Sonic Origins tech review: glitches and a steep price make for a tough sell - Eurogamer.net

Sonic the Hedgehog's original 16-bit adventures are considered some of the best games in Sonic history and - for my money - some of the best games ever made.

Sonic Origins is different though: a fully rebuilt suite of the original 16-bit games using the Retro Engine, the same tech that powered the brilliant Sonic Mania.

Sonic Origins reminds me of Sonic Jam for the Sega Saturn - the first complete collection porting each of the original Mega Drive games to a new platform, with a huge selection of bonus material including videos, music and illustrations.

So this is effectively Sonic Jam 2 - all the 16-bit games, plus Sonic CD, surrounded by a wide range of bonus material and alternative gameplay modes designed to expand upon the formula.

The entire front-end was created using Sonic Team's proprietary Hedgehog Engine, the very same engine powering many of its games including Sonic Forces and Sonic Generations.

When you launch one of the games, the Retro Engine powered games are displayed as a surface within the game's user interface.

The first and biggest concern is that games are rendered to the screen using a bilinear filter, resulting in softened pixel edges.

Sonic Mania offers four display options to solve this, including a pair of CRT filters and a sharp scale option, but these options aren't available in Origins - and the reduction in clarity is significant.

The only good news is that if you're playing on PC, the modding community has already fixed the biggest issue, restoring the Sonic Mania display options.

Thankfully, the games themselves are the main draw, and are generally produced to a high standard using the Retro Engine.

Bonus and special stages look smoother too, scattered rings fade out using alpha blending and the soundtrack of the first two games has been remastered with cleaner audio.

While the earlier games are great, Sonic 3 and Knuckles is the big addition for this package, having not previously received a Retro Engine conversion.

Objects which rely on rotation, such as vines and zip lines, have been updated with true per-pixel rotation, enabling smoother motion, while The blue sphere special stages have been updated to match Sonic Mania with dramatically smoother animation.

The solution to this problem for the new version is to replace these tracks with music found first in a prototype version of Sonic 3.

These tracks were later used in the PC port of Sonic 3 and Knuckles, where they were re-arranged as MIDI tracks, and now they've been recreated for Sonic Origins.

I feel the new arrangements are a step down from those featured in the prototype version of Sonic 3 but they're still serviceable.

However, the music featured in Sonic 3 and Knuckles is muffled compared to the remastered tracks included in the Retro Engine conversions of Sonic 1 and 2, which is disappointing.

Beyond the audio, however, all these ports have received extra gameplay features - the drop dash move from Sonic Mania makes the cut, though its implementation isn't quite on par, and there are also mission, combination and mirror modes available.

I could go on, but the point is that this game lacks the fit and finish we've seen in other Retro Engine powered projects.

Yet, these are still full Retro Engine ports of the classic Sonic games making it one of the most interesting re-releases yet.

If Sonic Team can solve these technical issues, Origins would be easy to recommend, but with its glitches and steep price tag, it's a tough sell.

Sonic Origins could have been the best compilation to date but, as it stands, there's more work to be done.

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