What The Hell Happened!?
First, I’ll start off with the one thing in the game I think is absolutely spot-on. Sonic’s in-game character model. He looks as seriously cool and realistic as a big, blue hedgehog can be. And that’s about it. The rest of the character models don’t look impressive at all. The humans just look stupid, and as for water effects, forget them. Final Fantasy XII had some amazing water effects during boss battles, and that was on a console half as powerful as the 360, so why did Sonic Team not even include some nice water? Everything just looks like a suped up Playstation 2 game. Apart from Sonic’s character model of course. Some of the FMV’s pretty nice though. Sometimes. Other times, it’d be pretty easy for it to be recreated on any last-gen console.
As for sound, the god-awful voice acting has returned. There has never been a Sonic game with good-voice acting, and as long as 4Kids entertainment is in charge of the voice acting for characters then there never will be. The characters seem to make grunts and screams for everything. Jumping, dieing, falling, punching….and it gets annoying FAST. Because the voice acting is so bad, the characters make half-assed attempts at screaming for their life when they fall. Tails is the biggest culprit of this. If you ever make the same mistake as I did, and buy this game, drop Tails into some water and hear him scream. It just makes me angry at how they’ve ruined the characters with the worse-than-bad voice acting. The music can be okay sometimes, but it gets repetitive quickly. The only music in the entire game that I don’t get tired of hearing is the game’s main theme tune. It’s brilliant, and if only the game had matched the same level of quality as the main theme we would have had our second amazing 3D Sonic game.
At the start of the game you can only choose to play as the blue speedster himself. And in all honesty it should have stayed this way. Sonic’s levels can be pretty cool and impressive sometimes, especially when Sonic needs to speed up. He dashes forward toward the goal and all you have to do is steer him left and right…where’ve we heard this before? Sonic’s main running levels are equally as fast at times; however they can be overly frustrating when you light-dash along a trail of rings and a monster pops out and kills you for no apparent reason. Once you unlock Shadow’s levels you’ll start to see the game go downhill from the start. You’re running through the first level, busting enemies open with your homing attack and then smashing their remains with a chaos smash. All is well. You run round a corner, only to then be faced with your worst enemy; a car. Seriously. Sonic team obviously learnt NOTHING from the disaster that was Shadow the Hedgehog. The vehicles are awkward to control, drive slower than Shadow can run and they have GUNS attached. Tsk tsk. In all honesty, I haven’t even attempted Silver’s levels, but from what I’ve heard, they’re not much better. I gave up just after I kept getting so far into one of Shadow’s levels only to die and be taken back to the beginning because the checkpoints are spread way too far apart.
The game is just badly built; it’s filled with bugs, some of the level designs actually prevent the player from continuing through the level in the correct way and, apart from some of Sonic’s levels, the game is boring. And they even tried to re-create the Adventure field areas from the original Sonic Adventure, but they failed miserably. The game’s loading times are possibly its biggest downfall. It has to load everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. Different areas to a level, which Sonic Adventure loaded up in a flash; a boss’ little introduction sequence; but possibly most painful of all is the fact that it has to load the individual missions that are available in the adventure field. It doesn’t sound too bad now, but take into consideration that it takes an age to load. Then, when you accept a mission it slowly loads the NPC saying something like “Jump through the rings!” Then it starts to slowly load the actual mission. Then, if you fail the mission, it slowly loads the NPC telling you that you’ve failed, but doesn’t grant with a retry option. No, instead it painfully loads the adventure field and you have to go through the entire process all over again.
Sonic the Hedgehog is more than a disappointment. It’s a sheer failure of a game that’s so bad that it’s caused me to lose all faith in Sonic and Sonic Team. And what terrifies me is that the same team who made this abysmal pile of crap is working on the NiGHTS sequel. If Sonic Team tarnishes NiGHTS’ title for being a spectacular game I will be writing a letter to SEGA, basically telling them to dissolve Sonic Team and forget about every game they’ve ever created, because they will no longer deserve to be given praise for the awesome games that they have created in the past. I’m surprised that Sonic Team weren’t eradicated off of the face of the earth because of this failure of a game. But there are no more chances for Sonic Team now. Get NiGHTS right and fix the damage you’ve caused to Sonic’s once good name, or lose practically every SEGA fan out there.