Sonic Mania Plus review: A fine “master quest” for the gotta-go-fast crowd

Enlarge / Sonic Mania Plus has a slightly new opening screen, as evidenced by Dr. Eggman holding a pair of caged critter-heroes. (credit: Sega)

Did you miss last year's Sonic Mania? That's easy to fix. You can rush to any major online gaming platform (Steam, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch), spend $20, and have fun with the best Sonic the Hedgehog game in years. The game is still fun; the price is still right.

Sonic Mania Plus arrives next week with a slightly fuzzier sales proposition: pay $30 for a boxed copy, or $5 for add-on DLC, to "Plus" things up. Unfortunately, Sega has been unclear about exactly what the game's Plus-ification delivers, so I took the opportunity to dig into the retail version of SMP ahead of its July 17 launch and fill in the cracks of its vague box description.

In short: anybody who really likes Sonic Mania can expect a perfectly fine expansion pack's worth of updates, and its low update price makes its biggest foibles more forgivable.

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