Edited, I kept the important part.
You are allowed to die and mess up. You can have no idea how to play a certain game. But be fair about it. Don't be pretentious. Don't blame everything on the game.
And it's about the way you die. Look at the gifs above. That part of the game is an easy one. Very easy. And all of those are beginner mistakes. To die like that means you don't play the game at a decent level. And when you do that maybe you should think twice before talking about level design, cheap deaths and compare it with the previous entries in the series. It's just not right. Because you can't be both experienced/knowledgeable and noob at the same time. This is my point.
Or here's another approach to this. Who doesn't mess up with controls when playing a new game? Who doesn't die when playing a new game? Exactly! So why punish the game for that?
Don't get me wrong. It's not a perfect game, it doesn't deserve 9's, but it's not as broken as a 4 or 5. I think Jim Sterling's review is spot on. And that's from a reviewer who doesn't favor Sonic games usually.
Fair enough. But who is to say that they did not die because of the controls, and not lack of "skill" or whatever amount of skill they need to have to be allowed to review this game?
Why would they include these clips of them dying, if it was not to show their frustration? When i looked at the videos i thought "actually that seems easy to avoid" but that is because i have this perfect control scheme in my head so it seems easy to avoid, right? I died in Galaxy games, but i never felt like i died because the controls fucked me, i died because i messed up. Maybe this is the opposite? At least that is what some of them are indicating
But what if the game's controls are not as good as we imagined them? Suddenly these rather easy scenarios become harder?
That is a picture of Dragons Lair from NES, maybe you know of it. But regardless that is a good example of a game with rather simple level design, it looks easy if one is unfamiliar with it. But if you actually play the game, it is a ball hard difficult, because the controls are terrible. If you watch someone play that game, you would laugh at them, because it looks so easy, but in practice is not.
Id rather read positive impressions of this Sonic game (or any kind of impressions) than just nit picking some gifs, that in reality can be found of anyone. You can find Fata1ty from Quake fame with gifs where he plays like shit. The best Starcraft players, LoL players, Mario speedrunners etc.
But regardless, you can do what you want. Criticizing them over some gifs seems petty to me.
