To most people, Sonic's fall from grace has been slow, starting with a promising first stab at 3D with Sonic Adventure, but it's all been downhill since those far-gone days, and games like Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) are the culprit. With plenty of bad glitches, poor controls, and totally lame gameplay on all fronts, this one's not going to restore any part of the hedgehog's name to glory. Now, this game, believe it or not, is over ten years old. Ever since it was released it has been bashed, butchered, and overall just not loved by the entire community. What suppose to be Sonic's most ambitious title turned out to be his most infamous. Let's see if it's still relevant to this day.
1) Story
...What? I'm not the only one that always looks forward to that.
2) Gameplay
While Sonic's name is on the box, you'll actually spend most of your time playing as other characters. Each of the stories play differently because of the way each character controls. Sonic is meant to be the fast-moving one, and he mainly attacks via a homing jump attack that makes most basic fights as simple as timing presses of the A button to bounce from foe to foe. Silver has telekinesis powers that let him pick up large objects and use his mind to fling them at enemies. He's not as fast as Sonic, but he has the ability to float in the air for brief periods of time, letting him cross larger gaps. Shadow gets his own version of the homing attack, but the big difference is that he can drive around in different armed vehicles. Further watering the game down is a heavy supporting cast, so even when you pick Sonic's story, you still occasionally have to play as Tails and Knuckles. Other Sonic collaborators, like Amy Rose, Blaze the Cat, Rouge the Bat, and E-123 Omega also put in guest appearances. While the character variety might initially seem like a good idea, most of them aren't too interesting. Tails moves almost painfully slowly, and his fake ring bombs aren't any fun to use, so when Sonic levels occasionally switch over to him, it's immediately boring.
While you play as many different characters throughout the main game, the same structure applies across the board. The game's action stages are separated by town portions, where you'll be able to take on dopey side missions to help out the locals or figure out puzzles to proceed. Each of these side missions are bookended by two sets of loading screens, where it first loads up the exact same scene, just with different text dialogue, then it loads up the actual mission. After that, it has to load up some ending text and then load up the out-of-mission version of that part of town. Each load time is fairly long, and when they stack up in this way, it almost makes the game feel broken.
But since the frequent and lengthy load times don't do the job, it's all up to the action stages. The camera is the most immediate problem, as it doesn't bother to give you a good view of the action on its own, and your control over it is inverted, with no option to change it. In some cases, the game changes angles at the worst possible time and the controls don't automatically compensate for the new angle. In one Sonic level, you're snowboarding down a mountain and must stay pointed in the right direction. When the camera flips around to give you a new view of the action, you immediately grind to a halt, because you're no longer pushing in the proper direction. This makes some sequences of the game a frustrating exercise in trial and error while you attempt to compensate for this mess. This is but one of several cases where the camera causes often-severe gameplay problems, and it gets frustrating to the point of being nearly unplayable.
(I would put videos of the other characters, but I think Blaze is the best of them all.)
3) Presentation
Graphically, Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) is a glitchy mess that usually looks extremely bland. The town that Sonic spends most of his time saving looks like someone dug up some old Dreamcast-era artwork, brushed it up a little bit, and released it onto current consoles. While his animation for running and jumping usually looks okay, there are plenty of awkward moments, too, like spots in the level that cause the camera to freak out or the way Sonic occasionally launches from platform to platform with his head pointed directly at the ground. There are some better-looking levels in the game, though, and Silver's first level at least starts off with a bang, complete with a nice-looking devastated future city and a big fiery boss fight. Unfortunately, the very next level drops the psychic hedgehog into a nondescript forest setting that doesn't look any better than Sonic's ugly town, and it goes on from there.
Also, why would you want to put these cartoonish characters in a realistic environment? Like, are you serious right now? What kind of natural-looking world has realistic humans, robots, dogs, whales, pigeons and cats, while also having freakishly mutant hedgehogs, foxes, echidnas, bats and...cats? It's just inconsistent! Apparently, this has been a problem since Sonic Adventure, but it's really worse here because of the "high-quality graphics".
4) Overall
Back in 2006, only the most blindly reverent Sonic fan could possibly squeeze any enjoyment out of the game. This platformer is a mess from top to bottom, and any of the occasional moments that don't feel somehow broken only serve to make the game's other flaws appear that much bigger. Part of me still thinks that Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) isn't a game that you can have hours and hours of fun with. It could've been so much, but it left a lot of people with so little.
Despite its flaws, however, this game really isn't that bad now as it was back then. Trust me, I have played much worse, but I can agree that this a poor excuse of a Sonic game. I'll still give this game somewhat of a passing score, yet I wouldn't recommend this to anyone except for those who are curious. I think that it's an okay distraction, but nothing more. This is a game that you can play when there's nothing else to play...and I mean really nothing else.
If there's one thing I'm glad about this game, it would be the fact that it exists in the first place. It represents what many people believe to be the absolute worst of Sonic's 3D career. Sometimes, you have to hit rock bottom in order to see that something is terribly wrong, and Sega realized that. Two years later, Sonic got back up on his feet with future titles like Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations and Sonic Forces (which comes out on the 7th of this November).
Would I like to see another "adventure-styled Sonic game" in the future (even though this game is technically a "Sonic Adventure 3" all along)? Absolutely! I still think there's a lot of potential to be unlocked here for not only Sonic, but also for characters like Tails and Knuckles. I really think they had something going with Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2.
Rating: 3 / 5
