You unlock cool goodies upon successfully completing the bonus stages, but their clunky, unimaginative designs aren't nearly as entertaining as the traditional 2D stages. The game even has remastered classic stages and the older titles' lame "3D" bonus levels in which you collect items in races against the clock. On that level, Sonic Mania is very much like the sprite-based Sonic titles that came before it. Sonic Mania adheres to the classic Sonic gameplay of running really, really fast through loops and straightaways as you collect life-preserving gold rings, dispatch enemies, and free captured fuzzballs from hulking enemy machinery. And that's perfectly fine, as Sonic Mania is packed with all the elements that make a Sonic the Hedgehog game shine. In fact, Sonic Mania's story picks up after 1994's Sonic & Knuckles, thus making the official Sonic 4 more irrelevant than it was prior to this game's release. Sonic Mania is, for all intents and purposes, the true Sonic the Hedgehog 4, discounting the intensely mediocre, polygonal game that appeared last console generation. Admittedly, Sonic Mania dances the line between rehash and loving homage to the hedgehog's 16-bit adventures, but there's just enough new material in this excellent PC game to justify revisiting Sonic's war against Doctor Eggman and his mechanical henchmen. Sonic Mania is here in the now, continuing the sprite-based, retro-style play that represents the Sonic series at its best. But, really, there's no need to revisit the Blue Blur's history in such precise detail. I intended to begin this review with a retrospective of the wildly uneven Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, a series that's seen era-defining highs and highly embarrassing lows.
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