Sonic Mania
Fair · Action · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
WAIT.
A BANGER at $6.72, only fair at $19.99.
- Length
- 5.7h
- Value
- $3.51/hr
- Reviews
- 94% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, DirectX 9.0c compliant video card 256MB, 399 MB of storage. Windows only.
Experience the ultimate celebration of past and future in Sonic Mania, an all-new 2D Sonic adventure running at a crisp 60FPS with stunning HD retro-style graphics.
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 2021 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. It has been discounted 54 times in the 9 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. 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 7 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $6.72 BANGER line 36 times.
Value puts it in the top 3 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Pizza Tower ($19.99, scores 70) beats it on value, while it beats Sonic Origins ($29.99, scores 34).
84 from critics against 94 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Steam's global achievement data says about 13 percent of players ever finish it. On a 5.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 19 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2022 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 80 percent of the 2,684 reviews written there were positive, against 94 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
5.7 hours to finish it, 19 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 3.3 times the campaign.
At 5.7 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
58% start to 13% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
78 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
There's no such thing as a bad sonic game (Excluding labyrinth, though I haven't played that in a while) It's very fun to play and that's all that matters.
As a huge fan of the Genesis Sonic games, I have to say this game is pretty good. I'm slightly disappointed there are a lot of nostalgic stages as opposed to primarily ones with completely new designs, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Highly recommended for classic and new Sonic fans.
peak game, despite being quite old. i got it for very cheap and its graphics look on point. optimized perfectly and runs amazingly. never gets old
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.
Cite this score
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Sonic Mania scores 65/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/584400/sonic-maniaThe 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 14, 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.