The hills are alive with the sound of Sonic...and some chick.
Unfortunately, Sonic, you are incorrect.
Her smile is not all you need.
A touching love scene with a human being is not all you need.
You need a lot of things, and this game provides none of them.
This is Sonic the Hedgehog, a game with a title that seems to illustrate the apathy
it has even for itself.
Released to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2006, Sonic the Hedgehog was the attitudinal
blue mammal’s debut on current-generation consoles.
It predated SEGA’s exclusive Wii title Sonic and the Secret Rings by about three months
and offered an elaborate, high-definition contrast to the simpler Secret Rings.
The first mistake was to think Sonic should be elaborate.
You wouldn’t expect AC/DC to write a song with more than two riffs...I mean, three would
be dangerously ambitious and potentially catastrophic, so why bother?
You go with what works and you shoot to kill, play to thrill.
Unfortunately, in 2006, SEGA was still laboring under the delusion that Sonic the Hedgehog
is the gaming equivalent to Rush, a character that required big worlds, big adventures and
big stories...
When all he really needed was one or two good riffs.
Sonic the Hedgehog is both a 3D action game...and a sprawling mess of ideas.
You play as Sonic and Tails, obviously, but you also play as other hedgehogs.
And I mean, that basically sums up all this game’s problems.
SEGA built this ambitious adventure game with a ridiculous story and all these new characters,
but never nailed down a single gameplay mechanic to put under the hood.
The game mixes open worlds with on-rails segments.
So you fight some enemies, collect some things and then go back to going fast.
The sad thing—and perhaps the chief mistake SEGA made in its worst 3D Sonic releases—is
that the game seems oblivious to the fact that Sonic is fun when Sonic is fast.
So you’ll be blasting through loops and collecting rings...only to be forced to stop,
whether by your own lack of skill or, all too often, the level’s design.
These portions bring all of Sonic’s momentum to both literal and figurative crashes.
Start, stop, start, stop, this, sucks.
Oddly enough, the other characters actually play better than Sonic, reinforcing the criticisms
that this is a slow game with slow levels.
Silver’s telekinesis, for example, makes for some solid action-platforming...and in
contrast, that’s actually a lot more enjoyable than Sonic’s abrupt and stuttering gameplay
design.
But of course, it’s a whole lot more than that.
It’s putting Sonic among humans, it’s a horrible story, it’s a control scheme
that seems broken and it’s one of the worst Sonic games of all-time.
In fact, the only positive for Sonic the Hedgehog is that it makes Sonic’s awesome recent
games seem even better.
And for that, we have to thank our good pal Peter from California for sending us this
game and making us enjoy Sonic Colors all the more.
I guess hedgehogs are always darkest before the dawn.