Nothing outstays its welcome, save perhaps the Crisis City levels, brought in from the disastrous Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 release. The action is relentlessly colourful and engaging thanks to the many context switches, meaning that you can be racing up the side of a gigantic, sky-scraping clock tower and then leaping into an airship one minute and trawling through a factory riding platforms and using rockets to boost through loose metal plates five minutes later. You start off in the familiar Green Hill Zone, but before long you're in Sonic 2's Chemical Zone, Sonic Adventure 2's City Escape and even Sonic Colors' Planet Wisp. Since this is a magical mystery tour through the series' history, SEGA has also gone through and picked out some of the best settings of the last twenty years to use as the basis for each of the levels. They're still issues, but you don't encounter them anywhere near as much as you used to do because most of the game is in a format that you actually like.
This allows the developers to emphasise the best elements of the series - the incredible speed, the precision platform sections, the variety in level design and the many hidden sections and alternative routes that will keep you coming back - while reducing the frustration associated with bottomless pits, running out of lives and losing control of your character into occasional frustrating footnotes. Using the conceit of a nasty time-travelling new enemy who has disturbed the course of history, it gives you control of the original 2D Sonic and his 3D counterpart in the same game, switching you between 2D levels and 2D/3D hybrids.
SEGA has pulled itself together in recent years and gotten Sonic back on track, though, most notably with last year's Wii exclusive Sonic Colors, and Generations continues that trend. Resplendent in 2D - fast, varied, interesting with tons of replay value - the hedgehog struggled to follow his great rival Mario into the third dimension, hoodwinking critics with the Emperor's New Clothes of Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast before settling into a pattern of unsatisfying 3D platform games that threw you into bottomless pits every ten seconds and tried to tell stories instead of just spin-dashing. Sonic Generations is both an homage to the original Mega Drive Sonic the Hedgehog, released in 1991, and the suggestion of a possible future for the interminable hedgehog where 2D and 3D live happily together.ģD has always been a bit of a problem for Sonic. He's twenty years young, and judging by the latest instalment of this apparently never-ending series, he's got a good few games left in him yet.