Unleashed, Colors, Generations all rejuvenated the franchise, hell even Lost Worlds while flawed I wouldn't call a "bad" game. We also had the two incredible Sonic All-Star games, and Mania a month ago. And Forces doesn't look to stray to far from the successful Boost formula, so it being bad would be a legitimate surprise.
Besides Boom and Sonic 4 Episode 1/2, which were small downloadable titles, it's been more good than bad by a big margin.
Unleashed was bad (the day stages were better than most of the 3D fare before it, but still not good, and the stages get worse and unfairly difficult as you progress), and Colors, Generations and Lost World were just okay. Secret Rings and Black Knight are... Divisive. The spinoffs have wildly different levels of quality. The only truly great Sonic platformer released in a long time, Mania, is one
Sonic Team didn't make, regardless of 2D or 3D (and even then, it pisses over Sonic Team's attempts at 2D post-Unleashed).
And Forces looks like an unfocused mess of a game that continues to demonstrate Sonic Team's inability to get over their idiotic paranoia about the attention spans of players. It's been a flagrant trend of theirs starting with Adventure for whatever reason - they can't just stick to a single core gameplay loop and run with it (no pun intended). When people complained about 'Sonic's shitty friends' bogging down gameplay, Sonic Team took the wrong message and proceeded to engineer contrived ways to force their multiple game types on
Sonic himself. Forces finally breaks the "Sonic-only" trend, but we end up back at the original problem instead.
Oh, and that's ignoring that the "Boost formula" is
shallow as shit. Even Generations only tried to veer away from the hyper-linear corridor crap in a couple of stages - it just doesn't have the depth or flexibility of classic gameplay. Even Lost World, despite its flawed execution, had genuinely good ideas that could've been refined and built upon, but nope, we can't have that, apparently.
