Reviews VideoGame / Sonic Heroes

One Of The Worst

Sonic Boom and Sonic 2006 are known as two of the most terrible video games not just in the Sonic series, but generally. And that worries me, because if they're both considered to be so bad, and Sonic Heroes isn't, then I can't really imagine how bad they must be. Presumably they somehow transmit venereal diseases straight to the player.

Sonic Heroes has a decent premise; you always play as part of a team, composed of a Speed character, Power character and Flying character, and you choose the formation. The problem is that the four different teams you can choose from are all basically the same, and they have the same levels too. Team Sonic have standard levels. Team Shadow copy Sonic. Team Amy copy Sonic but by the grace of God they decided to halve the length. Team Chaotix copy Sonic but with arbitrary 'Collect 10 Keys on the way' goals.

What kills the game are the glitches, the controls, and the general lack of good programming. You will die. You will die many, many times, and maybe sometimes it will be your fault, but a lot of time, it's just because the developers did not know how to make a game that works. When the combat is working, it's dull and boring. When it isn't working, I've had homing attacks send me flying in the opposite direction of enemies, and almost always off of the edge of a platform and into a bottomless pit. Fun. But that's just the beginning.

How do you miss that in the Chaos Emerald Bonus Stages, you end up stuck on the ceiling every time Sonic banks around a corner? How do you miss that some of the railings send you straight into bottomless pits? How do you miss that the Mercy Invincibility runs out by the time your character is standing again, so if you're attacked twice in a row, you're screwed? How do you miss that some enemies shoot at you through solid parts of the scenery? There isn't enough nostalgia in the world for me to enjoy something made with so much ineptitude.

Three decent things I can say. One, the game is colourful. Two, I found Big the Cat's good-natured dumbness to be endearing. Three, I beat the real final boss by mashing the B button over and over. I'm counting that as a good thing because compared to the other boss fights in which you have to obey conflicting rules (Don't let Eggman get too far away, or he'll hit you with an unmissable attack! But don't follow him over that gigantic ramp just yet, or you'll lose control of the character and run into the beams he's firing and fall into a pit!) and fight the same mob of boring robots again which for some reason always takes place on narrow platforms with no edges and as mentioned before I can barely say the words 'homing attack' without wanting to punch a playtester in the face because homing-it-sure-as-hell-ain't... um, what was the question again?

If this isn't considered one of the worst Sonic the Hedgehog games, then frankly, Sonic the Hedgehog isn't worth supporting, defending, or caring about.