Most of them encourage you to go fast only to break your flow with some bullshit enemy placements, spikes, pits, etc. This was the first one where I felt like the game doesn't try to slow you down. In the first two zones the only times I was dying was when I would panic and go against the flow.

Still, it's not like they made the game play itself. You still gotta time your jumps and attacks, it's just that now you actually have a chance of doing everything right. There are still small mistakes any normal person can be expected to make on the first playthrough, but for those you now have a move (Tails-assisted brief flight) that can save you, so it's not that as frustrating as in the older games where you could die over some minor bullshit. It won't bail you out of all situations though, but overall I felt like the difficulty here was a perfect balance.

That is until the Metal Sonic boss. At first it seems normal, until suddenly he stars destroying the platform, and it comes so unexpectedly that it's almost impossible to predict and jump over. After dying three times there, I became so paranoid I just kept jumping into the Tails flight again and again, and finally was able to beat the boss.

But then the third zone is absolutely brutal. There are these rooms that are filling up with sand where you have to jump in and out of the Tails flight to circumnavigate the mazey obstacles before you get consumed by the sand, and this shit is fucking nightmare. You make one mistake and you're gone. And the clunkiness of the mechanic really starts to show here because the animation to get into and out of the flight is pretty long, which wasn't a problem before because you rarely dealt with such short time limits. And Tails' collisions are pretty bouncy too. So I would often fly up, hit the ceiling and get knocked back down, thus immediately failing the section.

I ran out of lives on act 3, which meant I had to start over, and then ran out of lives again. That's when I gave up in frustration. Honestly, were it not for the difficulty spike, I might've loved this one. The graphics and music are so beautiful, and there is a strong nostalgic feel to everything. Zone 2 has some of the prettiest Christmas-themed levels I've ever seen.

Sadly, I don't think I'm ever gonna be beating this game. I don't have the competitive spirit. I don't like replaying the same level dozens of times until I beat it. That's not what I play video games for.