While his fandom has finally latched on to a new audience, things didn’t look too sure for Sonic in the 2000s. Sega had left the console market, and the era of 90s attitude that Sonic had pioneered had been relegated to a fad. In 2010, a chance to carry on the 90s charm of the first few games into a new world presented itself in Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1.

Much like the originals that bear a number, Sonic 4 has you speeding through different levels, occasionally jumping and dodging obstacles or baddies. You collect 50 or more coins as you hit a checkpoint, and you can reach a bonus stage, occasionally there will be a simple-to-solve, hard-to-master boss battle when you jump on Eggman’s head a repeat number of times. None of this will be new to you if you grew up with the classic Sonic titles from the days of the Mega Drive/Genesis, but 16 years after 3, finally fans can play part 4. 

A lot has changed in the 16 years, Sega as a console player is no more, so now Sony, Xbox, and PC users can get in on the fun too. The game was initially a mobile exclusive, and you can tell as Sonic 4 aesthetic looks very familiar to those who played games on their P.D.A. just before the Smartphone did away with all that. The levels look like what the game designers at the time were trying to evoke with their pixel-perfect-parallax backgrounds. The 16-bit era of graphics was just beginning to make its unironic-ironic renaissance, while Sonic 4 remains in the middle of both design paradigms. You can feel some slight changes in the way Sonic behaves, although the game is determined to evoke the classics of the 90s, it’s unafraid to keep innovations that worked from the series attempts at 3.D. Sonic Adventure introduced the homing attack, and now Sonic 4 is brought into the 2.D. flow, Sonic Generations would also do that, however, that worked more in 3.D. sections. The soundtrack is pretty good, while it isn’t exactly the unironic rock of Sonic Adventure or the stylish 90s songs off Sonic C.D., admittedly it is hard to follow whoever composed Sonic 3. However, Sonic Adventure’s Jun Senoue compositions shine so much that they could come off the old Mega Drive and still sound relatively modern.

Observant readers among you might recognise, episode 1 in the title. This adventure is the first of a supposed trilogy of games that would have comprised part 4. This was the height of fashion in the early 2010s, with the rise of digital downloads, splitting the adventure up into concise chucks like a television drama was popular for storied franchises like Resident Evil, and cult franchises like Sin. Much like Half-Life, only episodes 1 and 2 arrived, but the game’s length is roughly the same as the Mega Drive titles.

So much has changed for the hyper-speedy blue hedgehog since his heyday in the 90s, and his renascence due to the blockbusting films. Episode 4 takes a lot of the old familiar and sprinkles in some newer familiar to create an adventure worthy of the name 4. It’s almost as if the 3d world passed the franchise by Episode 4, but the game is not completely obstinate enough to take some of the ideas that worked. While you soon forgive the long absence, 15 years is one long act break.

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