Recent reviews by MikeyTWolf

For Sonic Generations: Massively overpriced considering how old the game is and how many sales and cheap keys there are out there.
For just Shadow: Rather short and feels like a big step down in terms of story compared to Frontiers writing. Like an imitation was made but the direction is wooden. New voice actors feel a little off and Shadow "whisper shouting" lines doesn't even have the fun edgyness to it.
For those who already own Sonic Generations: Effectively being forced to double dip despite the original still holding up.

So already not great and it will probably take a while before a good sale that makes the price tag around what this is actually worth paying for.

For those that can ignore the price tag: The game (specifically Shadow, I skipped Sonic) is well made at least, the engine feels improved and there were no technical problems at all. In fact the range of options available was one of the first things I noticed. Wonder if a studio like RGG (Yakuza) is rubbing off on Sonic Team.

Shadow gets an experience based on just five (?) games: SA2 (twice?), Sonic Heroes, Sonic 06, Forces and Frontiers. Note that Shadow doesn't even appear in Frontiers and I never played Forces considering its awful reputation, so he didn't get the big treatment Sonic did; somewhat ironic since the game kinda presents "getting to Sonic's Birthday party" to be a goal before the actual goal. In addition while the music remixes are generally great, Frontiers music is just awful, at least you can replace the stage music with actual Frontiers music. Speaking of music, you unlock a LOT of Shadow the Hedgehog music - so bizarre that there are no Shadow stages then.
Another thing that makes it feel short is there are in-level cutscenes and neat transitions to teasing the final zone, it does eat up a good chunk of the stage the current zone is supposed to be paying homage to and usually it's for some trippy reality bent ride instead of a SA2 tribute. Replayability will likely suffer for it when it could have been held separate as one of the challenge levels (which are rather simple, easy and short).

Boss fights are well done as a tribute act for them. However, Emerl never appears so that's a weird marketing only decision. SA2, Heroes, 06 and Shadow bosses but nope, Battle is still not actually mainline.

So overall too expensive for what you get. Considering nobody I know has played let alone appreciate 06 and Forces, for a tribute game there's a big hole where Shadow's story related levels could have gone instead when base Generations already covers 06. Absolutely not worth full price to original Generations owners, this isn't a Yakuza title promising dozens of hours.

Un♥♥♥♥ingplayable
With FSR3 makes no difference so I'm struggling to reach 60FPS on the MENU
20FPS first cutscene with heavy stutter in gameplay
AMD 5700XT was told "can't launch with this" and then it launched, then it corrupted my drivers
What the ♥♥♥♥

There's one thing when there's a lot of grind. Could just grind away various side jobs while podcasting or something. While there's a ton of grind to an almost excessive degree, you eventually start to get momentum.

It's another when there's So. Much. Waiting involved. Even mods can't help until you mod the game to the point where the grind completely vanishes (and even then you're forced to wait for days of the week to progress).

When you wait a whole week to get the resources to get a sermon to get the resources to make vendors unlock their wares so you can progress the story, but you can only get those resources by waiting yet another week to actually use it, I lost all interest.
You have effectively three tokens for "inspiration", one is a random drop for most of the time and another is hard timegated, while the last is only a secondary currency to the weekly currency that begs the question "why?".

So do I put up with it for the story? Nothing seems to matter in a rather linear way, and then there's the fact there are clear typos/grammatical errors in the dialogue. So nah not really.

Only played with the base game for the record, doubt the DLC would improve things when they're mostly mixed reviews about content islands.

Please stop with the meme positive reviews. It really isn't even a 7/10 going by averages.
Barely functional, zombie game published by a different developer? They won't have any shame or pride to keep working on this and make it better.

So instead of porting crossplay from SF6 to Exoprimal or MH you do this? lmao

It was the only metaverse with serious potential, in a DIY fashion
Now all of the DIY has been removed so you can play funny money with techbros, while the only world you can inhabit burns to the ground around you.

Hopefully a successor comes out somewhere in future, sorry Froox it went this way.

Turns out the lack of content is mostly because it's story locked.
Advance the story, unlock new exotic mutant dinos and suddenly go from Mann Vs. Machine cocky to Alien vibes.
Also new game mode with a hammer is fun.
But yeah you have to commit to like 20 games before it starts to reveal content to you.

Edits, because somehow this blew up:
Ok I just randomly said 20 games, to break it down a bit more;

(View clues/cutscenes as they unlock? to allow matches to spawn)
6~8 games: Story mission replaces a match, adds mutants to your roster and therefore the matches you can wind up with
12~ games: 10 man PvE raids appear, more difficult matches can now start that throw more dangerous waves at you (because at this point you should learn to prioritise objective dinos)
16~ games: More raids appear, new large dinos appear, and new maps appear in queue.

A typical game is like 20 minutes depending on how it goes, and you can be matched into older story matches if someone in the session hasn't done it yet

0% rating let's goooooo
Wasted money on premium just to have it poof into dust, I effectively spent £20 for literally nothing because I didn't pay £60+ to get a single vehicle to grind eternally with instead of going through the tech tree like a sane person.

Lag-B-Gone with the matchmaker fixed now, great fun.

You can't even enjoy the free play mode, QoL issues are still present since day 1 of EA. Really feels like the last half of early access was just nothing to finish up a story nobody asked for (and didn't explore the world building built on by audio logs). Endless grind for padding for story is also terrible, and free play exposes endgame salvaging as being too overpowered with tools to the point you're more likely to utterly destroy parts of the ship by accident, zero effort or weight behind anything. And you can still find "unsolvable" ships where you will just eat ♥♥♥♥ to physics and lose random objects to wonky pressure mechanics, because the seed didn't spawn enough air vents, large holes are just as damaging as small ones, there's no regard for tensile strength of materials and suddenly working vents/airlocks stop working because you made a tunnel.

Utterly wasted concept. It was at least something to podcast to when the grind was more tolerable and it was just you and one handler.