It seems the Blue Blur is finally giving me an off year, as 2025 is the first time in a while we likely won’t be seeing a new mainline game. Although the forthcoming Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is shaping up to be a great time, I am still left wanting for things to tide me over until then. Luckily, there’s never a dull moment if you’re a fan of this series thanks to how much fan content there is. Seriously, there are more fan games than you can shake a stick at, with not just one, but two annual events dedicated to showcasing the many fan projects made in celebration of everyone’s favorite blue rodent. Today, I’d like to share and recommend just a few of these projects.
Sonic Unleashed Recompiled (by Hedge-dev)
A modern version of Sonic Unleashed has always been that White Whale among series enthusiasts. Unleashed is well-known for being a very artistically impressive game held back by some notoriously poor optimization. While its lighting systems, geometry, and general attention to detail are impressive, you’re more likely going to be too frustrated by the low resolution and especially the terrible framerate to notice. Probably due to its mixed reception among critics, it’s largely languished on its original platforms since its 2008 release. While it has received backwards compatibility on the Xbox, as well as a framerate bump for Series S|X, it wasn’t quite the remaster people were hoping for. Over the years, fans had taken to trying to remake the game or create mods for Sonic Generations in hopes of more accurately simulating it.
Now? We need not worry about such a thing, as Sonic Unleashed Recompiled has come out of nowhere, offering by far the best way to play Unleashed to date. Not only is this a great conversion as a whole, but it’s one of the best PC ports I’ve seen in recent memory. My praise for it has less to do with Unleashed itself and more about how awesome a job they did in bringing it up to modern standards. If you want a quick summary of my thoughts on Sonic Unleashed, I think it’s okay. The Daytime stages that set the benchmark for the main gameplay styles of Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations are great thanks to their sheer scale and relatively higher difficulty, but the Nighttime beat ‘em up stages are too simple and wind up being a drag. I also don’t like the progression style, with stages locked behind collecting medals haphazardly placed throughout the main stages and hub worlds. It is something I think is worth playing, but how much enjoyment you’ll get out of it will vary quite a bit.
Unleashed Recompiled keeps the game entirely intact in terms of design, maintaining all of its qualities and warts. It does make a few choice quality of life improvements, like allowing the player to disable the notorious Werehog battle theme so they can instead enjoy the incredible night level themes the whole way through. It even pays attention to little things like the slightly different colorations and loading screens between the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, which you can change at your leisure. You can also boost the framerate past as high as the 200s, and although the developers warn that this might result in unintended errors, my experience remained buttery smooth throughout. Even at 1080p/120fps, my computer hardly broke a sweat and the experience was delightfully smooth, with even loading times being cut down considerably.
If you haven’t played Unleashed, or are looking to relive old memories, I can’t recommend this version enough. It’s everything that a remaster should be, plus a bit more. There’s also flexible and easy-to-use mod support, so if you’re into that kind of thing, that’s also an option.
Sonic Unleashed Recompiled requires an NA or EU Retail Disc or Digital Copy of Sonic Unleashed for Xbox 360. Full instructions on how to install it can be found on the project website.
Sonic Robo Blast 2 (by Sonic Team Jr.)
You’ve probably heard of Sonic Robo Blast 2, more commonly called SRB2, on account of the fact that it’s been in development for longer than I’ve been alive (no, seriously). As one of the earliest and most acclaimed examples of a 3D Sonic fangame, it boasts an impressive mixture of speed and sharp platforming. Throughout its updates, it’s added more characters, stages, boss fights, mechanics, and steady improvements to its presentation including 3D character and asset models. It’s quite a sight to behold, especially for something that was already considered more than competent before this.
Being built on top of the Doom Legacy engine, SRB2 can take some time to get to grips with. I had several false starts with it because something about its sense of control and inertia never quite gelled with me, until one day when something just clicked. SRB2 does not hold the player’s hand in its sense of speed or direction, since unlike the official 3D games, you are given absolute control over basically all times. What might be a scripted sequence where you’re bouncing between springs in an official game will be unscripted in SRB2, leaving you barreling down a bottomless pit if you’re holding your control stick in an unfortunate direction. Unforgiving? Yes. However, at the same time, this gives you such a high degree of control that learning how to master it feels all the more engaging. The skips you can do are wild, but always organic thanks to the sheer amount of trust the game has in the player.
Robo Blast 2 itself is quite solid, featuring great level design, a large variety of playable characters, and even Special Stages modeled after NiGHTS into Dreams on the Sega Saturn. To be clear, you’ll have a great time with this game if you choose to play it as-is, just so long as you can adjust to the control scheme. However, where Robo Blast 2’s true strength lies is in its mod support. New characters, stage packs, and mechanics galore, many of which carry that same sense of polish that the base game does. I would be here all day if I attempted to list all of my favorites, but I’ll say that it’s absolutely worth scouring the community just to see what’s there. In particular, the Sonic 06 themed stage pack is excellent, featuring levels modeled after Sonic’s campaign, but placed in a gameplay engine that’s actually fun. This paired with the many character mods (some of which lift gameplay elements from official games like Sonic Unleashed or Sonic Adventure 2) creates something that is practically infinite in its replay value.
There’s also excellent multiplayer support, featuring robust co-op and PVP play for people who get really into the game. I personally am more into speedrunning, but even that’s accommodated for. The game saves things like ghost data and tracks player inputs when recording and watching over speedrun videos, making it very easy to study where you did well and where you may have screwed up. It’s an extremely versatile game in terms of how you want to play it, and I haven’t even gotten into the mods that completely change the gameplay and genre. There’s an RPG that plays like Persona, a fighting game modeled after the 3D Dragon Ball fighters, and even a kart racer. Speaking of that…
Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers (by Kart Krew Dev)
Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers is the sequel to SRB2 Kart, a mod of SRB2 that famously turned it into an old-school kart racer, combining elements of Mario Kart and various Sega arcade racers. Originally helmed as a large update to SRB2 Kart, it eventually grew so large and complex that it became a full-blown sequel separate from its source game. And what a game it is, boasting a simply ridiculous amount of content, full mod support, and mechanics that are fresh to the kart racing genre while still being quite considered and elegant. It’s sometimes called a fighting game under the guise of a kart racer, and I think that’s quite fitting all things considered.
It does keep your standard kart racing mechanics, such as using items to thwart enemy racers, boosting, and an emphasis on drifting and taking daring turns or shortcuts. The main differentiator here is the emphasis on slopes and platforming. Like in Sonic games proper, inclines will slow you down while declines will speed you up, so a large part of the mid-race strategy is learning how to best deal with inclines to keep a strong position and lead. While you can rely on boosting items or boost panels to keep up your speed during those sections, those options aren’t always going to be available to you. Instead, you’ll have to rely on spending the rings you collect, which gives you a slight boost for every ring spent. However, you can only carry a limited number of rings at a time, and not having rings will leave you especially vulnerable if another racer hits you with an item or crashes into you. It becomes a tense, ever-present balancing act between spending your rings to keep up the pace and staying alert on how close other racers are.
The game has both a high skill floor and skill ceiling, leading to an experience that feels really fun to master in the way a lot of Sega’s old arcade games often did. This is likely intentional, given the game’s sheer dedication to recreating aesthetics that were popular during the Sega Saturn era (even down to having Saturn-based button prompts for the UI), and it all comes together in a very polished package that’s on par with many official racers. It’s also filled with secrets that call to mind the sorts of crazy stuff you would have to do in older games to unlock characters and other content in ’90s games. The unlock method for Jack Frost of Shin Megami Tensei fame is very charming and characterful. It’s a hard thing to articulate, but it puts a lot of emphasis on aspects of games that have steadily been downplayed in favor of focusing on convenience and polish.
The track design is also a sight to behold, with many of them carefully replicated from Sonic games of the past. You’ve got City Escape, Emerald Coast, Palmtree Panic, Green Hill, and even somewhat more obscure tracks like Isolated Island from Knuckles Chaotix. Many tracks are original too, some of them are original zones tailored for Ring Racers that would feel right at home in an official game. Others are also homages to Sega as a whole, such as Pico Park, which doubles as a tribute to Baby Park from Mario Kart: Double Dash and the Sega Pico, an old edutainment system. There are also some tracks lifted from things like Sakura Wars and even Idolmaster of all things. Variety comes in spades, and that’s before mentioning the battle mode and very flexible multiplayer. I’m unsure where it ranks on my favorite kart racers list, but it’s far up there to be certain.
Sonic Galactic (by Starteam)
The last game we’ll be looking at today is a classic-styled game titled Sonic Galactic, which is still in active development and had an extra demo released earlier this year. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve been able to play of the game, especially in its aesthetics, music, and tweaks to the core classic Sonic gameplay. It mostly seems to build off of Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic Mania, with the same emphasis on larger levels, a variety of character skills, and a charming narrative being delivered through wordless cutscenes between the main levels. It’s also got that same sense of polish that a classic Sonic title should have, with rolling and inertia feeling exactly as intuitive as they do in preceding games.
Before getting into the new stuff, I first want to talk about the tweaks made to the returning trio of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. The big new addition to Sonic himself is the ability to use his Drop Dash skill from Mania to go up and down walls, and even wall jump off of them for some extra height. It’s such an intuitive addition to his moveset that I’m a little surprised this wasn’t already in the official classic games. Likewise, Knuckles can spindash up walls when he’s climbing on one, and Tails can cancel his flight to return to the ground more easily, both of which are excellent for keeping a sense of pace and flow.
The two big additions to Sonic Galactic come in the form of two new characters. The first is Fang the Sniper, a recurring antagonist who last officially appeared in Sonic Superstars. Here, Fang is promoted to being a fully playable character. The main differentiator between Fang and the others is his popgun, where he’ll shoot downward mid-air, allowing him to hit whatever is beneath him and effectively double jump in the process. Another jump can be gained if you hit something beneath you when you do it, such as an enemy or item box. It is immensely satisfying to get a lot of airtime with this skill. Given his past antagonism towards Sonic and friends, I’m especially curious about what the nature of his role in the story is.
The next new addition is Tunnel the Mole, an original character made just for Sonic Galactic. I immediately liked Tunnel thanks to his design being evocative of the mid-90s style used for Sonic, with clear Naoto Ohshima influence making him fit in with the rest of the cast effortlessly. Being a mole, Tunnel’s main ability is that he can burrow towards surfaces and ceilings, allowing him to zigzag all over the place. It’s a hard ability to get to grips with, but feels really satisfying once you master it. He’s sort of like a combination of Mighty the Armadillo from Sonic Mania Plus, and Knuckles. All told, I’m really excited to see what the future holds for Sonic Galactic, and am very impressed with what the developers have created so far.
In Conclusion…
Even though the wait times between new main games can occasionally get quite long, you’re never bored being a fan of this series because of all the new content on offer. This was only a small taste of what fans of Sonic can create, and it’s a blast to go through each of them. Self-expression can be considered one of the core values of the series, and I think Sonic’s fanbase has always been able to embody that with the impressive and creative things they can make. Fangames are a good way to spend time with a series because, even at their worst, they can offer some interesting insight into the minds and values of their creators, and that alone makes them worthwhile in my eyes. The future of Sonic is looking the brightest it has in a long time, and the fans are no small part of why.
If you would like to read about Platformer games, you might be interested to read this review of Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania or some of our other looks at Sonic games.
A hobbyist who took up the pen to write about their favorite pastime: games. While a lover of many genres, Isaiah Parker specializes in Platformers, RPGs, and competitive multiplayer titles. The easiest way into his heart is to have great core gameplay mechanics. Self-proclaimed world’s biggest Sonic fan. Follow him @ZinogreVolt
