I’ll give you the DLC. I played it when it came out, and I also switched to easy mode.
To be fair, they added another update afterward to fix the difficulty and boss trials, and they also give Knuckles his proper gliding movement back. These are great improvements, but I was already done with the game when that update came out, and it honestly should have been that way from the start. Maybe I’ll replay the game in a year to see.
But as an open world, it worked pretty well. I know some people called it Ubisoft slop, but it felt nothing like that.