Sonic returns to his roots.
Story
Sonic the Hedgehog battles aginst the evil Dr Robotnik who has taken the Chaos Emeralds and Sonic has to retireve them.
Gameplay
The game has a great sense of speed and takes a few ideas from recent Sonic games and blends them in nicely into Sonic 4. The Homing Attack works really well a red arrow with lock onto an enemy and you can hit it and score combined hit points. The old badniks return like the Motorbug and Buzz Bots and yes it has a water level which have you scratching your head. It maintains the high speed quality of the Advance games and also adds the platforming segments from old school Sonic titles like Sonic 1. It has leaderbords to see how fast you can do certain levels. The game has 4 zones, 3 acts and then a boss plus one final level against Robotnik.
The Bonus levels return and are like Sonic 1 but you can't jump. You use the D Pad on the Wii mote to move the stage around. You also are given a time limit but you also have to watch out for the Red Goals or else you will fail. Though if you do run low on time there this a chance just before the timer runs out to quickly retry the stage. It's a bit unfair really. The stages do get harder as you progress and you have to pick up a certain amount of rings to clear an area so you can grab the emerald.
Prsentation
It has the old school type look of it with HD graphics and the game also has solid music but nothing compared to the likes of Chemical Plant and Star Light Zone.
Lastability
About 1 and half if your not going for the emeralds but if you are it might be about 2 hours of gameplay. Thats not enough but its about the size of Sonic 3.
Overall Opinion
It's not the big return to 2D but we didn't expect it to be. It's old Sonic with elements of old titles mixed in there and some new moves thrown in. It isn't in the same league as Sonic 1 or 2 but its a good game and a nice return for Sonic. It isn't gonna get a 9 because 1500 Wii Points is a bit to much and it isn't that big of a game.