonic 4, it should follow the scheme of the previous games in the series that do not do this, but secondly, gimmicks like these in Sonic games tend to just slow the pace of the game down more than anything. I don't want to get stopped to use a cannon, or roll on balls, or use a torch in the dark, it just slows the pace down, which is contradictory to the main point of a speed-based platformer. They also lack depth with these mechanics, often failing to do anything fun with them rather than... use them over and over. When the game isn't doing this, it's generally just propelling you forward using dash pads and springs, which can be fun every once in a while, but quickly gets tiring here.

The actual level themes aren't any better, as ALL FOUR OF THEM are recycled from Sonic 1 or Sonic 2. They look like near carbon copies, and the bosses they bring alongside them are nearly identical as well. At that point, don't bother giving them new names, just call them what they are. It baffles me. On note of the bosses - they suck too, and now you have to wait for their intro animation to play to hurt them... lame! The game also only has four levels, which makes it have fewer areas than any of its predecessors... from the 90's. Really getting your bang for your buck here I guess.

"Well geez is there anything you like about this game?" No, and I will continue. The art style is probably the worst in the entire series. Sonic looks like he's from a totally different game than the environments, being cell shaded, while the backgrounds are fully 3D rendered (but still 2D, think Donkey Kong Country), and also just atrociously shiny. The backgrounds look more in line with a mid 2000s hidden object PC game (which I have a lot of experience with). It just doesn't look like a finished product, I'm so surprised they didn't just... make it not look like that.

The soundtrack is a little bit better, there's actually a lot of really nice tunes here. They're just unfortunately coated in this faux 16-bit soundfont that makes them sound not the greatest. Jun Senoue is a really talented composer, he should just be let nowhere around a synthesizer ever again (something Sonic Superstars was oh so happy to show us is still true to this very day).

Achievements here also suck, and include doing the final level damageless (sucks), replaying the entire game as Super Sonic, replaying the whole game in Time Attack, and the rest are pretty reasonable. It's just those three that really annoyed me.

To conclude, you should not play this game unless you are a die hard Sonic fan, and even then it's mostly just to understand why people constantly dunk on this game. It truly is shockingly bad, a fact that's only partly excused by the fact that this was originally supposed to be a spin-off mobile game. This explains a lot of the reused content and lower budget aspects, but alas this is not the game that we got. We got Sonic 4. A poor excuse for a Sonic 3 sequel, and one of the worst platformers in the entire series.

I like torturing myself so I play this game.