NOTE: Sega clearly buys into the whole "North America is homogenous" argument by releasing this game as "Sonic Colors" in Canada, even though they had produced the alternate spelling for Britain. To counteract this, I will be using the proper Canadian spelling for the game. SUCK IT, SEGA.
Sonic Colours is amazing by not being particularly outstanding. I guess this is probably due to its close release to the absolutely atrocious Sonic the Hedgehog 4 – anything by comparison would look better. I talked in my review of that game of the Sonic Cycle. To some degree, Sonic Colours falls into that same trap: inane story that would be better left on the cutting room floor, a too-stringent focus on this particular game's gimmicks. The only real difference between Sonic Colours and many of the worst Sonic games (Black Knight, Unleashed, Secret Rings, on and on and on) is that Sonic Colours focuses on being fun.
I think that the prevailing argument after the failure of so many 3D Sonic games has been that not every series needs to move into 3D. And truth be told, there's only been a few series that have effectively made the transition from 2D to 3D – far fewer than most gaming media outlets claim. The funny thing, though, is that somehow, Sonic Team did make an effective transition into 3D with Sonic CD. That game understood the essence of Sonic – speed, lightning-quick path selection, and a little bit of a reversal of the standard Mario rhythmic platforming – and simply transitioned it into 3D. Now, simply is probably a bit of a misnomer; nothing ever seems to come simply to Sonic Team.
They continued the goodwill somewhat with Sonic Adventures 1 and 2, though even those games had some truly boneheaded level design. It wasn't until the end of Sega as a major console force in the early 2000s that Sonic lost pretty much all relevance, as an icon and as a gaming series. Every attempt to revitalize the brand, which focused both on "deepening the mythos" of the Sonic series (I'm throwing up in my mouth as I write that) and introducing "modern" gameplay gimmicks (the Werehog of Sonic Unleashed; the varying historic locales for the Sonic Tales series), were so fundamentally wrong that it's amazing that anyone stuck with the series at all.
I'm not going to say that their patience is entirely rewarded with Sonic Colours. This is still a deeply flawed game, which I'll get to in a bit, but for now I'll say that it's easily the best console Sonic game since Sonic CD (I haven't had a chance to play the DS version, though I hear that it's every bit as good as Sonic Rush, for my money one of the top three 2D Sonic games). Let's start with the good.
Sonic Colours is a really pretty game. That "colours" subtitle isn't a marketing ploy: colour saturates every frame of this game, threatening to burst the confines of the TV with the game's splashy palette. This type of oversaturation is the bread and butter of the Wii, and Sonic Team seem to understand the hardware almost as well as Nintendo themselves (no wonder, as Sega is very nearly a second-party developer at this point). A controlled colour palette can be used effectively in some cases, but seeing as Colours is doing its very best Saturday morning cartoon impression, it really works.
That Nintendo comparison up above wasn't for nothing – Colours is very clearly taking inspiration from 3D Mario games, albeit with the speed dialed up. Earlier 3D Sonic games seem to have been developed in a vacuum, but here they're at least ripping off the very best in the 3D platforming genre. Outside of the space theme and the transforming powerups, the action morphs from 3D to 2D and back fluidly and excitingly, a cue taken straight out of the Super Mario Galaxy playbook.
If all that Sonic Colours was was Super Sonic Galaxy, it might be fun, if derivative and not really in line with the Sonic design ethos (despite their competing nature, Sonic never was very much like Mario, at least not as much as the plethora of Mario knockoffs that have come out over the years). But Sonic Team has finally understood what they already understood back in their Sonic CD days: Sonic games don't need to fundamentally change. In essence, they just need to parlay the 2D experience into 3D and that's it. That's what Super Mario 64 did, and then Miyamoto shook things up once there was a solid foundation. Putting Sonic into medieval times or making him change into a plodding Werehog was never going to work, even from a conceptual standpoint.
To some degree, it seems as though the developers still felt beholden to have some sort of narrative framework for the action. Why couldn't the game just take place on Dr. Robotnik's space theme park without having horribly written and acted cutscenes every once in awhile? Their attempt at Saturday morning cartoon humour doesn't really jive with the whole "epic space" theme, and makes for far too many embarrassing moments.
There are efforts, too, to undo the goodwill generated by the feeling that, "yes, they finally got 3D platforming right!" Namely, those transformations I spoke of earlier. On a conceptual level, it works: Sonic is freeing a cute little alien race called the "Wisps" from the grasps of Dr. Robotnik, and when he does, they give him new powers. Great. Excellent. This is very much in the vein of transformation gameplay that has been around since the NES. No real problems here.
The problem is the game's reliance on these tranformations, and a too-stringent approach to their use. Some wisps have powers that are suited for specific purposes: drilling through the ground, for instance, or shooting from point to point as a laser. These work fine, and their short time limit of use makes a certain amount of sense. However, no matter which wisp you have control of, these same rules apply. So, for instance, an entire level might be built around the wisp that allows you to float in a little spaceship – but there's still an arbitrary timer on your use of that wisp. You'll be floating up, and the clock will run out, and you'll plummet down until you pick up that wisp again. It's needlessly frustrating, and could have been easily counteracted by making the challenge avoiding obstacles rather managing the timer on your transformation powers.
Other wisps, such as the blue block wisp which changes blue blocks to blue coins that you can fall through, play too much like puzzle-solving. I want you to say this slowly with me, Sonic Team: NO. PUZZLE. SOLVING. IN. A. SONIC. GAME. Now, it's nowhere near the frustration of the "torch lighting" level in Sonic 4, but it doesn't belong and puts a tarnish on the overall experience.
These are minor nitpicks in the overall scheme of things. I'd say that 90% of the time, Sonic Colours is really a successful experience, and that that other 10% really only brings it down a notch or two. That being said, I'd be remiss not to mention what makes up the majority of that 10%: Sonic Team has apparently forgotten how 2D Sonic gameplay works.
When you're careening from one side of the screen to the other, the 2D gameplay works fine. You don't really have much control here anyways, so it's basically an on-rails experience. It's when it slows down and you have to actually make jumps that the problems start. One of the amazing things about SMG is the fact that the controls are equally suited for both 3D and 2D sections. Not so with Sonic Colours. The controls feel good, really good, when the game is in 3D. In 2D, they're uncompromisingly stiff. Once again, still not as bad as Sonic 4 – but stiff nonetheless. This makes the precision platforming that is required in these sections needlessly difficult. Too many times, the developers use the 2D sections as a place to insert insta-death pits or ring-stealing spikes, and it's unfortunate. One wishes that Sonic Team would have realized the limitations of their engine, or delayed the game to perfect these sections. They come off as merely serviceable.
And merely serviceable is, unfortunately, good enough for Sonic Colours. Like I said, I was amazed to be having fun playing it, but that's all it was – a little bit of rental-time fun. That that is a giant leap forward for the series speaks ill of the series' pedigree, but there you have it.