(unfortunately i haven't quite seen the entirety of what the mod has to offer, let alone SEEN most of it, so i'll base my review off of what i've played of it so far. rest assured, though, i feel i've played enough of it to formulate a solid opinion.)
this is not a sonic robo blast 2 mod. hear me out.
rather, this is a fully interactive gallery tour of srb2's history that takes you through the vast majority of the game's history in the most charming way possible. the museum itself and all of its little areas and hubworlds are extremely endearing and have a TON (and i do mean a TON) of stuff to find, unlock and interact with, genuinely giving me reason to go back and literally find a ton of things i've never seen before, despite revisiting these areas several times over the past few days. it's truly impressive how much is stuffed into each little explorable area, and that i really appreciate.
the levels themselves are not much to speak of, they're the originals flawlessly ported over. not much to speak about, but that's more of a positive comment than not. i will say, though, there are a ton of maps i would never have thought to have seen included separately purely because of how negligible the differences between stages would've been, but i do wholly respect the efforts.
though, i will admit, the stages do stay true to the originals...for better or worse. mostly worse. i definitely can't (and won't) fault you for this, but the stages do retain all of their archaic level design attributes from when they were originally released, which makes playing the stages themselves easily the least enjoyable part of the game. once again, though, can't fault you on that.
what i CAN fault, though, are some of the original inclusions added, or, in some cases, the lack thereof. a huge part of the mod is based on emblem collection (after all, a good chunk of unlockables are tied to your emblem count), but most of the time there's at least one emblem locked behind another character. normally this wouldn't be too big an issue, but for how often this occurs i do find it very odd that there isn't a more accessible way to change characters. for instance, i am playing on a sonic save file, but his emblem in 2.1.x THZ1 requires the sonic and tails combo, and in order to get the emblem i need to go back to the title screen, enter the no-save file, pick sonic and tails, run my way back to the THZ hub and find 2.1.x act 1 again just to get that one emblem. i really think having something like the OLDC's return-to-hub feature and the character select barrel would be a godsend, and i don't think i'm alone in this one.
***SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE READING AND HAVEN'T YET TOUCHED SRB2TP***
before i go into my next general piece of criticism, i do have to applaud the fact that the sheer AMOUNT of content allows for unlock chains, and it really helps the unlocking experience and incentivises people to find secrets. for example, from the hint in the hint area alone, you can not only use the gargoyle pond to find the hidden button (which if i may say feels kinda redundant that you hit a metaphorical switch just to find another switch to hit but whatever), which unlocks The Wizard Needs Food Badly, which can unlock metal sonic via super search, which by proxy unlocks metal challenge. that's AWESOME.
unfortunately, though, metal challenge is where i do find a lot of grievance. not that the mode itself is poorly executed, far from it. it's an extremely fun time and expands perfectly on the BCZ2 mechanic that it's based upon.
except for relay races!
i have no shame in saying that the relay races are poorly designed. to my knowledge there are only two of them in the package, which lessens the blow a little bit, but both still end up poorly delivering on what i thought to be a super fun concept. in reality, what happens is that you end up tagging alongside metal for the duration of the race, in a competition to see who can make it across the signpost at the end first. this really just amounts to either a pretty dull or pretty annoying experience (depending on which race you chose) that could've been so much more had it not relied on sticking to metal's side. rest of the mode is fantastic, though, i had an absolute blast.
you'd think that because of all this criticism i've laid out on the table that i would give The Past anything less than five stars. well, you're wrong! purely because it's something that, for the effort put into it, doesn't really necessitate anything less. it's absolutely fantastic, even in spite of the flaws that probably should be ironed out sooner rather than later.
also screw beta quest i had to beat it twice and i did not like either of my attempts at all
