Agree/disagree?
Great time to make this topic given that I played plenty of Generations a few days ago for a certain someone's birthday.
I like Generations. It's a fun game that has a high degree of polish and accessibility. It's clearly made with a lot of love and by all accounts was a big success.
I just recently played a few hours of Generations back to back with Lost World and I have to say that my experience was a bit startling. Generations felt stiff and linear in a way that I don't remember being so frustrating. At one point in modern Rooftop Run (my favorite level by far) I missed a life and back tracked to pick it up. What followed was an immensely irritating exercise in battling the controls to do something as simple as picking up an item I'd missed. Sonic simply isn't designed to function at low speeds in the game. At all. Not only that but between the modern and classic sonic levels, your jump is only
just high enough to clear most platforms, making those sequences incredibly stiff and hard to navigate. The result is that you simply want to spend as much time in the game boosting and homing attacking as possible. As a platformer, it is a complete failure. And platforming should be as important to the character as speed in my opinion. In addition, the levels were hard to get into. The loading times are long and switching between classic and modern sonic in the hub menu is a chore. Sonic games dearly need something like the Egg Shuttle from Colors. A mode where I can just play all the levels unmolested and uninterrupted just like the classics.
After playing my favorite modern and classic zones in Generations, I popped LW in and was blown away by how fluid and free the movement was by comparison. Picking up a missed item or some rings wasn't only incredibly possible now, but was actually
fun. The jump as well delivered enough height to easily clear most platforms, making launching yourself from ledges and platforms an actual option for reaching certain areas. It's such a shame that the majority of the levels simply don't support this freedom of movement. I can count only about 3 that do; but man are they fun.
This coming from a guy who only days ago considered Generations to be vastly superior to LW. I don't think any Sonic game has nailed it. Each has pieces of something great, but always manages to trip on the finish line, Generations included.
To answer your question more directly, the best Sonic game since Sonic 3&K is without a doubt Colors. There's a sense of playfulness in the level design and an encouragement of exploration not seen since the Megadrive games. It's more thematically cohesive than Generations, has a better story, and better designed levels. It's dripping with a sense of fun and creative freedom not felt from the franchise in a decade and a half.
I'm really hopeful that Sonic Team's next game has the same flavor. Also here's a birthday drawing I did:
