Play time at the time of review is about 90 minutes, played on the Steam Deck in offline mode so the timers are off.

I have a reasonable amount of experience and patience with modern sonic games. Unleashed was fine, Generations was great, Colors was a good game with a bad control scheme. Finished all of them, and liked them all well enough.

Lost World is, unfortunately, marred with weird decisions that prevent me from enjoying it. The biggest of these issues is how the player character actually handles. The controls are fine (other than the Run button, which shouldn't exist and is held almost the entire time the game is played) but the interactions are so weird. Momentum rolls to a stop incredibly quickly, wall jumps are awkward, limp, and cause more problems than they solve. The homing attack feels finicky, particularly on boss fights because iframes are not visually represented. Hitting enemies tanks your speed to zero (including bosses that are attempting to crash into you) so I found myself avoiding them instead. It's incredibly hard to go fast for more than a few seconds - not because the level has thrown a Gotcha at you (as is the case with classic 2D sonics) but because you've just...run out of speed. Everything you do, apart from Just Running, eventually brings you to a crawl without sufficient means to smoothly maintain speed. Sonic just feels bad to run around as, plain and simple.

The level designs are fun and creative (at least, for the first world and a half that I experienced) but that's about the only strong thing the game has going for it. A lot of things feel rather odd; the story is told in between stages but there seems to be absolutely no relation between the two. The world map controls oddly and is free roaming for absolutely no reason, making it feel clunkier to get between stages. You're dropped into the first level after the intro cutscene with no onboarding, no explanation of controls, no instructions, and no defined goal. Wisps from Sonic Colors are also in this game, for seemingly no reason, and are also never explained. It's hard to tell what exactly went wrong with Lost World, but very easy to tell that something absolutely DID go wrong.

I don't think it would take a significant amount of rework for the game to feel good to play, but I doubt it will happen, either.

Play time at the time of review is about 90 minutes, played on the Steam Deck in offline mode so the timers are off. I have a reasonable amount of experience and patience with modern sonic games. Unleashed was fine, Generations was great, Colors was a good game with a bad control scheme. Finished all of them, and liked them all well enough. Lost World is, unfortunately, marred with weird decisions that prevent me from enjoying it. The biggest of these issues is how the player character actually handles. The controls are fine (other than the Run button, which shouldn't exist and is held almost the entire time the game is played) but the interactions are so weird. Momentum rolls to a stop incredibly quickly, wall jumps are awkward, limp, and cause more problems than they solve. The homing attack feels finicky, particularly on boss fights because iframes are not visually represented. Hitting enemies tanks your speed to zero (including bosses that are attempting to crash into you) so I found myself avoiding them instead. It's incredibly hard to go fast for more than a few seconds - not because the level has thrown a Gotcha at you (as is the case with classic 2D sonics) but because you've just...run out of speed. Everything you do, apart from Just Running, eventually brings you to a crawl without sufficient means to smoothly maintain speed. Sonic just feels bad to run around as, plain and simple. The level designs are fun and creative (at least, for the first world and a half that I experienced) but that's about the only strong thing the game has going for it. A lot of things feel rather odd; the story is told in between stages but there seems to be absolutely no relation between the two. The world map controls oddly and is free roaming for absolutely no reason, making it feel clunkier to get between stages. You're dropped into the first level after the intro cutscene with no onboarding, no explanation of controls, no instructions, and no defined goal. Wisps from Sonic Colors are also in this game, for seemingly no reason, and are also never explained. It's hard to tell what exactly went wrong with Lost World, but very easy to tell that something absolutely DID go wrong. I don't think it would take a significant amount of rework for the game to feel good to play, but I doubt it will happen, either.