What happens to a Sonic game when you remove the speed, platforming and fun? You get Sonic Labyrinth.
Let's start with the plot. The evil Dr. Robotnik is tired of Sonic foiling his plans and so he figures out a solution; get rid of his signature speed. Robotnik invents a new pair of shoes that will make Sonic run slower and he orders a robot to sneak into his house (Sonic has a house now?) and swap these shoes with his normal shoes. Sonic wakes up to find that he can no longer run as fast as he used to. After hearing Robotnik's scheme, Sonic decides to take him on anyway, with his spin dash instead. This story just makes no sense. Why doesn't Robotnik just capture (or even kill) Sonic while he's still sleeping? Especially since he apparently knows where he lives. Anyway, that's all you're given on plot, what little there is.
You control Sonic in a 3D environment. Thanks to Robotnik's "brilliant" plan, instead of controlling Sonic at high speed, you are turtle slow. In fact, I know the idea is that he's supposed to be slower this time, but he's too slow and as a result, he's very tedious to control. Running (or walking) is out of the question, but thank goodness you can still spin dash. Holding a button will charge your spindash and you'll get 3 lights that represent how powerful your spindash is. When you are ready, release and Sonic spins into enemies. This works ok but spindashing sends you out of control. The press of the button again will stop you but trying to control the spin dash can be quite annoying and making a whole game based on this move wasn't even a good idea in the first place.
The goal of this game is to collect 4 chaos emeralds in order to run fast again. In each stage, you must collect 3 keys in order to advance to the next stage. Once again, you must do this without jumping or running while navigating through each stage fighting enemies that don't do anything to you, this especially doesn't help the fact that there is a time limit. The keys can be found sitting in the open or inside enemies. It's easy enough but when you get hit, the keys you've collected go flying off in different directions and you have to go chasing after them which can get very tiring. Luckily you've got items to help you like the speed shoes (that don't help your speed much, you can't even run up a hill), invincibility and extra lives. For the most part the game is short and not that hard, but it's boring, tedious and there is little to no appeal.
There are bosses after a certain amount of stages and each one starts the same; rolling down a large hill and try to collect as many rings as you can before the fight. However, this is useless since you always take two hits before you die no matter how many rings you've collected. The bosses themselves are "meh", nothing really special.
The character model and animation are actually pretty decent for a Game Gear game, but the levels are unappealing. You don't get to much else outside of a different colored pallet with each level as every stage looks the same. The music isn't bad, although sometimes it's annoying. For the most part though, it's forgettable. You'll get sick of listening to the same song in every act.
Sonic Labyrinth is the result of what happens when you take away the speed, momentum based platforming and fun away from a Sonic game. This game is short and easy for the most part, but it's just dull and not even worth it. Sonic's games may not be fully about speed but speed was at least present and level design based around building momentum is what made Sonic so fun. Labyrinth tries to do something a bit different, true, but it wasn't a good idea in the first place.