Sonic CD Review

We can’t complain about spending a portion of our working afternoon playing a Sonic game. Or can we? Yes we can, when it slaps the rose-tinted spectacles off the zitty face of schoolboy nostalgia and stamps them repeatedly into the ground.

Sonic CD is boring and, occasionally worse than that, it’s frustrating. Running down ramps and flinging the blue hedgehog off into the sky is fun, but we’d forgotten how often Sonic CD goes out of its way to halt the most rewarding bits of a Sonic game and force us to restart, over and over again.

Spikes, enemies, walls and springs all conspire to stop every decent run-up in its tracks and often frustrate any simple attempt to try it again except to restart the level from the last checkpoint. 

Defeating that nonce of a balding boss, Doctor Robotnik, is a banal series of attempts to strike at the weak point and dodge an incoming attack, before repeating until he’s dead.

And the ill-conceived bonus levels featuring a Mode 7 race track seem like an excuse to crowbar in a weak Mario Kart clone, jumping on what would have been the enormous success of Nintendo’s addictive racer, the previous year in 1992. 

Chastising a 20-year-old game for being archaic probably makes us look like bullies, but when that game is repackaged and resold, it’s our business to tell you whether it’s worth the money.

Sonic CD has a few extras: the resolution has been upscaled, you can switch through three graphic modes (classic, smooth and sharp) and Tails is unlocked after one completion.

But unless you’re a rabid Achievement whore or dedicated Sonic fan, the only reason to buy Sonic CD is to remind yourself just how much this series has evolved for the better over the last two decades.