Had a blast playing through the Sonic Galactic demo last night. What a wonderful game made with love. The stages and colors are amazing, the music is incredible, the movement is spot-on. Lovely game.
IDK how 2D Sonic ever existed without the dropdash mechanic, and dropdashing up walls and propelling off just feels good. The stages are a classic mix of high speed set pieces and platforming puzzles, but tend to keep the high speed through most of every stage in the demo, or at least incentivizes you to keep moving. Like I mentioned, the color pallet is so good, and all the stages look detailed and eye-popping. Really gives a taste of what a 2D Sonic would have looked like on the 32bit Saturn hardware. The music is crazy good, even the tutorial level had me tapping my toes. Additionally we get 2 'new' characters, one of which is a groundhog who's special ability I had more fun with than I have with some full AAA recent games. I'd play an entire game with levels designed just around his special ability.
I'd highly recommend the 30 mins or so it takes to play through the Sonic Galactic Demo v2 if you're a Sonic fan, or just like an old school 2D fast platformer that is well made. It's a free fan game:
https://sonicgalactic.github.io/download.html