Sonic Colors

Sonic Colors arrived at a time when the blue hedgehog was going through one of the worst periods in its history, and it turned into a surprising return to form. Sonic Team dropped the experiments with side characters, swords, or nighttime transformations and focused on a single thing: fast movement through well-designed levels. The story frames it as an amusement park that Doctor Eggman built on the orbits around several planets, of course with an ulterior motive. Each planet has its own visual theme, from a candy world through a tropical beach to a neon city, and the color palette ranks among the most vivid the series has ever had.

Gameplay alternates three-dimensional stretches with side-view passages, and the transitions between them are smooth, which had been the most common stumbling block in previous entries. The new feature is the Wisps, alien beings that lend Sonic temporary abilities: a laser shot that bounces off walls, a drill for moving underground, a rocket firing upward, or a transformation into a heavy ball. Thanks to them, levels have more alternate paths than they seem to at first glance, and replaying them genuinely pays off. Controls do without motion elements, and the game supports a classic gamepad too, so precision suffers not at all.

Technically, Sonic Colors ranks among the top-tier titles on Wii. The pace stays smooth even in the fastest passages, the colors shine, and the level design remains readable despite the speed. The music mixes electronica with big-band motifs, and the title song became one of the most beloved in the whole series. Reviews were noticeably more favorable than for previous three-dimensional entries, and many players still call it the best modern Sonic game to this day. A remastered edition later came out for newer platforms, but the original Wii version remains a fully valid experience and still plays beautifully today. For console owners it's clearly the first Sonic game to reach for. It also showed that Sonic works best when it sticks to a simple idea and lets speed speak for itself.