Is any of the 3d games good? People always seem to shit on every single sonic release, except for Mania I think it was (that new-ish 2d one made by some fans)
Also I actually remembered I played and own Sonic Heroes for the gamecube
Sonic Adventure 1 is great. I'm not sure what Ollis issue with it is.
The issue with 3D sonic games is that Sega knows how to make Sonic work in 3D. They just shove a bunch of other crap in there that dilutes it. Sonic Adventure 1 only has you playing as Sonic for a fifth of the game. The rest of the game has you doing completely different playstyles. But in SA1 it's okay because you can just choose to play the Sonic campaign and ignore everything else. It works really well. Sonic has a lot of momentum to him so you can do fun tricks like using the spindash to launch yourself up hills and angles to skip parts of the level.
I'm playing through SA2 right now and it's fun when you're playing as Sonic or Shadow, but you only get to play as them a third of the time. The rest of the game is spent in a clunky mech or treasure hunting. I fucking love mecha but the mech stages just aren't fun in SA2. They're very slow, you can't strafe to dodge fire, he platforming isn't great. The treasure hunting stages have garbage cameras and are a slog to get through.
Sonic Heroes just controls like shit. It's very slippery and whenever you change characters you lose all your momentum which makes it not fun to play.
Sonic Unleashed is a 10/10 but only for half the game. When you're playing as Sonic it's a lot of fun. Very linear game but it's always throwing obstacles at you and demanding the right reaction. It's a lot of fun when you memorise a stage and can react perfectly to it. It's like a rhythm game disguised as a platformer. But then for some reason the other half of the game you have to play as the werehog in a shitty slow brawler game.
Sonic Generations, Colours, and Sonic Forces have similar issues, though I haven't played them so take this with a grain of salt. Generations is okay because the alternative playstyle is just classic 2D sonic. Although to my knowledge the 2D levels don't have very good physics compared to the Genesis games. Lots of automated speed instead of allowing Sonics momentum to naturally carry him through. Sonic Forces dilutes the game even further by splitting it between Modern Sonic, Classic Sonic, and bits where you play as your OC which all have different gameplay styles. I believe that Colours has a lot of sectiosn where you have to slowdown and solve puzzles and stuff using the wisps. To the point where only some %20 of the game actually plays like a 3D Sonic game. With that being said I've heard that people generally like Colours and Generations.
Not sure about Shadow the Hedgehog. I've got a copy of that in the mail that hasn't arrived yet.