Sonic the Hedgehog

Nov 26, 2006

Sega's Team Sonic could have churned out a fun, old-fashioned Sonic for the blue one's fifteenth anniversary and the vast majority of us would have been happy. I would have been happy. Instead, Sonic the Hedgehog will at best convince Sega to replace the decision makers in Team Sonic. Individual segments of the game where you actually get to play as Sonic and run fast don't fall apart, but other than those rare portions of Sonic, the game is a disaster. It's more reminiscent of the debacle of Shadow, not the glorious Sonic games of yesteryear.

The hub city, Soleanna, is a charming burg that makes no sense for Sonic and company to be in. I spent the better part of an hour painstakingly hunting down and talking to each of the numerous townspeople to ferret out hidden secrets. I was rewarded for my effort with fifty-five wasted minutes. Individual levels have hidden silver coins (and finding them can net you achievements), but the central city has all clue- or quest-givers color-coded to eliminate any pleasures of exploring. Filling the city with a few dozen NPCs who all repeat the same useless information doesn't make Soleanna feel lively or real; it makes the whole area feel tacked on. And while having a Princess to save is part and parcel of the platforming-hero gig, the storyline to draw Soleanna's liege and Sonic together is unforgivingly mediocre.

I'm Mad as Hell, and I'm not Gonna Take it Anymore!

Getting out of Soleanna and into the missions, some of the more grotesque errors of the Sonic Adventure titles and Shadow have been cleaned up. The lock-on system is much better at guessing who you want to attack, the ring dash is much less likely to mysteriously fail and send you tumbling fatally into the abyss, and Shadow isn't carrying a gun anymore. With those fixes, destroying Dr. Eggman's plans could have been pretty good. Instead, the new Sonic offers a painful experience with scattered moments of happiness. Yeah, I was reminded of a bad relationship too.

Quite a ways off from a checkpoint, I often found myself abruptly shifted to playing Tails, Knuckles, or other second-string characters whether I wanted to or not. That was okay until it became clear that these characters were designed to force me to, oh, destroy every controller I own. Since they generally don't handle as well as the difficult-to-control Sonic and are usually forced on you in areas surrounded by instant-death falls, be ready to restart often. Even if you skip trying to get extras like rings, the camera jumps in a fashion I can only call "malicious" as you try to land non-lethally. Putting Tails on solid land becomes a guessing game, with an instant death as a runner-up prize.

Anything that could be done to prevent you from simply getting to run really fast seems to have been done here, presumably to make the game more "cutting edge," "next-gen," or "hip." Shadow and its gunplay were arguably more fun, because at least I went in expecting a trash game. Here, the misguided attempts at creating alternate gameplay options are unpredictable, showing up at random in levels and quickly costing a few lives as you try to navigate through nonsensical controls and sudden 180 degree camera rotations.

The boarding sections of the game -- snowboarding, hoverboarding, etc -- are typical of these issues. In them, I often ended up with sequences where I was boarding up an incline, stuck moving that direction until I fell off the edge of the level or was embedded in a piece of the stage's scenery thanks to glitchy hit detection. It's telling that the best parts of the game are the short sections where Sonic is flung at high speed from spring to spring, or from rail to rail, out of your control. Those moments capture the energy of the old Sonics, but they're little more than brief sections of FMV.

Is There Any Reason to Go On?

And at this point in the 360's life cycle, there's no reason for full-price games to ship this full of technical issues. The frame rate stutters constantly, leaving you at its mercy as you try not to collide with an enemy or miss a jump. Objects and characters pop in just as often, which can also make combat difficult. Load times are frequent, including load screens so a character can deliver his one spoken line to set you on a quest, followed by another thirty seconds of waiting for the quest to load. These are all the more infuriating for the fact that the game looks, at best, all right.

The layout of the levels do a decent job of encouraging either straight speed runs or lingering, careful attempts to dig every coin and ring from the strata of Soleanna's surrounding territories. Both approaches are actually feasible and valid. Silver, the new hedgehog, gets to do some cool telekinetic stuff as he plods through levels, and Shadow's vehicles are less terrible than Sonic's boarding. Sonic doesn't crash and it doesn't look horrific, and that's about all that recommends it. Maybe the 20th anniversary will be better.