First, let me get this out of the way. This game is absolutely terrible! Before the release of this game, I was extremely optimistic about it. I'm a huge fan of the other Sonic games that were made by Dimps for the Nintendo handhelds, so I assumed that this game would be equally good. I tried to ignore all of the whining about this game online, which I assumed to be completely unreasonable and just a result of the "oh it's Sonic so it must be bad" line of thought.
 
However, yesterday I downloaded the trial of the XBLA version of this game, only to discover that this game is super messed up. It feels like they stripped away the dashing and trick mechanics from their handheld Sonics, but didn't add in the concept of maintaining momentum that made old Sonic so fun. I'd actually say that the original Sonic Advance is a far better spiritual successor to the old Sonic games than the actual Sonic 4 is. Add some terrible character models, weird looking animations, and a bad jumping mechanic to the mix, and you have a game that is even worse than the recent 3D Sonics.