No Zytrons In Range

Although Sonic the Hedgehog shares a name with a legendary Genesis game, I’m referring to the Xbox 360 version here. I’ve had this game for awhile and I haven’t reviewed it yet because I prefer to review games I’ve finished. (Or played thoroughly, for those games that don’t really “finish.”) And, despite having Sonic for months, I haven’t completed it because it kind of stinks. There’s a good reason: this game disappoints on almost every level.

First the overview. The Sonic games, at least the original Genesis games, are platformers that focus primarily on speed. Sonic is a blue hedgehog with the power of superspeed, and the ability to roll into a ball and kill enemies using the hedgehog spines on his back. He collects rings and, as long as he’s carrying a few, he won’t die when he gets hit. His enemy is Dr. Eggman (or Dr. Robotnik in some versions), a fat mad scientist who creates chicken-themed robots to kill Sonic.

There are three storylines in Sonic the Hedgehog, represented by the three main characters: Sonic, Silver and Shadow. In addition to those three, you’ll also play as a host of other characters. Sonic partners up with Tails and Knuckles, Silver has a cat partner named Blaze and hangs out with Amy the Hedgehog. And Shadow’s friend is a bat named Rouge. (Shadow is also “the Hedgehog,” he emphasizes that in his intro.) I have no idea where all these characters came from, but suffice it to say they all have lengthy Wikipedia entries: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Silver, Blaze, Amy, Shadow, Rouge. And I’m probably forgetting at least one. (Last time I played a Sonic game, there was only Sonic and Tails.)

The story involves copious amounts of time travel and, I’ll be frank, I have absolutely no clue what’s going on. All I’m entirely sure of is that the requisite kidnapped princess is kidnapped at least three times, and I’m not even halfway through the game. The dialog would be clunky even if the dubbing and animation in the cut-scenes weren’t poorly-paced.

And get used to watching, or at least loading, the cut-scenes: your game is saved at the beginning of them, so you have to load and skip two or three of them before you can actually play. You might as well skip them, since they really don’t have anything to do with the game. For instance, after Amy rescues the princess (for, I think, the third time?) there’s a cut-scene about them both having a crush on Sonic. I think it was supposed to be funny. In any case, as soon as the cut-scene ends, you have to save the city from Dr. Eggman’s robots. It might have been an interesting idea to, you know, show the robots coming in the cut-scene instead of jumping from one thing to another with no transition at all.

A bad story in a Sonic the Hedgehog game really isn’t that big deal and I’d be able to forgive it if the gameplay weren’t also highly flawed. Between levels, you’ll frequently be taken to a city where you can roam around and do quests to earn rings. The rings can be used to buy additional powers for the heros. This wouldn’t be a terrible game except for two things: 1) the game doesn’t have enough save points, so if you die on the next level, you have to do the boring city crap again instead of just the level, and 2) “Loading…”

I should elaborate on point 2 there. Here’s a typical play session:

1. Pick a character from the menu.
2. Pick a level from the menu.
3. Loading…
4. Watch a stupid, poorly-done cut-scene.
5. Loading…
6. Watch another stupid, poorly-done cut-scene that apparently couldn’t have been loaded with the last one.
7. Loading…
8. Enter boring city stage. Run around aimlessly because the map is useless until you find a quest to do. Watch briefing of what the quest involves. (Always very creative, like “kill the robots!”)
9. Loading…
10. Watch ANOTHER briefing of what the quest involves, with the same information as the one we just saw. (This is usually just one or two dialog boxes and takes about 4 seconds to get past, even if you do bother reading it.)
11. Loading…
12. Do the quest.
13. Loading…
14. Exceptionally long and irritating end-level score screen.
15. Loading…
16. Back to the city to wander around aimlessly again until you find the entrance to the next stage.
17. Loading…
18. Stupid, poorly-done cut-scene.
19. Loading…
20. ACTUAL GAMEPLAY! Oops, you hit a hard part of the level. Die and return to step 1.

(I’m exaggerating, but not much.)

Once you enter the actual game, the problems don’t go away. Sonic has questionable physics, to put it politely. Say there’s an accelerator that sends you up a ramp. The ramp has two rows of rings, one on the left and one on the right. If you walk onto the accelerator twice in the exact same way, you might get shot along the rings on the left, you might get shot along the rings on the right, or you might pass between the rings and miss all of them. It seems to be completely random; if you try to control where the accelerator sends you, the slightest touch of the analog stick sends you flying away off the level where you fall and die.

Beyond the questionable physics, there are outright bugs. Silver has a desert level filled with robots who enjoy embedding themselves into the ground and getting stuck. Of course the robots are impossible to kill when they’re like this, and naturally you can’t finish the level without killing all the robots. This happened to me twice in a row, and I think it was only luck that let me pass that room the third time.

The glowing question mark icons are tutorial hints. These have an annoying habit of coming late, or not at all. While playing Sonic, I found a hint that read, “use your homing attack to cross the gap.” Sage advice! Except you needed to use that technique about a dozen times to pass the previous level, so it was not needed. A tip such as, “don’t use that next accelerator, it’ll rocket you right off the level” would have been much more useful. Oh, and did you know the bat character Rouge can climb walls? I sure didn’t, and the game didn’t seem very interested in telling me. I spent a lot of time stuck on that level before I lucked into finding that skill. (I’m sure the next level will have the hint: “you can climb walls with Rouge.”

Playing Sonic is a frustrating experience. If you do manage to avoid the quirky physics, the game has an extraordinarily high “where the hell do I go now?” factor that most modern games have learned to avoid.

The graphics are actually quite good, and I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Eggman’s robot designs. Interestingly, the robots and all the humans in the game are rendered in a very realistic fashion. In fact, they could have been pulled out of this game and plopped down in Lost Planet and would not have looked out-of-place. Sonic and his friends are all about as cartoony as you can imagine, which produces kind of a strange effect when they interact with the realistic-looking city. (None of the humans comment on how freaky the cartoon characters look. They’re more tolerant than I.)

Half of the bosses are Eggman robots, and the other half are other Sonic characters you have to fight. For instance, Sonic fights Silver. Then Silver fights Sonic. (This might be the same fight from two different perspectives, but the plot is too confusing to know for sure.) Then Silver fights Shadow. Presumably, I’ll have Shadow against Silver in a few levels. The other bosses are Eggman robots. Egg-Cerebus has a dumb name, but it’s a pretty well-done boss battle.

The sound and music are fine. I have nothing really to complain about, but it also didn’t blow me away. I enjoyed that the laser sound used was the same sound effect used in Sonic 2 all those years ago on the Genesis.

I’m slightly over halfway through this game, and I’m dedicated to finishing if only to make the money I spent on the game worthwhile. Unless you’re the biggest Sonic the Hedgehog fan in the universe, I’d recommend skipping it. There are the ingredients to a good game here, but they simply don’t come together.