Sonic the Hedgehog [X360]

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.

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