After playing Superstars and the excellent Megamix Mania demo, I’m starting to understand what makes a Sonic game work or not work relative to other platformers. Physics, player abilities, level mechanics, and - most importantly - level design. For most platformers, you can still have a good enough game if some of those elements are lacking, but for Sonic, the whole thing falls apart if they’re not in perfect balance.
Mania has beautifully-crafted levels and physics that make the game… flow, I guess you’d say? Whenever there’s an intense section that pushes you to move at full speed, the level is designed around that speed, and you get a very clear indicator of when the game wants you to slow down and think. The extended camera (that’s when you move so fast you start to outrun the camera) is also only implemented in areas where it’s safe.
Compare that to Superstars, where the level design is a mess of objects and enemies slapped in random places, with a camera that trails behind/below you and gives no warning that something offscreen is about to hit you, made worse by enemies blending into the 3D background depending on the level. With Mania, an experienced Sonic fan can easily get through the game on a blind run because all the mechanics work in tandem, while Superstars requires you to memorize the level layout regardless of your skill or reaction time because nothing about it is intuitive. It’s the same problem that fast mascot platformers had in the 90s; they imitated what they knew about Sonic games on a surface level (cool characters, fast, edgy compared to Mario) and didn’t bother to analyze what exactly made them work. Bootleg Mario is at least tolerable, but bootleg Sonic just sucks.