Forgot to mention that the character boss battles are also terrible. Gamma's fight against Sonic just requires the player to spam the shoot button to win. And some of the regular boss battles are also terrible like Chaos 4.
Eh, it ranges from great to decent since even the main trio has their fair amount of issues that needed to be ironed out.
Honestly, if the game was just the main trio, it would have allowed the devs the time to fine tune their control, level design and content size to deliver an actual great first entry to the 3D genre. Instead it's a really flawed experience that i really love.