Saw it with some friends.
It keeps to the same pretty-solid status as the first one. It maybe asks us to remember events and characters from the first one in a bit too much detail, and has one five-ten minute detour with sidecharacters that feels utterly unneeded and uninteresting for the most part, and there's some pop-culture references that feel a bit dated and lazy (The Rock having a feud with Vin Diesel is referenced as I recall?) already, but overall it's a solid, family-friendly video-game movie with a d'aww worthy ham-handed (in kind've a good way) moral/theme to it.
Do have to specifically call attention to one clever bit that got an extended giggle-fit from me:
*Knuckles and Robotnik running from a rolling boulder in a forbidden temple, Indiana Jones-style*
Robotnik: "I don't want to die like this. It's derivative!"
Also, as others have mentioned...They tease a Shadow the Hedgehog thing in the works. I honestly don't know enough to have anything much to say about that--purely know the character as the edgelord 90s-meme that he's been joked into.
Also surprised a bit by Idris Alba as Knuckles. I had expected it to be worse and grate on me a bit just because it's different from my expectation. But given some time it works--and they do a pretty good job gradually wrangling some straight-man, dumb-muscle humor out of Knuckles in ways I appreciated.
