Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - Episode I
Skip · Other · 2012
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $9.99.
- Length
- 2.5h
- Value
- $4.00/hr
- Reviews
- 40% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 256 MB (NVIDIA GeForce 7600/AT Radeon X1300) & above, 502 MB of storage. Windows only.
The sequel fans have waited 16 years for is finally here - Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode I! Featuring enhanced gameplay elements, including the classic Sonic Spin Dash, and the versatile Homing Attack, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode I picks up right where Sonic and Knuckles™ left off. Dr.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
July 2013 is where it bottomed out, at $2.49. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 72 in the 14 years tracked, about 8 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks.
It is less well reviewed than 99 percent of its genre. On the same math Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - Episode II ($9.99, scores 29) and Sonic Mania ($19.99, scores 65) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
Steam's global achievement data says about 13 percent of players ever finish it. On a 2.5-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 799 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 12 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2023 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 106 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 37 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 30 percent of the 809 reviews written there were positive, against 40 percent overall, and those are 31 percent of everything written about it.
2.5 hours to finish it, 7 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.8 times the campaign.
The drop-off
76% start to 13% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
7 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This game is painful to play, The level design sucks, The momentum of sonic is terrible and same with control, Boss level design is boring and hard, Don't try this game unless if you really want to.
I hate this game. I always heard people say this game sucks and I agree lolol ! Its not very smooth and it took foreverrr to get the game to even open but when I got it running there hasn't been any problems since thankfully but it still wasn't a very good first impression of the game lol.. The stages/levels I hate them so bad they're just not fun I'm so frustrated playing this I am not excited to play episode 2 cos...
Played for 30 minutes, the entire time hopeful that the game wasn't as bad as everyone said it was. I did have fun in some areas, notably splash hill, but casino zone is what pushed me to request a refund. I've always hated the casino zones in Sonic, and this one is the WORST. Don't even get me started on the boss. Countless bottomless pits with 0 warning, and to add salt to the wound, the platforming above those...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - Episode I scores 3/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/202530/sonic-the-hedgehog-4-episode-iThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 17, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.