Shadow the Hedgehog Review

We've already established that Sonic Heroes wasn't too good, but following it things would only get worse. Even non-fans know how much of an unholy abomination SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2006 was, but the first game considered to have really sucked was Shadow the Hedgehog. It was made to sort out the loose plot threads surrounding Sonic's dark other, named - you guess it - Shadow the Hedgehog, and also because he was a popular character amongst fans at the time. Well, his game not only was one of the three that caused everyone to lose respect for the franchise, but also induced complete and total hatred and resentment toward the character. Time to find out why! LET'S CRACK THIS GAME WIDE OPEN! YEAH, LET'S PARTY!
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Shadow the Hedgehog features a storyline with a much darker tone than previous Sonic games. It begins with Shadow, suffering from amnesia after the events of Adventure 2, in a field by a city, angsting about his lost memories and what memories he has left of a little girl named Maria getting shot down by soldiers. Well, that's nice, ain't it? Then, right the heck out of no where, the sky opens up and black-and-red colored aliens literally rain down on the city and start destroying crap. Shadow walks away, as he doesn't "have time for these humans", when he is randomly approached by...a floating eye with tentacles. At this point, you're probably about as confused as I am, but regardless, the eye projects a hologram of an alien overlord who tells him to bring the Chaos Emeralds to him at the "promised time". "Who are you? And how do you know my name is Shadow? And what are you talking about?" Shadow asks, saying what we're all thinking right now. The eye states he will find out soon enough and floats away into the city, explaining nothing. Somehow believing this incredibly stupid-looking alien overlord to have answers to his past, he heads to the city and from there IT'S UP TO YOU.

At first, Shadow the Hedgehog seems like a joke, perhaps even a parody of the darker games whose popularity was eclipsing platformers around the time that this game came out. I mean, really, read the synopsis I gave for the story up there again. Who could take that seriously? The box art shows an angry-looking Shadow holding a gun in front of an explosion, as if making fun of over-the-top shooters, and you'll be thinking the same thing when you watch the CGI opening. It starts off showing Shadow - who is a three-foot tall, cartoony hedgehog by the way - loading a gun and slowly approaching the edge of a cliff, followed by a montage of scenes including such things as Shadow (who can run several times faster than any vehicle) riding a motorcylce while being chased by angry black birds and jumping off of it before it collides with an object (naturally followed by an explosion), as well as a scene where Shadow just fires at the camera and screams. Need I even mention that an angsty nu-metal-ish song is playing in the background the whole time? Each of the menu screens in the game features a gunshot sound effect playing with every selection. One of said menu screens shows Shadow's face with fire burning in his eyes. It's so cliched that there's no way it could be taking itself seriously. And I'd like to reiterate: the main character of this game is a three-foot-tall, cartoonish hedgehog.

This parody feeling doesn't end when you start playing: Shadow shouts PG-rated profanities almost every time he gets hit or dies, and you also get the ability to use firearms against your enemies. The humans you'll be fighting don't bleed - at all - and the green blood effect seen when killing the aliens is very cartoonish. Heck, the humans don't even die. They just lie there begging you not to kill them. The violence and cursing is kept under control just enough to secure an E10+ rating, and this is a franchise that, up to this point, had never shown a drop of blood or featured the usage of a single curse word, mild or otherwise. And it stars a three-foot-tall, cartoonish hedgehog. It's so tame yet so out of place. Oh, Sonic Team, we always knew you had a sense of humor. So, if this is so obviously a parody, why was it poorly received?

Because when you play it, you realize that it takes itself seriously the whole time. That, and it has some of the worst gameplay and level design in the entire series.

Yes, you are, in fact, meant to take this seriously. What.

The main gimmick of Shadow the Hedgehog is that what stages you will end up visiting and the direction of the story will change depending on your actions in the levels. On paper, this sounds like a fantastic idea for the franchise, as it would add a lot of replay value to an otherwise short game. In practise, though, it's one of the worst things ever introduced to the franchise - and when you're up against Big the Cat's fishing stages in Sonic Adventure and the freaking Werehog in Sonic Unleashed, that's saying a lot.

Basically, the path you take is based on your moral decisions - whether you want Shadow to team up with the good guys (Sonic, his friends, and the humans) or the bad guys (the aliens), or if you just want Shadow to be neutral. Let's talk about what's wrong with this from a story perspective first. First of all, no matter what side you're on, both parties will be shooting at you. Joining the aliens? Alien enemies will still try to kill you. Joining the good guys? The good guys will still try to freaking kill you. To its credit, the good guys being after you has an in-story explanation: a military commander - who, as a bit of trivia, is never at any point officially named even though he is a very important character - holds a grudge against Shadow for some reason and is able to order his troops to go after Shadow, completely ignoring the fact that Shadow has ended up as a relatively innocent good guy for the last few games. It's an incredibly stupid explanation, but it's an explanation nonetheless. The aliens, though? Choose the "Dark" mission and they will still shoot at you for no explained reason. For another thing, this leads to many, many plotholes and inconsistencies. Oftentimes, Shadow will go from location to location without any sort of explanation. Sometimes you'll see a teleportation effect, but that only raises the question of HOW he got teleported. You can also switch sides at any time in any level, and previous "betrayals" are never referenced at any point. Doing something that conflicts with the moral path you're taking, such as striking down a human soldier when doing a "Hero" mission, holds no consequences whatsoever other than being told off by the character accompanying you and is sometimes even required to progress through a level. This is, simply put, lazy.

That's not even getting into how horribly this translates into the gameplay. Remember the annoying Team Chaotix levels from Sonic Heroes? The ones that required you to search for items or objects in a level that was linear in design? Now, imagine them stretched over an entire game and made about twenty times more frustrating and annoying with an even worse camera. That's Shadow the Hedgehog in a nutshell. Both the "Hero" and "Dark" missions generally require you to hunt for items or enemies in a linear level, and there is no room for error. One level's "Dark" mission asks you to kill fifty military robots. How many are there? Fifty exactly. This template is used for the "Hero" and "Dark" missions in nineteen of the game's twenty-two levels. The other three are open-ended in design, yet end up being even more torturous. The landscapes are completely repetitive and the camera is the worst the series has seen yet - which is saying a lot - leading to stages that are extremely easy to get lost in. And like I said, to complete a mission, you have to find EVERYTHING. It's almost insulting that, as you perform actions considered good, a blue bar in the upper right corner of the screen starts to fill up (the same goes for a red gauge in the upper left corner as you do things that are considered evil). If it fills all the way up, you can use one of Shadow's Chaos powers. Sounds good, right? It would be if this particular power didn't cause you to boost forward really fast, past things you need to find to complete the mission.

Oh, but doesn't the game still have your typical "point-A-to-point-B" missions? Those should at least be fun, you may be thinking. Indeed, there are missions that simply ask you to run to the goal, (usually a level's neutral mission) and they are, in fact, the most tolerable...but that's not saying much at all. The level design in Shadow the Hedgehog is laughably bland. It's mostly just running in a straight line with a few loops and some enemies. That's it. There's no semblance of a genuine challenge here, and what precious little platforming the game features is so utterly forgettable that it might as well not even be there.

Like the level design, Shadow the Hedgehog's bosses pose no challenge to you whatsoever. All you have to do is find a gun, then just blast away. Can't find a gun? Don't worry, the homing attack will do just fine, too, even if it will take a little longer to beat the boss. What makes this even worse is that the same final bosses are used for more than one of the different story paths. I see that 2005 Sonic Team liked being lazy quite a bit. I would also like to note that this is the first time a true final boss in a Sonic game has ever left me disappointed.

I am not pleased with you, Sonic Team.

And lest we forget how Heroes cheaply extended its length by making you play through the exact same game four times with few changes. Shadow pulls a similar trick. Each final level has a "Hero" and "Dark" mission. The final boss you fight and, by extension, the ending you receive changes depending on which of the two missions you complete. There are five final levels and thus ten endings. You have to get all ten to unlock the last story, and you will receive the true ending to the game if you beat that. Since allowing you to use the level select to make things quick would be too fair, you'll definitely end up going through the levels you already went through several times and probably even completing missions you already completed. There you are being lazy yet again, Sonic Team. Speaking of the endings, they're all so similar and formulaic that I can give a basic rundown of each without technically spoiling anything: Shadow gets all the Chaos Emeralds, says "Finally, I've got ALL the Chaos Emeralds!", states "I am Shadow the Hedgehog," has an epiphany, declares "This is who I am!", credits. You've got to appreciate the effort here.
But how could I go this far into the review without mentioning the numerous, numerous technical flaws? Actually, I did already mention the camera, but I believe it deserves mentioning again. Sonic Adventure was released in 1999, and its camera could get pretty annoying at times. It was at least somewhat justifiable, though, since it was Sonic's first step into 3-D. Even Super Mario 64 had an annoying camera, albeit less so. Sonic Adventure 2's camera was still flawed, but they had at least tried to improve it. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 were later rereleased for GameCube, and the camera wasn't improved at all, and Heroes featured a camera that was even more annoying. So, Shadow the Hedgehog came out in 2005, after ALL of these games, and it features the worst camera yet. Not only does this mean that Sonic Team couldn't program a competent camera system after developing 3-D Sonic games for six years, but that they only got WORSE at it. Not to mention that in a game where you're going to spend most of your time searching for things, you NEED a camera that's at least somewhat reliable. Even aside from the camera, Shadow's controls are annoyingly slippery, and the vehicles like cars and motorcycles - which are utterly pointless in a game where the main character is supposed to be able to run faster than the speed of sound - tend to control even worse. The auto-aim the guns use is even less reliable, at times being too sensitive and at times not being sensitive enough, and the only thing keeping them from being completely useless is the fact that bullets kill faster than the homing attack. Also, like Sonic Heroes, the game can get kind of glitchy at times. The light dash and homing attack can still backfire just like before, but now some areas won't load completely before you enter them, meaning you can fall into a black void where a solid floor should be and die. An even more frustrating glitch is when enemies - that you often NEED to kill to complete a mission - won't spawn, meaning you'll have to restart the level if you want to complete said mission. I know that at this point I shouldn't expect much from you, but what the heck, Sonic Team?

Finally, the graphics of Shadow the Hedgehog are utter garbage even for its time. Wait, the graphics in Heroes were pretty good, so how could they screw THAT up? Well, part of why Heroes' graphics looked good was because they were bright and colorful, like you would expect from a Sonic game. Shadow is supposed to be DARK AND EDGY, and thus Sonic Team thought the environments should look darker and more subdued. This shouldn't automatically lead to the graphics looking like crap, but apparently Sonic Team thought "darker and more subdued" meant "muddy-looking with blurry textures". Character models don't fare much better; facial animations look like crap and the human characters are blocky. I would expect that from a Dreamcast game released in 1999. I wouldn't expect that from a PS2 game released in 2005. The next problem with the graphics may be exclusive to the PS2 version, but it has the WORST framerate I have ever seen in a video game. There is not a single moment where the game doesn't look slow or choppy, and that is simply unacceptable.

Pretty much the only thing about Shadow I can say legitimately doesn't suck is the music. I absolutely love almost all of the stage BGM's in the game. Shadow also has the distinction of having the most vocal tracks I like out of the entire Sonic series. "I Am (All of Me)", "Almost Dead", and "Waking Up" aren't all that great in my opinion, but I actually really liked "All Hail Shadow", "Never Turn Back" and especially "Chosen One". Sure, it's angstier than anything Linkin Park has ever written (okay, that's probably a HUGE overstatement), but darned if it doesn't sound good.

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Shadow the Hedgehog is quite possibly one of the worst games I've ever played. The gameplay sucks, the level design sucks, the graphics are garbage, the story is atrocious, it's rife with technical problems, it tries to cheaply extend its length, and finally, the "dark" tone is incredibly stupid. The only thing saving it from a 1/10 is its soundtrack. What's really sad about the whole thing is that this was a story that just didn't need to be told. We already knew everything we needed to about Shadow; the information that was revealed in this game was not only unnecessary but completely ruined Shadow's back story. I can understand having to resolve loose plot threads from Heroes such as Shadow's amnesia, but did they really need to make an entire game to do that? And did they really need to do it this horribly?

But perhaps the saddest thing about it all is that things only got worse for the Sonic series from here. After Shadow, this happened:

It honestly made me wonder how I've been able to remain a fan for so long. Sonic and the Secret Rings was bad, albeit less so than Shadow and 06, and the same goes for Black Knight. Even Unleashed, though a decent game overall, was a disappointment thanks to the stretchy-armed monstrosity known as the Werehog. Yes, Colors was great and Generations is shaping up to be even better, but how was I able to keep buying the horrible games without losing enthusiasm until Colors happened? The answer is because when Sonic started going downhill, I was young. Young enough to look past the flaws; young enough to squeeze enjoyment out of these awful, awful games. Yes, there was once a time when I enjoyed Shadow the Hedgehog, and I'm darned glad there was. Otherwise, I might not have seen Sonic through until he got good again. I hope many of my fellow fans had a similar experience growing up.

*ahem* Yes, sorry for that little tangent. Anyway, Shadow the Hedgehog is an unholy abomination of a game and an insult to the series that it belongs to. Pick up the OST, but avoid the game itself like the plague. T-Man, out.

Score: 2/10

My Scoring System:

10 - Amazing game. Flaws are minor at best. If you don't own it, you should be ashamed of yourself. (Super Mario Galaxy 2)

9(.5) - Fantastic game. Perhaps a couple of notable annoyances, but still a must-have. (Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep)

8(.5) - Very good game. Has a few flaws, but you won't be disappointed with your purchase. (Super Mario Sunshine)

7(.5) - Pretty good game that either has several problems or is just too short for its price. Enjoyable to play, but you may want to wait for the price to drop a bit before picking it up. (Sonic Unleashed)

6(.5) - Passable game. Has its strengths, but unless you're a fan of the series or genre, you're probably better off not bothering. (Mega Man X6)

5(.5) - Mediocre game. Not a bad experience, but it's too flawed to be much fun. A bargain bin purchase at best, and only if you're a fan of the series. (Sonic Heroes)

3 or 4(.5) - Bad game. A mostly negative experience, and whatever it does right fails to save it overall. Even if you're a fan, you're probably better off not playing it. (Sonic and the Secret Rings)

1 or 2(.5) - Utter garbage. An unholy abomination that we should do all in our power to avoid playing. In other words, STAY THE HECK AWAY! (Sonic the Hedgehog 2006)

0 - ...No. Just freaking no. (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing)

Super Mario Sunshine Review

As those who have read my Viewtiful Joe review will know, lately I have been clearing some games out of my GameCube backlog. This ended up bringing me to a nostalgic favorite, Super Mario Sunshine. It was not in my backlog per se, as I had already beaten it. However, it was the only 3-D game in the entire Mario series that I had yet to complete 100%, and I intended for that to change. With all that said, it is sometimes considered the non-spinoff Mario game that leans closest to "ehh". Is it as great as I remember it, or is it more nostalgia gone to waste like Sonic Heroes? Time to find out!

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In Super Mario Sunshine, Mario, Princess Peach and a few of her toadstool servants are going on vacation to the "sun-drenched tropical paradise of Isle Delfino." The plane comes to a screeching hault at the airstrip in order to avoid a strange goop covering the landing pad. While exploring the airstrip looking for help, Mario comes across the cleaning robot FLUDD (Flash Liquidizer Ultra Dousing Device - yes, that is the official acronym), which Mario uses to clean the sludge off of the airstrip. Upon doing so, he is confronted by local police and is put on trial for spreading paintlike sludge over the island (which has apparently caused the Shine Sprites, the guardians of Isle Delfino, to run away, which has, in turn, caused the island to get darker), with his sentence being to clean up the island. We quickly find out that the one who did this is an imposter named "Shadow Mario", and thus begins an epic adventure that inevitably features the capture of Princess Peach yet again. Oops, did I just give a spoiler?

Gameplay-wise, Sunshine uses the template that 64 established: you are put in an open-ended stage and given missions to complete. Completing one of said missions allows you to receive one of the featured macguffins (Shine Sprites this time around, rather than Stars), of which you will need a certain amount to complete the game. However, Super Mario Sunshine adds a new gimmick to this formula: your trusty water-shooting backpack, FLUDD. FLUDD has several nozzles, used for different purposes. The spraying nozzle is the default nozzle, and you will have it with you at all times. It does just what you think it would do: it sprays water at things. You will be required to use this ability to clean up the toxic sludge that Shadow Mario has left in the various worlds, but it can also be used to stun enemies and sometimes even interact with the environment. Another nozzle (which you will start out with, but can be traded in for other nozzles) is the hover nozzle, which you can press the "X" button to switch to. It functions as sort of a water-shooting jetpack lite, allowing you to traverse the world more easily. There are two more nozzles that you can switch the hover nozzle out for: the rocket nozzle, which propels to extreme hights, and the turbo nozzle, which finally allows Mario to run as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog - it's about freaking time. This may sound like a stupid gimmick, but it's actually pretty unique and interesting. You will be putting the spraying and hover nozzles to great use throughout the game, and the rocket and turbo nozzles have their own missions and secrets associated with them and are pretty fun to use. Also, what other game lets you do so much with just water? I mean, really?

Sunshine's worlds feature less of a focus on conventional platforming than its predecessor, Super Mario 64, and what conventional platforming there is is usually made easier thanks to the hover nozzle. In return, however, Sunshine's levels are far bigger and more open-ended than anything that 64 had to offer. The game also reintroduces blue coins as separate collectible items from normal coins. There are far less of them, and ten of them can be traded at a certain store for Shine Sprites. Thirty blue coins are hidden in each area, making exploration a lot more rewarding. Of course, a Mario game without difficult platforming might as well not be a Mario game at all, which is why some missions will require you to visit "secret" levels. These secret levels feature platforming that is reminiscent of the classic Mario games (but in 3-D) yet remain very unique and even creative. Also, upon entering secret levels, FLUDD is taken away from you, making for a very difficult and fun platforming experience. These secret levels may also be revisited later on (with FLUDD) to collect red coins for an extra Shine Sprite.

Sunshine also features fewer worlds than 64 - seven as opposed to 64's fifteen. However, it again makes up for this in several ways. While it doesn't have as great of a variety of levels, its locales do remain very diverse while still sticking to the theme of a tropical resort island. Several aspects of the levels will change depending on which mission you are playing, including what NPC's you will see as well as what they say, making the levels feel more alive than ever. Speaking of missions, Sunshine features much greater variety in mission structure than Super Mario 64, and the areas feature more missions overall. Besides missions requiring you to chase down Shadow Mario, every mission asks you to do something different. Even missions requiring you to hunt down eight red coins tend to have a different, interesting spin put on them. The game also features several bosses, and while none of them are qute difficult, they are actually very creative and unique as well as a LOT of fun to battle. Even aside from all this, the levels offer a lot more to do overall. There is the aforementioned blue coin hunting, of course, but there are also two hidden Shine Sprites to get in each world, and, like in 64, you can get one last Shine Sprite by collecting 100 normal coins. Many of these attributes extends to the game's featured hub world, Delfino Plaza, which changes as you continue through the game and collect more Shine Sprites and contains many more secrets than Princess Peach's Castle in 64. Overall, I found it to be a far more engaging hub world.

There are two more positive aspects to the game that I feel deserve mentioning. The first is the graphics. The graphics were absolutely amazing at the time, and despite the game being nearly ten years old, it's actually still visually appealing if not technically stunning. The environments are all as bright and colorful as you would expect, and the lighting effects are great. Some of the textures are blurry, but it still looks really good overall. Finally, this was 3-D Mario game that allowed you to ride Yoshi. This may not seem very big, but hey, it's still cool, and he will prove very useful in certain missions and in finding blue coins.

But although Sunshine is a great game, it does unfortunately have a couple of genuine flaws. First of all, the camera in this game is not very good. There will be times when your view will be annoyingly obstructed before the camera catches up to you, and it's not always easy to see where you need to go next. Often, trying to move it with the "C" stick or center it with the "L" button won't help much or can even make it worse. It's not quite something you would expect to see in, say, a Sonic game, but it can be an annoyance. What IS something you would expect to see in a Sonic game is the noticeable lack of polish. Don't get me wrong, the game is far from broken; you will mostly just see some minor oddities. However, there were some disconcertingly frequent annoyances that almost made me wonder if SEGA had developed the game, including three collision detection issues I experienced that came right out of no where and caused me to go through an otherwise solid object. Another example of this lack of polish is a segment toward the end of the game where you have to navigate a boat across a pool of lava that will sink if it hits an object. The method of controlling the boat is that you spray over the side of the direction you want to go in, but there were times when the sides you would need to spray over would randomly invert, making an already difficult area downright frustrating and cheap. Ultimately, I found this issue annoying enough to lower the score down a bit from the 9/10 I initially wanted to give it. Really, Nintendo, I expect more from you.

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While it feels more rushed and unpolished than what Nintendo usually puts out, Super Mario Sunshine is still a great game, featuring a neat gimmick, great variety in mission structure, and a lot to do overall. It's sometimes considered to be the weakest 3-D entry in the series, but while 64 is probably more polished, from a gameplay perspective Sunshine does improve on several aspects of 64. If you own a Wii or GameCube and you're a fan of platformers, this is not a game that you should pass up.

Score: 8.5/10

My Scoring System:

10 - Amazing game. Flaws are minor at best. If you don't own it, you should be ashamed of yourself. (Zelda: Ocarina of Time)

9(.5) - Fantastic game. Perhaps a couple of notable annoyances, but still a must-have. (Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep)

8(.5) - Very good game. Has a few flaws, but you won't be disappointed with your purchase. (Klonoa)

7(.5) - Pretty good game that either has several problems or is just too short for its price. Enjoyable to play, but you may want to wait for the price to drop a bit before picking it up. (Rayman 3D)

6(.5) - Passable game. Has its strengths, but unless you're a fan of the series or genre, you're probably better off not bothering. (Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2)

5(.5) - Mediocre game. Not a bad experience, but it's too flawed to be much fun. A bargain bin purchase at best, and only if you're a fan of the series. (Mega Man X7)

3 or 4(.5) - Bad game. A mostly negative experience, and whatever it does right fails to save it overall. Even if you're a fan, you're probably better off not playing it. (Sonic and the Secret Rings)

1 or 2(.5) - Utter garbage. An unholy abomination that we should do all in our power to avoid playing. In other words, STAY THE HECK AWAY! (Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22)

0 - ...No. Just freaking no. (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing)

Sonic Heroes Review

Last summer, I reviewed three of the controversial 3-D Sonic games - namely, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Sonic Unleashed. This was partly due to my hype for the then-upcoming Sonic games - Sonic 4: Episode I and Sonic Colors - and also because I find 3-D Sonic games an interesting subject, what with the controversies, broken fanbases, and allegations of bias towards professional critics surrounding them. Well, this year is Sonic's 20th anniversary, and we have yet another awesome-looking game coming out called Sonic Generations. Before it comes out, I've decided to review the 3-D Sonic games I skipped over last year, just so no one feels left out.

Uhh...yeah, sorry, but not that one. I tried to play it again, but the torture was just too much to bear. That statement alone should say enough about my feelings for THAT game. I also won't be reviewing the Riders or Storybook series, as they're just spinoffs and had little influence on the direction or canon of the Sonic games overall. Instead, I will start my excursion through the remaining two 3-D Sonic games with Sonic Heroes. It was released in early 2004 to mixed reception from both the fans and the critics and is sometimes considered the point where the franchise starting its downhill spiral that it has just now broken out of. I, myself, absolutely loved it as a kid, but do I still care for it as much now that I'm an older, more seasoned gamer? It's time to find out!

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Sonic Heroes focuses on four teams of characters: Team Sonic, made of up your usual Sonic the Hedgehog, Miles "Tails" Prower and Knuckles the Echidna; Team Dark, made up of series veterans Shadow the Hedgehog and Rouge the Bat as well as new character E-123 Omega, who is a robot that Eggman built; Team Rose, made up of Amy Rose, Cream the Rabbit (first introduced in Sonic Advance 2), and Big the Cat; and finally, Team Chaotix, made up of Espio the Chameleon, Vector the Crocodile, and Charmy the Bee, all characters from an old 32X spinoff that very few people even knew about. So why did they even bring them back? Well, we'll see soon enough. Anyway, Team Sonic's story is exactly what you would expect: Eggman's planning something evil and they've got to, in Sonic's words, "CRACK THAT EGGMAN WIDE OPEN! YEAH, LET'S PARTY!" Team Rose has to find Froggy and a lost Chao named Chocola, and Team Chaotix (being a detective agency) has to help out a mysterious client by completing missions. Team Dark's storyline is the most interesting: whilst breaking into Eggman's base, Rouge finds Omega and the thought-to-be-deceased Shadow (who can't remember anything), and they all pursue Eggman for their own reasons - Shadow for answers as to his lost memories, Rouge for treasure and Omega for revenge.

Sonic Heroes was the first 3-D Sonic game after the Adventure series, and changes things up from them by introducing the team gimmick. Rather than controlling each team member separately in their own levels as in Sonic Adventure 2, each of a team's three members are controlled at once. Each team is made up of a "speed" character, a "flight" character and a "power" character. The formation of the team changes depending on which one is the leader, and the leader can be switched out using the "Y" and "X" buttons (on the GameCube). Obviously, while in "speed" formation, the game moves at its fastest, and you will also be able to use the homing attack, which is useful for damaging enemies and sometimes even crossing gaps using said enemies. Speed characters also have a tornado move that can knock enemies off balance or take away the shields of some enemies as well as allow the team to swing off of poles, and some can even dash along a trail of rings by pressing the "B" button or jump between walls. When in "flight" formation, the characters stack on top of each other, with the flight character on top, allowing him/her to carry the entire team by flying. The flight character can also shoot the characters s/he's carrying as electrified balls to damage enemies. Finally, when in "power" formation, the team's attack power increases, making this formation useful for clearing obstacles and fighting groups of enemies. The power character can also throw other team members at enemies as fireballs, and can also float, which can be used to propel everyone upwards in areas with giant fans. You will often have to switch between characters to suit different situations or clear certain areas, and sometimes you can take a different path or shortcut depending on which formation you're in. Overall, the team gimmick is unique and places a fun twist on the usual fast platforming gameplay.

One thing that fans will appreciate is the callbacks to the original Genesis Sonic games. In the classics, there were always "Zones" with two (three in the first game) "Acts," or stages, in each, followed by a boss. Things are much the same way in Heroes. While it drops "Acts" and "Zones," you always go through two similarly-themed levels and then fight a boss before moving on to two more similarly-themed levels. Special stages also return from the classics. To access them, you have to find a caged key somewhere in the stage, and avoid getting hit for the rest of the stage to keep it. If you have it when you get to the end of the stage, you will enter the special stage. The way the special stage works is that you must gather spheres scattered around the stage to keep your boost gauge up, which you use by pressing the "B" button repeatedly, as you make your way to either the goal ring or a Chaos Emerald, and the boost will become more effective the more spheres you get. If you enter the special stage in the first of a pair of stages, your spheres will count toward your score, which will be converted into points if you get to the goal ring. If you enter in the second stage of a pair, you will be racing against a Chaos Emerald, of which you will need seven to enter the final story, and you can only have it if you catch up to it. It's actually a pretty fun special stage, and I think that the fact that you have to get the Chaos Emeralds yourself in this game rather than receiving them over the course of the story like in other 3-D Sonics makes things more interesting.

Sonic Heroes succeeds aesthetically as well. The graphics are very good for their time, featuring bright, colorful enivironments. Most of the character models are pretty good, too, but I can't help but think that a few of them are a bit shinier than they should be. Heroes also features a great soundtrack for the stages. While, as usual, I found that most of the vocal themes didn't appeal to me personally, there were a couple that I liked: namely, "This Machine," a catchy industrial rock track, and "What I'm Made Of," the final boss theme.

So, Sonic Heroes does get several things right. It's a bit unfortunate that the rest of the game doesn't fare quite as well. While the gimmick of the week is fun and the gameplay is as fast-paced as ever, not everything about the gameplay succeeds. First of all, the grinding mechanics in this game suck. In Sonic Adventure 2, your speed upon hitting a rail was determined by how much momentum you had beforehand. To keep moving fast, you had to hold the "B" button down to crouch, but you couldn't keep holding it down or Sonic would lose balance. In addition, while I suppose this is more related to the level design, you usually wouldn't be grinding for a very long time without having to partake in some form of interaction or platforming. None of this is so in Heroes. You still hold the "B" button to go faster, but prior momentum is not a factor when jumping onto a rail, nor is balance. Grinding pretty much boils down to holding the B button while the game does the rest for you, which is honestly kind of boring. This would just be a nitpick if it weren't for the fact that this game places a much larger emphasis on grinding than in Adventure 2. Outright automation extends to the few loops that the game has. When going through a loop, you are thrust into a semi-scripted event that strips control completely away from you. This doesn't bother me for most of the smaller loops in the game (such as the ones in Seaside Hill and Ocean Palace), but when it comes to larger ones such as those in Grand Metropolis and Frog Forest, I just found it to be pretty annoying.

The game feels pretty darn unpolished. Though I wouldn't quite call the Adventure games "polished," it was pretty rare that the glitches would intrude on the experience, at least in the Dreamcast versions. Unfortunately, I can't say the same thing for Sonic Heroes. There are times when a homing attack or light dash will backfire, which can lead to your doom. In the few boss fights where you will be using the Thunder Shoot ability, the hit detection for it can be severely off at times, leading to frustration. Also, notice that I referred to the loops in the above paragraph as "semi-scripted". Dare to let go of the control stick while running through them and the game will glitch out. It doesn't glitch out severely, but it happens. There are two levels featuring pinball mechanics, but the controls are kind of unresponsive when on the pinball tables. This was probably, to an extent, intentional, but it adds needless frustration to at least one of these stages. And none of this is even getting into the camera. 3-D camera angles were never quite Sonic's best friend, but the camera in this game sometimes likes to go through walls, and also won't always clearly show bottomless pits. If you try to turn it with the shoulder buttons, it moves pretty slowly and can sometimes make the angle even worse. Though you should be able to, you can't use the C-Stick to turn the camera around, as moving it in ANY direction causes you to switch to a useless first-person view. Just...why?

Even if these problems with the gameplay had been fixed, there is another element that's of almost equal importance in a platformer: the level design, and in Sonic Heroes, it's pretty much a mixed bag. There is a lot of variety in mechanics and gimmicks, and, as mentioned earlier, there are times when you can take a different path or shortcut depending on which team formation you're using, which is great. On the other hand, (again, as mentioned earlier) some levels feature long sections of the aforementioned boring grinding. Another problem is that the levels sometimes feel like they're relying on beat-em-up elements too much in a game that's supposed to be a platformer. I have no problem with there being SOME sections where you have to defeat a group of enemies to proceed - after all, that's one of the things that the power character is for, right? The problem is that there are just too many of them.

Boss design is even more of a mixed bag than the level design. At the end of each pair of levels you will either fight Eggman himself, one of the game's other playable teams, or several waves of enemy robots. Eggman battles are an absolute joke, and can be won just by continually spamming a single attack. Team battles, on the opposite end of the spectrum, are freaking frustrating. It's supposed to be like rock-paper-scissors, where the opposing team is in one formation and you have to choose the formation it's weak to, but the game never makes it completely clear which formation is weak to which, and even if you do figure it out, it's still pretty annoying. The only bosses that I really enjoyed were the ones that required you to fight off waves of Eggman's robots. These were legitimately difficult and pretty darn fun. In fact, if they wanted so much emphasis on beat-em-up elements, why didn't they just make a few more of those? Aside from those, the only boss I really liked was the true final boss, which, while not as great as the ones from Sonic 3 & Knuckles or the Adventure games, was still pretty fun.

Unfortunately, the problems don't quite end there. Sonic Heroes is a pretty short game...that is, it WOULD be if you didn't have to play through it three more times before gaining access to the last story! As I stated earlier, Sonic Heroes offers four teams to control. What I didn't say was that you have to complete the game with all of them to unlock the final story! Normally, I wouldn't have a problem with this; after all, you know what they say, the MORE the MERRIER! Ohohoho - no, I won't ever quote that line again. *ahem* The problem is that the order and designs of the levels are exactly the same when going through it with each team, with the only difference being in difficulty. It pretty much forces you to play through the game on hard mode (Team Dark) and easy mode (Team Rose) before allowing you to fight the final boss. If you enjoyed the game the first time, you'll probably enjoy it again, but it's a cheap way to extend the game's length nonetheless.

And then there's the final team, Team Chaotix. Earlier in the review, I questioned why they were brought back, since very few people had even played the game they came from. Well, apparently, making you play through the game on different difficulties didn't cheaply extend the length enough, so Sonic Team saw fit to shoehorn THESE guys that nobody cared about in. So what difficulty are they? Super Easy Mode? Brutally Hard Mode? Nope. Team Chaotix's levels are mission-based, either requiring you to find a certain number of items in the level or proceed through a level stealthily. If you ask me, the item collecting stages are flawed conceptually. The Adventure games had stages that required you to hunt for items, but they were open-ended in design - like they should have been. Heroes' levels are linear in design, which, when combined with the game's bad camera, can sometimes make required items easy to miss. Sometimes, if you miss JUST ONE, you'll have to go back through the entire stage AGAIN just to find it. You'll also find yourself trying to explore around a lot to make sure you're not missing anything, which will require you to try to turn the camera, and considering how bad the camera is...yeah, I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Especially notable is the mission in Mystic Mansion, which requires you to use your tornado ability to put out 60 red torches. How many red torches are there? 60 exactly. How long is the level? Long enough to decently space out 60 red freakin' torches.

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So, is Sonic Heroes the point where the series started going downhill? Unfortunately, I would have to say so. It's not quite a bad game; the gameplay can be pretty enjoyable at times and the team gimmick works well. However, almost every aspect of it is flawed in some way so that it seriously hurts the experience. Some would say that the Adventure games weren't that good, but I would still say that Heroes is the one where you could tell something was very wrong. Sorry, fans, but this one is a bargain bin purchase at best.

Score: 5/10

My Scoring System:

10 - Amazing game. Flaws are minor at best. If you don't own it, you should be ashamed of yourself. (Zelda: Ocarina of Time)

9(.5) - Fantastic game. Perhaps a couple of notable annoyances, but still a must-have. (Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep)

8(.5) - Very good game. Has a few flaws, but you won't be disappointed with your purchase. (Klonoa)

7(.5) - Pretty good game that either has several problems or is just too short for its price. Enjoyable to play, but you may want to wait for the price to drop a bit before picking it up. (Rayman 3D)

6(.5) - Passable game. Has its strengths, but unless you're a fan of the series or genre, you're probably better off not bothering. (Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2)

5(.5) - Mediocre game. Not a bad experience, but it's too flawed to be much fun. A bargain bin purchase at best, and only if you're a fan of the series. (Mega Man X7)

3 or 4(.5) - Bad game. A mostly negative experience, and whatever it does right fails to save it overall. Even if you're a fan, you're probably better off not playing it. (Sonic and the Secret Rings)

1 or 2(.5) - Utter garbage. An unholy abomination that we should do all in our power to avoid playing. In other words, STAY THE HECK AWAY! (Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22)

0 - ...No. Just freaking no. (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing)