It’s the beginning of 2025 and, though games increasingly launch in any month of the year, the early weeks of January generally remain the slowest. So, instead of sinking into the calendar’s molasses, I’m speeding up with a playthrough of Sonic X Shadow Generations.
Sonic: The Next Generation
I tried the original game, Sonic Generations, years ago through PlayStation Now — the cloud-gaming service that Sony has since folded into PlayStation Plus. I liked what I played, but until Sonic and Shadow teamed up to maximize their joint slay with the 2024 remaster, I never felt compelled to return to it. So, this is less a revisit of Sonic Generations and more a welcome return to City Escape.
While Sonic X Shadow Generations is a remaster, it’s also more than that. The closest analog is Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, which brought the Wii U game to switch with an entirely new game packed in.
I picked up a copy from the library and am having a good time — even if the 3D platforming feels weird and the 2D platforming isn’t quite as crisp as in the original Genesis run. Generations isn’t the best-feeling Sonic game, but it’s worth playing to see how it reimagines classic Sonic levels from multiple different perspectives. You can play as old-school ’90s Sonic — through strictly sidescrolling stages — or as the Sonic of the ’00s and beyond, as he blitzes through 3D stages that feel like toboggan shoots.
The Return Of City Escape
This central conceit is fun, especially when Sega is revisiting classic levels you know and love. And there’s no classic Sonic level I love more than City Escape. As a kid growing up in the early 2000s, City Escape was my introduction to the Blue Blur — and the level served the same purpose for many players of my generation.
The stage kicked Sonic Adventure 2 off with a ska-inflected bang, with the iconic bum-bum-bum-ba-dum-bum bass riff hitting as Sonic dropped into the San Francisco-inspired level effortlessly riding a helicopter blade like a skateboard. The level ends as epically as it begins, as a gigantic truck appears and Sonic has to make like Crash Bandicoot and run toward the screen as it bears down. City Escape was the coolest s*** I’d ever seen in my life, and it made quite the impression on me at a time when extreme sports were at the apex of their popularity.
So, when Sonic Generations brought it back for not one, but two levels, I thought, “Why just two? Why not an entire City Escape game?” Now, that’s a likely thing for me to say. I love video game cities — an affection that actually may date back to the moment I first played through City Escape on Christmas Day 2002. I’m on the record loving Star Wars’ city planet, cities built inside asteroids, and the labyrinthine design of Baldur’s Gate 3’s titular city. I looked forward to Starfield primarily because it would let me explore futuristic cities and criticized Cyberpunk 2077 because it didn’t let me explore enough of Night City. This is a thing I care about, maybe way too much.
A City Escape-set Sonic game could be an open-world game, but that isn’t the best solution. Instead, I picture it working like Anger Foot, where each of the game’s four parts was set in a different part of the city and each level showed off a new area within that larger region. Give me a Sonic game with levels that speed through apartment buildings, around the sewers, between crowded tourist areas, across noir-inspired alleys, and the gleaming skyscrapers where the wealthy live. And, of course, the steep hills and loop-de-loops that made us fall in love with City Escape in the first place.
Cities are better video game settings than organic spaces. Though the layout of a forest can be as complex as the layout of a city, it isn’t authored in the same way. A forest is the product of nature, and grows organically. A city is made by people and reflects their needs, wants, interests, and preoccupations. When you walk by a strip club or a comic book store or a vacuum repair shop, you know a little bit more about the psychology of the people around you. A big tree can teach you other things, but that isn’t one of them.
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