Sonic was on a life support machine. Sonic Heroes just hit the 'off' switch.
User Rating: 5.1 | Sonic Heroes PS2
*Prologue* Before I start this review you must realise that I'm a huge Sonic fan. My first ever game was Sonic 2 on the Megadrive. I was a master of all the Megadrive Sonic games. However, in the future because of the fact that I bought a Playstation 1 and 2 I never got to play on any of the Sonic games on the Sega Saturn or Dreamcast. Then I heard Sonic was coming to the PS2. I was thrilled. This was my first new Sonic game in years and I had never played a 3D one before. The hype I had towards this game was incredible. That's why it is one of the biggest disappointments in my gaming life. *Graphics* The graphics are relatively good. Nice colourful areas. Although it's not really my taste, the characters were shaded very well. However, there are some quite bad clipping problems that shouldn't be as bad as this in a next-gen title. The levels are very blocky. You often get some extreme camera angles which are irritating espically during a heated boss fight. *Sound* So what's my major problem with the game? This: It has the most annoying voice acting in the history of computer games. Normally I wouldn't let voice acting bother me but the characters won't shut up. They're constantly stating the blindingly obvious. Particularly bad voices are those of Big (who sounds like he has had serious head injuries) Tails (who sounds 4 instead of 8) and Charmy (who is just out and out annoying).Apart from that MAJOR problem the sound is pretty average. The music is good but not at all as catchy as the Megadrive game's music. On a positive note, they still use the end of level music from Sonic 3. :) All the music with lyrics is incredibly cheesy and the main theme that plays when you first start the game will make you quickly pound the mute button on your TV. There seems to be a lack of sound effects. Sometimes you get the odd complete silence when Knuckles smashes a rock to pieces. Very strange. *Style* "Style? Who would review a game depending on how stylish it is?" I hear you cry. I would. I feel style is a very important issue for a game. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance would get 9/10 for it's dark style and GTA: Vice City would get a 10/10 for the 80s style. Sonic Heroes has completely changed it's style to keep up with a more modern Pokemon watching audience. To put it bluntly, it's kiddy. REAL kiddy. This sudden change in style may scare off some of the veteran Sonic fans (including myself). *Gameplay* Ahh gameplay. The most important feature of any game. From Pong to San Andreas, games have always had to have good gameplay to succeed. Sonic Heroes has some good and bad points. Sonic. It's called Sonic because it is fast. You move at high speeds. This does no work well in the 3rd dimension. All the characters handle like old shopping trolleys. This is particully bad in the level Rail Canyon use the only thing stopping you falling to your death is a thin metal bar which you must grind on. It takes a hell of a lot of practise to master jumping from one rail to another. When going along a track using your speed character (more on that later) it is hard to line yourself up to collect rings. This game introduces the 3-characters-at-a-time-that-doesn't-work-as-well-as-it-sounds gameplay. Each of the four teams have a power character, a flight character and a speed character. It's pretty obvious what each one does right? The 4 teams are Team Sonic (Sonic, Tails and Knuckles), Team Rose (Amy, Cream and Big), Team Chaotix (Espio, Charmy and Vector making their comeback) and Team Dark (Shadow, Rouge and Omega). All the teams may have different characters but they all play relativly the same. Some characters may have a little unqiue move but it's nothing much. Like in Sonic and Knuckles each team goes through the same level but taking slightly different paths. Team Sonic is normal mode, Team Rose is very easy, Team Dark is hard and Team Chaotix has a bizarre 'mission' based mode. Swiching between character is messy too. Say you're playing as Sonic (speed) and you want to switch to Tails (flight). Now according to the HUD you press triangle to switch to Tails. But as soon as you're about to hit triangle it changes to that pressing triangle wil give you Knuckles (power). This happens pretty much all the time and you can find yourself pounding triangle and circle to get to the character you want. There isn't much to say about the combat system. I'll make a little tactics guide right here. If using your flight character press square rapidly. If using your power character face the enemy and press square rapidly making sure to move so you're right next to the the enemy at all times. If using your speed character and press X rapidly. This one is a real button basher. *Story* The Sonic games have never had good storylines (apart from Sonic Battle) so I didn't expect much from this. The cutscenes are boring and uninteresting. It's the old story of Robotnik (sorry, I mean Eggman...) lures Sonic and co into an obvious trap and tries to kill them. Sonic Team tried to spice things up by throwing in some rubbish about Robotnik actually being Metal Sonic but it is all in all the same old Sonic storyline. *Replayibility* You've completed the game. Now what? Try and complete the game with all emeralds and defeat the Metal Overlord? Impossible. It has the worst special stages to date where the physics are completely off the wall (literally) making getting the emeralds almost impossible. There are a 2P unlockable games but the only good one is the classic 'Sonic 2 style' race. This can be a bit of a laugh for a while but you'll quickly turn to an actual multiplayer game like Timesplitters 2 or Worms 3D. Unlockables? What unlockables?! All I see is a little feature letting you play the music and fmv movies you've heard/seen so far. *Overall* Sonic Heroes is not a bad game. It's an average game. But a game carrying the Sonic name shouldn't be adverge. This makes it seem a whole lot worse to Sonic fans who are expecting a whole lot more from our spiky blue friend. Should you buy Sonic Heroes? Rent first. See if you like it. I might be wrong. But don't buy it first, find out you just wasted £20 and blame me. I warned you. I'm going to tilt my score up a bit as it can be a lot of fun when you first start and the score is dragged down by the awful voice acting. Sonic was on a life support machine. Sonic Heroes just hit the 'off' switch. We still have the GBA games right? 
