SAGE 2024 - Demo Sonic & Blaze SAGE 2024

This title reminded me of what's so fun about 2D boost Sonic. I played this a couple days ago but went ahead and replayed some of it for the review. I took the survey a while back so I'll try not to go over the same things I wrote there.

The sprite art looks just as great as I remember the DIMPS games being, and having a sprite-based playable Blaze feels awesome to see in action and actually play for myself. I do think the ranking system can be a tad harsh, but ranking is such a hard thing to really nail down in Sonic games that I don't consider it much of an issue and rarely impacted the amount of fun I had in these levels.

I did want to note that it seems like Xbox controllers aren't supported? I was only able to get Dualshock working, which to be fair I do prefer a lot more, but thought it was worth pointing out nonetheless. I really like the music choices for the levels. Listening to some of the more obscure picks and seeing how they fit the level themes was a delight to experience. I did have some instances where no stage music would play for the rest of the unplayed levels during my run, which was a shame.

Some other oddities I noticed were the lack of looking up animations and Super/Burning forms reverting to normal when in water. Aside from that, I think this is a really solid and fun boost game! My main complaint would be to alter the whale segments in Blue Coast 3, as they seem far too punishing without rings and a difficulty spike compared to everything else in the game. I'm excited to see the rest of the levels release and to play them when available. Thank you so much!