While whizzing through the same level for the tenth time, trying to grab every rescue pod, and destroy every enemy while keeping the accelerator pinned, it dawned on me. Velocity 2X is the best Sonic game to come out in two decades. Much like the Blue Blur once did, Velocity 2X takes an established genre and injects it with equal parts speed and ingenuity. It skillfully uses its well-thought-out mechanics to lay out a clear path to mastery, and walking it gave me a near-constant sense of gratification.

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Velocity 2X is both a vertically scrolling shmup and a side-scrolling action-platformer where you blow up nearly everything you can’t pick up, and speed is the highest virtue in the land. Like its predecessor, it disguises itself as a traditional vert-scroller, but once you’re tele-dashing into the heart of enemy formations and slinging smart bombs in every-which direction with the right stick, any feelings of familiarity will dissipate. Along with its near-constant focus on speed, these elements make Velocity 2X far more dynamic than your garden variety space shooter.Velocity Ultra veterans will have an easy time slipping back into the cockpit of the Quarp Jet. Everything was right where I left it, as were the responsive controls. I hadn’t in any way expected the new on-foot side-scrolling sections to match that level of fluidity, but somehow, developer FuturLab did it. Thanks to the mirroring of key functions from the vertical sections, like boosting and tele-dashing, the platforming sections feel like solving a new set of problems with a pleasantly familiar box of tools.This makes the on-foot action feel like a natural extension of the space-shooting rather than an interruption of it. It also gives Velocity 2X a surprisingly coherent sense of place for an arcade shooter, a feeling reinforced visually by stark lines and notably improved lighting. Nearby explosions bathed my ship in a warm glow, and airlock walls pulsed with light as I gunned down swarms of enemy drones.On the whole, levels are laid out more intelligently than before, allowing for smoother, more rhythmic speed runs. There are still a few puzzle-based levels that focus on navigating branching paths of security locks, and, as in Velocity Ultra, they break up the ordinarily breezy pace of play in unpleasant ways.Where most of the level designs in Velocity 2X make impeccable use of your ship’s versatility and maneuverability, these ones amount to little more than tangled, incoherent knots that have you yanking at whatever strand looks the loosest until, somehow, it comes undone. It’s a structure that’s brought into the side-scrolling areas as well, requiring you to stop dead in your tracks and carefully toss a personal teleporter over obstructions in order to proceed. These brief moments of tedium are the only real stumbling points to be found though, and thankfully they’re few and far between.The new boss battles serve as effective “final exams,” keenly melding Velocity 2X’s various mechanics with a splash of bullet hell rather than making them like the giant damage-sponges you’d see in more traditional shmups. And while the 50 stages are noticeably easier to complete than those of Velocity Ultra’s, scoring a perfect rating is as much of a feat as ever.