They really called this guy "Fark" for three games and have no sign of stopping and still insist he be taken seriously...
At this point there is no need for the Sonic franchise to continue, outside of a vehicle for Robotnik's comedic stylings. Spark 2, and now Spark 3 even moreso, humiliate the best Sega has been able to produce in the world of 3D Sonic. Music, level design, art style, just making a fast character equally as fun to control playing for high level time attack speed and casual shiny crap collecting for score. Spark 3 has everything you have wanted in a Sonic game for 20 years that Sega has only been able to scratch at. Even the combat is easily fun enough to be worth messing with. Even the popcorn enemies are appropriate threats, requiring you to be a little bit more careful than just mash homing attack on them (In the case of the little jerks with spikes, just avoiding homing attacking them entirely.) without impacting the amazing sense of flow the game has. Every single weakness Spark 2 could be said to have has been improved on here tremendously, from combat to platforming to presentation. (You can actually run some loops for speed now rather than having to jump skip EVERY SINGLE ONE like in 2)
As with all Spark games the plot is complete nonsense... except... well, let me just talk around it a bit. The final act of this game is one of the most bold and daring things I have seen in a 3d platformer, an entire hour of a game that could only have ever come from a dev team of one. The finale is a massive, 40 minute long level which introduces a lives system JUST for that level. If the dev team had even one more person he would have said "Dude this is just going overboard." If any other dev did this, it would be intolerable and self-indulgent to the extreme. But because there's one man doing all this with nobody to stop him, and one extraordinarily talented man making the game he loves, we got this complete descent into insanity uncut, and man he earned every nerve-wracking minute of it. Not a word is spoken in that level and it still manages to tell a story. What a way to cap off the game. Bonus points, the finale could have cheaped out, gone into meta nonsense, or devolved into Yoko Taro-esque crap at any point, but he never allowed that to happen. He took this finale and played it out 100% straight, 100% logical, 100% in universe without flinching and it was so good I actually want to go back and play the previous games and actually try to keep up with the stories this time.
Spark 3 is better than everything Sega has published in the last 10 years, not just Sonic, EVERYTHING. If you have any love for a platformer where you get to run really fast, you owe it to yourself to play this game.
Update: The most recent patch for Spark 3 has added every single level from the nearly as good Spark 2 into Spark 3, in a style reminiscent of the amazing Sonic Unleashed running levels in Sonic Generations mod. No story, bosses, or forced combat, but the good stuff is all here. This makes Spark 3 an even better value, adding quite a few maps that are easily replayable and extremely fun. As you might expect, there is some jank to it; Spark 2 had a running parry that you do not have in Spark 3, so some of the obstacles can be annoying, but it extends the lifespan of a great game tremendously.
