>>109604894>>109604936>>109604953Sure, fine, whatever. But I'm limiting it to only answering direct questions.
>>109604955The text limit on posts doesn't let me do this question justice.
>tldr: City Escape has the better presentation, but Radical Highway has the higher skill expression ceilingBoth stages are classics, and immediately display what both characters are about, but their positions in their respective stories creates a really interesting tradeoff of qualities.
For example, City Escape is the first level, and likely the first level of the entire game, so when you're (literally) dropped in the level has to immediately teach you several things.
Which it does quite successfully, in my opinion. The snowboarding segment alone teaches you
-Going forward is the most important thing
-The camera will follow you around turns
-there are bonuses you can hit if you practice the stage (the ramps, and maintaining speed)
-and you also can't take damage at any point in the snowboarding segment
Without breaking down literally every single part of the levels, Radical Highway's opening, in contrast, hurls you down a big rail (in a nice subtle visual mirroring of Sonic's first level), and then dumps you into a free roaming 3D environment. The way Dark story is structured is that they fully expected it to be your second playthrough, but also accounted for if it was your first. So you first control Shadow in a boss fight, meaning some semblance of his controls is required to even get to Radical Highway. In turn, they throw you into a safe area at the start, (a flat platform with guard rails), but still task you with more intuiting than Hero side (the snowboarding literally puts you on one big forward rail)
Now why are these details so important? Because with that established, you can begin to extrapolate the greentext I started with this, and would see it yourself were you to play it.
City Escape doesn't really have any outright level shortcuts, but Radical Highway does. The very first interactable also lets you show off if you're skilled, since you can hold A to bounce off the rectangle spring higher, and actually homing attack that jet who's bombs would always hit you as a kid. The rest of the contrast in level design continues throughout both
this one guy did good level breakdowns, if you want something to watch while you eat dinner tonight
https://youtu.be/mlz-K3tRVxQhttps://youtu.be/0i4toQUIUPY 
