Demo impressions to follow.
First, the good parts. They did think about level design a bit and made things a little bit interesting in there. Some shortcuts are really easy to take, while others, you have to be a master to look for, like homing attacking up the 'nik's on the wall. Speaking of those things, I found about a dozen different robots to fight in the entire level. They had pretty good aim too up close, unless they were the missle robots.
Also, the game looks pretty nice and has a slick interface as well. There weren't many options or anything to choose though, but that was to be expected since this is just a demo. The textures seemed diverse enough; the enviroment changes at the end of the level from the hill-esque level to the edge of a castle, and I thought that was somewhat interesting. The music was okay during the stages... I haven't found an invincibility powerup yet, so I'm wondering what that music sounds like.
Now, for the bad. There's one thing I didn't mention yet- the most important part. The controls, AKA the gameplay. I'll be honest and say this about it:
-Sonic is slow. At first. When you start picking rings/getting a higher score, you get faster. How dumb is that?!
-The homing attack has a pause on it now; it's Phantasy Star Online styled now, which means you have to wait a specific amount of time to push the button back in, or else you homing attack slower.
-The spindash is utterly useless now. Not only is it faster just to run, but you can't spindash unless you're 100% stopped now, unlike previous games, and you can't jump while you're rolling either.
-The sliding crap is annoying when I'm trying to light dash.
-The collision engine is somewhat eh.
-The camera is bogus. It immediately switches to wherever it wants now, so if you're in control and that happens, your control gets wonked up.
-Nitpicking maybe, but it's weird how the robot pieces just disappear instead of the usual fading away deal.
Good parts about the gameplay? Well, they did try to add a lot of diversity to how you can handle Sonic... but they didn't do a very good job of that. If you play the level like they wanted people to play it, there's a lot of fun to be found in this demo, and they spent a bit of time designing some of the game objects; for example, some of the glowing orbs that you homing attack can open two grinding routes if you hit it again.
Overall, this felt like a mediocre Sonic game as a result of the gameplay crap. To be honest, I think they just whipped out the buggy E3 demo and threw it on Xbox Live. Who knows, but it had the same trailer as then. Overall, I think this'll turn out around the same place as Heroes did, probably better than that since it has "a story", and a "lot of ways to play". This is definitely going to beat the crap out of Shadow the Hedgehog though, I can gurantee it.
