Sonic Heroes

Roughly 10 years ago, Sonic the Hedgehog was the single hottest game character in the world. With a trio of awesome Genesis games, Sonic single-handedly took the Genesis to the mainstream game market and gave Nintendo quite a run in the 16-bit era, demonstrating chinks in Ninty's armor that have yet to be healed. Just as quickly as Sonic hit the scene, he seemed to have disappeared. Many blame the Saturn's complete failure in the marketplace on a lack of a great Sonic game - after all, wouldn't you launch a system with your meal ticket? Sonic finally resurfaced on the Dreamcast in 1999, with the decent Sonic Adventure, and the better Sonic Adventure 2. However, both of these games failed to capture what made classic Sonic so good - insanely fast gameplay and challenging tricks you have to figure out on the fly. Instead, Sonic Team and Sega forced different, crappy characters on Sonic fans, and shook the gameplay up to the point where it felt less Sonic and more...something entirely different, and not good either.

This time around, Sonic Team has gone back to their roots - or so they say. The first multiplatform Sonic game is here, starting off with the GameCube version of Sonic Heroes. Harkening back to the classics, Sonic Heroes was pushed as fast, intense 3D platforming levels with a new teamwork option to mix things up. It sounded all so promising. Yet - here we go again. While the speed is tremendous and graphics pretty, the twitchy, sensitive control becomes error one in a numerous set of missteps that doom this game almost immediately. It might be all right for Sonic fans, but anyone else can get away without bothering to give this a try.

Sonic Heroes is based totally on teamwork options - you can play as one of 6 different teams of characters, 3 to a group. Each one has different attributes and skills - one is powerful for smashing things in your way, one is able to fly and thus float over stuff, and one is fast for streaking through speed sections and collecting rings. Each team has a different path, and some are much more difficult than others - but it might not be much of a deal, because aside from Team Sonic (Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles) and Team Shadow (with Shadow and co.), the other teams are lame-o and downright cheesy. They might just as well remove the Sonic name from the title, because you'd barely know Sonic was in the game. The stories of each team do occasionally intertwine, but mostly, it's all separate.

As always, you can tackle levels you've completed in challenge modes, like time attack and goal-oriented situations, and can also be done in multiplayer. Still, you must play the single player story mode to unlock this to its fullest extent. As usual, you collect emblems that unlock other stuff in the game, giving you something to aim for.

Each level in Sonic Heroes is quite long, with numerous checkpoints and chances to use your teamwork skills to defeat the level - at the least, the team powers are required in many cases to advance, and not just a dumb gimmick. There's only one small problem with the levels - they're boring and poorly designed. Due to their length, lots of corners seemed to have been cut, and many stretches repeat often and there's just not enough thrills despite the speed of the game; and the game definitely is very fast at all times. Too often there's slight stopping to fight stuff, and break stuff, and not enough places to let loose and race around collecting rings at truly insane speeds. It just seems that there's not enough gas in the tank to round up a dozen or so awesome, memorable and replayable levels, instead putting out generic, boring levels to play through - that don't even come close to capturing the feel of Sonic's past. They might be fast, but it's easy to see when there's no inspiration.

Boss battles take place after every 2 levels, and of course revolve around Dr. Eggman and his latest invention that you have to destroy. Figuring out the pattern is the key, and it's not always evident, and there's actually multiple ways to beat a boss, thanks to the different team powers. What you do might be different from what your friend might do in the same case. In this regard, the boss battles are many times better than the actual regular levels, which is not a good thing.

The greatest enemy in the game though, is the controls. A game like this needs precise, accurate controls, and Sonic Heroes has neither of these. Instead, you get flaky, sensitive controls that make it feel like you're skating on ice all the time, making the game more frustrating than it needs to be. It's simply not fun if you don't feel in control of the characters on screen. To its credit, though, Sonic Heroes' teamwork controls are intuitive and it's easy enough to switch characters quickly and on the fly. As you can tell, most of the good stuff is based on the teamwork option - it's apparent that's all Sonic Team was interested in, instead of refining the gameplay to be something special instead of so poorly implemented.

It's unfortunate that Sonic Heroes turned out the way it did - it could have been an amazing game and returned Sonic to the spotlight in style and maybe even get Sega some overdue positive publicity - instead, you get a mostly boring game with controls about as wonky as a $10 PlayStation game and level design just as bad, with one cool innovation to carry the game along. It's not all bad - the cool teamwork stuff presses you along, and once you 'get' the quirks of the controls, it's at least playable if you can get past the boring, too-long levels. Simply, Sonic Heroes doesn't feel finished - just rushed out the door to get it over with. There are far worse platform games on the Cube, but Sonic Heroes isn't up there with the best, either. While the initial impression will be quite strong, with time the flaws of Heroes sticks out like a sore thumb and you'll just break out Sonic Mega Collection instead.

Sonic Heroes does look decent enough, though it doesn't look many times better than the Dreamcast games either. The framerate is solid and fast to keep up with the speed of the engine, which could have really doomed this game. Instead, you'll notice the colorful worlds and good-looking environments many times over; especially since they repeat a billion times in any given level. Sonic and his friends (and enemies) look pretty nice and are designed well, but it's a bit hard to notice since they're blazing by most of the time. While it doesn't look as good as other Cube games (no doubt due to the Renderware middleware development, and of course, releasing it for the PS2 as well), it looks good enough, despite the repetitive and unexciting level designs.

The audio is pure Sonic all the way - 80's style cheese rock blaring during many levels, and of course, the same horrendous voice acting from Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, right down to the same awful voice actors. Remember when Sonic was cool? Now he just sounds like a neutered, lame-o hedgehog who actually is friends with Tails, who reminds me of Pat from Saturday Night Live - just what the hell is it?

On the other hand, many classic trademarks return, such as the effect of collecting rings and going through checkpoints, collecting powerups, etc. That's one trademark of Sonic Team - they tend to make sure to reuse their best sound effects for Sonic games, to attempt to keep the Sonic of old mixed in with the Sonic of new. Too bad they can't make the gameplay work like that, eh?