It's still a tolerable playthrough, especially with part 2 in the mix.

And honestly, people get stuck talking about 1-3 as if they had stopped making 2D Sonic games until 4, but the Nintendo portable games are mostly some shade of solid, with maybe a couple of exceptions.

Thats a 2010 game and itself a simulacrum of the classic Sonic era. That was also 2.5D and not 2D, which already breaks from what we see in this post.