HANDS-ON: Sonic X Shadow Generations is a welcome remaster of Sonic’s turning point

For many long-time Sonic fans, Sonic Generations marked a turning point in the fortunes of Sega’s mascot.

After years of experimentation that frankly fell flat on its face – Sonic 2006, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic Unleashed, Sonic and the Black Knight, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 – many believe that Sonic Team finally struck gold with Generations, earning the blue hedgehog a purple patch that continues to this day.

They’re wrong, incidentally – Sonic Colors was released on the Wii a year earlier and was also very good – but for the sake of the narrative here, let’s go along with it.

It’s now been 13 years since Sonic Generations was originally released on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC (as well as a separate 3DS version), and Sega has decided that enough time has passed to bring the game back in a modern remaster.

What’s more, to coincide with the debut of Shadow the Hedgehog in the upcoming third Sonic movie, this time there’s an entirely separate second game called Shadow Generations, ensuring that even those who played the 2011 version to death will have plenty of new content here.

I recently spent an hour or so with the remaster, playing through eight of its stages – four from Sonic Generations, and four from Shadow Generations. If these levels are an indication of the game as a whole, Sonic fans are in for a treat.

The remastered Sonic Generation stages play as you’d expect. My demo featured the game’s first four stages – Green Hill Zone Act 1 and 2, and Chemical Plant Zone Act 1 and 2. For the most part they’re just the 2011 versions running at a higher resolution, but there have also been a few tweaks that mean they don’t play identically to before.

The most immediately obvious example of this is the addition of the Drop Dash, the move that was first added in Sonic Mania. By jumping then holding down the jump button again in mid-air, Sonic can hit an instant spin dash as soon as he lands on the ground, which is useful when you’re landing just short of a slope and know you’re going to struggle to get the momentum to ascend it.

Each stage also now has three hidden Chaos to find, but Sonic Adventure fans shouldn’t get too excited – there’s no Chao Garden here, no matter how had you close your eyes and pray. I spoke to Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka after playing the demo (full interview to come) and he told me Chao Garden would only return if Sonic Adventure 3 ever happened, and this obviously isn’t that.

The control system has also changed somewhat to match that of Sonic Frontiers, the main outcome of this being that if you want to hit an enemy with a mid-air homing attack you have to jump then press a separate button to perform the attack, as opposed to just pressing the jump button twice. If you despise this and believe all change was brought to the planet by Satan, there’s still the option to revert back to the old control method.

By and large, however, its minor changes aside the Sonic Generations stages are just sharper looking versions of their 2011 counterparts, and that’s no bad thing at all. It’s the addition of Shadow Generations that will have most fans interested, given that it’s all brand new content.

My demo let me play two stages – Space Colony ARK Act 1 (as originally seen in Sonic Adventure 2) and Kingdom Valley Act 1 (which has been added, boldly, from Sonic 2006) – and two boss fights against Biolizard (also from Sonic Adventure 2) and Metal Overlord (from Sonic Heroes).

Both the standard stages feel like natural evolutions of Sonic Generations, with generally better visuals (since their assets were created specifically for modern platforms rather than 13 years ago). Shadow controls mostly like Sonic but also has a selection of ‘Chaos powers’ which add a bit of variety to the gameplay.

The Chaos Control ability, for example, can stop time for a short while, enabling him to navigate particularly tricky moving obstacles or use them as platforms.

He can also throw Chaos Spears at enemies from a distance or use the Chaos Snap, which is basically a homing attack but teleports him to enemies, meaning he doesn’t hit any obstacles along the way.

The boss fights are the sort of typically grandiose, over-the-top efforts you’d expect from a modern Sonic game. We showed off the Biolizard fight in footage a couple of months ago but the Metal Overlord fight was a new one for this demo.

It takes place on the sea and has Shadow using his special Doom powers to essentially ride on the water like a jetski, chasing after the Metal Overlord as it constantly runs away. The water has debris littering it, and the aim is not to avoid it, but to flick sideways into it, smashing it into the Metal Overlord.

Eventually you get the opportunity to hit a boost jump in the water, and hitting it properly will send Shadow into the sky, where he can perform a homing attack into the Metal Overlord’s weak spot. It’s not a particularly difficult boss battle but it’s certainly a visually spectacular one.

So far, then, I’m very happy with what I played of the game. The Sonic Generations stages are a gentle upgrade but the fact they’re back on modern hardware in the first place is satisfying enough.

The Shadow Generations stages, meanwhile, don’t feel like they’re reinventing the wheel but rather feel more like a natural accompaniment to the 2011 stages, with Shadow’s extra powers and the new locations giving things a fresher feel for returning fans.

“The Shadow Generations stages don’t feel like they’re reinventing the wheel but rather feel more like a natural accompaniment to the 2011 stages, with Shadow’s extra powers and the new locations giving things a fresher feel for returning fans.”

Incidentally, numerous Sonic fans have noticed that a new trailer for the game shows that Shadow finds himself in Chaos Island from Sonic Frontiers at one point. Some have argued that since Shadow was never in Frontiers, Chaos Island shouldn’t really feature among his stages.

I put this to Iizuka (again, full interview soon), and he explained the reasoning. For those not in the know, the whole point of Sonic Generations is that time and space have been distorted, resulting in Sonic having to make his way through a variety of stages from past Sonic games.

Iizuka told me that although Shadow Generations takes place at the same time as Sonic Generations, it’s still technically a 2024 game, which means that any stages from any Sonic game before this year are now fair game for potential levels.

Hard to argue with him, really.