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User Rating: 2.4 | Sonic the Hedgehog X360
I was a big fan of the Sonic Adventure games (much to the chagrin of most of my friends), so I was pretty excited when I heard Sonic Team was going to try to bring their blue bomber back to his original 3D form. Unfortunately, the end result is something buggy, broken, and just plain un-fun.

The graphics, while not terrible, are certainly subpar. The draw-distance on the shadows of various objects is about an inch in front of your character's nose, and the shading on character models is pixelated and simply ugly. As in past voice-acted Sonic games, the voice acting here is pretty awful. Unfortunately, if you're an audiophile like I am, you may notice the low quality of the sound effects recycled from past Sonic games. The sound of picking up rings sounds exactly like it did in the Genesis games, and that's not necessarily a good thing anymore.

Although you can play through the game additional times with other characters, it most definitely isn't worth it. The sheer ridiculousness of the controls is more than enough to keep all but the most masochistic gamers at bay for a second helping. I also encounter a huge number of game-breaking bugs that resulted in undue lost lives, making the cheap deaths to earned deaths ratio at an all-time high. One boss I had to attempt ten times because of a bug that kept throwing me into the stadium seats whenever I tried to climb on his back. Good old fashioned cheap deaths are back, though, and they're here en force. The desert stage is a perfect, spoilers-free instance of this; you literally have to know exactly when to activate Sonic's shield power to cross the sand or you'll die. Every time.

This game had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but unfortunately it winds up feeling crappy and thrown-together. I'd recommend steering clear of this title at all costs.