Sonic Heroes

JavaFox · Jan 1, 2004, 04:57 AM

Sonic Heroes is out in Japan and will be out shortly in the US. It is enormously fun, super-fast paced, has lots of creative levels, has good music, and has placed the focus back on action (instead of exploration or story, as in the Sonic Adventure series), where it belongs. And, from what I've heard of the US version, it seems to have the best voice acting of any Sonic game. The game seems to invite comparisons to the stinker Chaotix (for 32X), but it is nothing like it. You only need to worry about controlling the lead character; the others just follow.

On the negative side, it does has Big the Cat and Cream in it, does have the occasional camera angle that makes play difficult, and does have some of the difficulties inherent to any 3D game with platforms. There are also a few stages comprised almost entirely of railgrinding and sometimes jumping from rail to rail can be really frustrating. That said, though, the camera is not bad (it's perfection compared to the SA1 camera) and the platforming aspects are not insanely hard.

There seems to be only minor differences (although they do exist) between the teams as far as controls and gameplay goes, but their stages are somewhat different. Team Rose is a tutorial team -- they have insanely easy levels and many many many opprotunities to get extra lives (it's for people who "don't have much confidence when it comes to action games"). The Team Sonic game is of a moderate ("normal") difficulty, with Team Shadow's being hard. I haven't played very far into Chaotix's or Shadow's games yet. Team Chaotix has different objectives than the other teams. For example, in the first level, rather than complete the course, they have to find 10 hermit crabs. In other levels, the Team has to do things like find a Chao or destroy all the robots in the entire level. But unlike the search-around-for-something levels in Sonic Adventure or Sonic Adventure 2 (the Knuckles and Rogue levels), Team Chaotix is actually a lot of fun to play with. And they aren't all scavenger hunt levels, either.

It initially looked like the only 2 player mode in this game was going to be a racing one, but I now know that to be false. Throughout the course of the 1P game, you collect emblems. When you get enough of them, you unlock new multiplayer modes. I've unlocked Battle, and there are six more to unlock. In Battle, you chose your team and try to knock the members of your opponent's team off the building/platform you're on. There are stages like this in the single player mode, too.

There looks like there's tons of stuff to unlock in this game, and it's a lot of fun. If you are a Sonic fan, you should pick it up. If you are a Sonic fan that didn't like the Adventures series, you should pick it up. There probably won't be many 2D Sonic games in the future, but Sonic Heroes is the most Sonic a game has been in a long, long time. The game is rewarding. It is the best Sonic game since Sonic 3, without a doubt. I would definitely say it's worth buying and playing. It is truly Sonic, in 3D, done right

ps: the new Casino level is insanely awesome.