The Special Stages are a delight when you succeed and an enticing challenge when you fail, perfectly complementing the joyous vibe of Sonic Mania as a whole.Īnother welcome addition is the Time Attack mode, the aspiring speedrunner's best way to test their time trial mettle. Though the perspective and controls are roughly the same as the Bonus Stages, the objective is so much clearer, and the miniature, self-contained levels are designed to be mastered as you would a Mario Kart (make that Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing) track, looking for shortcuts and avoiding obstacles with hairpin turns and short hops.
Worst of all, you have no way of quickly retrying a Bonus Stage should you fail, as their portals only spawn above checkpoints when you first make contact.īy contrast to the lackluster-at-best, vomit-inducing-at-worst Bonus Stages, the Special Stages fully deliver on the Sonic fantasy: running really, really fast. To convolute things even further, you can also jump - which you'll need to do (while silently praying for survival) whenever you've trapped yourself in a minefield of red orbs.
Once you've formed a closed loop of orbs, all the orbs contained in your path turn to rings, which you'll need to pick up if you want a perfect score and the Gold Medallion it bestows (no word on what those actually do just yet). To make matters even more frustrating, orbs are positioned in ways that often turn the slightest screw-up or miscalculation into guaranteed death. Problem is, you're going to need to turn on a dime extremely often if you want to clear these stages successfully, because every blue sphere turns red once you've touched it - and as you probably guessed, making contact with a red orb results in instant failure. Nudging Sonic (or Tails, or Knuckles) left and right causes the entire perspective to make a hard 90 degree turn, and the constantly shifting viewpoint is downright nauseating.
The problem with these Bonus Stages is immediately apparent: the finicky controls, which are a little too faithful to the originals. Sonic Mania classifies these as Bonus Stages, or 'Blue Spheres' - a reference to the core mechanic that has Sonic snagging all the floating blue orbs that dot the horizon of these spherical, wrap-around pocket dimensions. Let's get the bad news out of the way first: the quasi-3D Special Stages from Sonic 3 & Knuckles are back, and they're not better than ever.
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