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Sonic Colours: Ultimate

Sonic Colours: Ultimate

Somehow in an attempt to modernise one of the blue hedgehog's best adventures, they have managed to make it worse.

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There are many ways to relaunch a game. You have the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy, a re-creation of the original while retaining everything that made the experience special. You have The Last of Us Remastered and Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, two examples that are refining the original game while adding some elements without making any drastic changes. You also have Sonic Colours: Ultimate. Here it seems that the developers have put all their efforts into making people dislike what was one of the Sonic series' most respected games.

To start positively: This is definitely Sonic Colours, one of the best received Sonic games released during the current millennium. The structure of the game is very much unchanged from the original. Eggman has created an extraterrestrial amusement park and asks the inhabitants of the world for forgiveness for his previous aggressions. Sonic and Tails, always skeptical, travel to the park to find out what Eggman is really up to. It's a light-hearted story with a bit of uneven comedic timing, but it's enough to motivate. If the story does not, the stage concepts are so creative and the playtime so short that you can quickly play through it in one night. Extended fun comes from exploring the paths to find all the secrets. The game often finds an arcade-like charm by aiming for higher and higher top scores for each stage, which provides a lot of replay value.

Sonic Colours: Ultimate

And there it stops. What follows is a collection of changes they have made from the original that really worsens the experience. First of all: All the cutscenes are taken directly from the original. Same resolution, with a bold but ineffective attempt at upscaling that, makes the whole image a bit blurry. One thing should be said about the original, which becomes visible through these scenes, it was a nice Wii game and the style really holds up!

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The disappointments come when you actually start playing. The great Pixar-like style has been painted over with greasy fingers, everything shines in a way reminiscent of Mario Kart Wii. The details in the background have not become more visible with the resolution you get on newer consoles, as the new light engine blows out all strong colours and light sources to seem more "realistic". The variation in colours between all the worlds loses a bit of the sparkle they had on the Wii. All this is of course depends on your taste, but if this is what an "improved" version of Colours looks like, it should also be a way to keep the original style in an upscaled state. The problem is exacerbated by the switch back and forth between old and new when cutscenes are shown.

This problem also applies to music. One of the highlights of the Wii version was the soundtracks that followed all the stages. Each planet had three variations of the world's main theme, which were alternated to suit each stage best. The tunes still pop in my brain sometimes, ten years later. In Ultimate, there are some new remixes added for more variation in the soundtrack. Some of the old variants are still played. Again, here it really depends on your personal taste whether or not you like new remixes. The problem is that the new and old versions are so different that they could have been from different games. Where the Wii version offered funky electronic rhythms with elements of acoustic instruments, Ultimate has gone for the same all-electronic style we last heard in Sonic Forces. Both have their highlights, but they do not fit well together. Here I would like to have the choice between the new and old soundtrack.

Sonic Colours: Ultimate

"Isn't that in the options menu?" you may ask. No, there is virtually nothing there. On sound selection, you can control the volume of music and sound effects. Individually, you may assume. But no, there is ONE slider that sets BOTH the music and the sound effects simultaneously. It would have gone well if the sound was actually balanced. Sound effects jump randomly between the right and left channels, leading to severe headaches for anyone who dares to play with a headset. These sound effects are also not uniform in volume. It seems like they are rolling a dice on whether the ring sound effects should be in 1 or 11. If you run through a long series of rings, something you often do in the Sonic games, just say goodbye to your eardrums. All music fades out and the rings drown out all other sound effects. It will be extremely tiring way before you reach the end of the game.

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In a spasmodic modernisation attempt, they have added options for how Sonic looks in the game. You can make his gloves blue, shoes yellow, among other things. Most of them look ugly and or not strengthened by the new style, but it gives replay value in the form of new coins you can pick up on each stage. Many are hidden behind new roads only available with the new power-up, Jade Ghost Wisp. This allows you to bind yourself to enemies and flow through walls. It feels nice to use, but it's also held back by the fact that stages have not been changed in terms of design. You can count on one hand all the times it is actually needed to complete a stage, which is sad because it is one of the more fun power-ups you can use in the game. If you collect 15 red rings in a world, you unlock the opportunity to race with Metal Sonic to unlock more cosmetic items. It's okay, but not something that really adds to the experience.

Sonic Colours: Ultimate

This really applies to the whole package. None of the add-ons increase the value of the original. On some points, it only makes it worse. This does not feel like a remaster of Sonic Colours, but rather a remaster of Sonic Colours before quality assurance was done. The problems are so obvious and severe that anyone who wants to play Colours should rather dust off their Wii or Wii U and enjoy a working version. And I also forgot to mention it, but the game crashed three times during my first replay, which took three hours. Two of the crashes threw me back to a previous save. One was on the last boss and forced me to play it again after restarting the game. All this is very sad, as the original was and is one of the best games on the Wii, and one fans have always wanted a re-release of on more capable hardware. Now we've got that, but this is by no means what we asked for.

Sonic Colours: Ultimate
04 Gamereactor UK
4 / 10
+
It's still Sonic Colours at heart.
-
Uglier than the original, poorly optimised sound balance with no options, bad attempts at modernisation.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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Sonic Colours: UltimateScore

Sonic Colours: Ultimate

REVIEW. Written by Michael Breien

Somehow in an attempt to modernise one of the blue hedgehog's best adventures, they have managed to make it worse.



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