This is the game that Cream & Cheese first made their appearance. And Cream really feels over powered in this game. She can spin dash like Sonic and she can fly like Tails, but she also uses Cheese as a homing attack that will safely hit anything in front of her. It makes her boss fights with Robotnik feel broken. Like she can just stay in the corner and just has to dodge attacks while Cheese does all the work. She doesn't has to get close and jump on top of Robotnik to damage him like the other characters. In the final boss fight I didn't even have to move, I just spammed the Cheese button and I won without getting hit once.
Cream's story is pretty simple, Robotnik kidnapped Vanilla and Cream is trying to rescue her.
The Chaos Emeralds in this game had to be the most frustrating ones to ever get. In each zone there are 7 hidden tokens that you have to collect before the end of the zone to get to the special stage. You need all 7 and there are only 7 to get in each zone. Some of them require you to back track through the zone to get them. And the worst part of all is if you die you lose all your tokens and have to start the zone over again.
The special zone is pretty simple and doesn't actually change much for each of the seven times you have to do them. Run around in a 3D map and collect 300 rings in one and a half minutes. The rings requirement and time always stay the same. You clear a patch of rings and you get a brief ring multiplier that increase how many rings in the next patch.
The special zone is also the last appearance of Zero from Sonic Adventure. Running into him will cause you to lose 10 rings. But he is never an actual threat until maybe the last stage were you have to slow down to make the corners and he might run into you.
To unlock Tails, Knuckles and Cream you have to beat Robotnik with Sonic and each of those characters will appear tied up on Robotnik's Eggmobile. You can't unlock other characters with any character besides Sonic.
You can unlock Amy Rose as a playable character but only after you collect all the Chaos Emeralds on all four characters. So you have to beat the game fours times with all emeralds before you can beat the game a fifth time with Amy. And yes, I did in fact beat the game with Amy.
The game had some good music and I loved the music themed zone. That zone felt so out of place it was great. All the characters can grind now and I had fun with that. A new mechanic is that you can double jump off of a spring. If you didn't know you could do that, like I didn't, it makes certain levels impossible to beat.
It was an overall fun game just a bit tedious and frustrating at times.