Sonic Shuffle

"The game is greatly flawed"

In a quest to find a great party game, I looked up to Sonic Shuffle. Unfortunatly, I did not read any reviews before I bought this. Sonic Shuffle is the Sonic version of Mario Party, which is made by the same company of MP (Hudson). Likewise, you would think that it would be on par, or even better than MP. Well, it isn't. The game's main objctive is to regather parts of a stone called the pressure stone so a evil fairy would not plunge the world into darkness. Thats the whole story, exciteing? No. As with the graphics, it takes a turn into a wierd Cel Shading effect, only in a bad way. The characters look awful, not because of there cel shading, but because of there suroundings. Is this game worth $20 or $5? That is the biggest question

Like I said earlier, the graphics are a wierd Cel-Shading like engine. While not everything is cel-shaded, most of it is. First off, the story boards look awful and bland. With bland enviroments, Bad cutscenes, horrible minigames, the only thing that benifits from the graphics is the average character design. With all that, I give the graphics a 4/10

The control is a brutal nightmare. Although controling on the main board is fine, the mini game controls are seriously screwed up. It's extremely hard to make a character jump, or do anything for that matter since the buttons do not respond that well. it sometimes takes 4-5 button presses to make a character respond to something that should only take one.

The camera, while similar to Mario Party on the main board, is crap in the minigames. It zooms into the worst spots, making it extremely hard to see what you are doing or who you even are. With everything said, I give the Control and Camera a 2/10

Sonic games are known for it's catchy tunes and greatly composed music (at least the Genesis-gamecube era). Shuffle offers bland, fairy like music that playes over and over. The minigame music is the same, with barely anything catchy.

The voice acting is also awful. Most of the quotes are small, but whenever the voice is used, the mouth never moves, A extremely bad move by Hudson. That leads me to rate the Sound and Voice acting a 1/10

The biggest problem of the game is the difficulty. The game is so hard, it makes normal and hard difficulty unplayable. You can sit there for nearly a hour of winning the game, and then lose badly at the end. Another problem is how long collecting all the pressure stones take. It sometimes takes 20 minutes just to collect one, and 2-3 hours just to complete the board, which is WAY too long. The difficulty earns it a 10/10, while the fun equals a 0/10

The game itself isn't worth a rent, not is it worth anything $10 and up. The game itself is bad direction for mascot party games, and proof that it shouldn't be dont outside Mario Party. Your just better off buying a mario party game that this crap

Review Scores:

Graphics: 4/10
Control and Voice Acting: 2/10
Music and Voice Acting: 1/10
Difficulty: 10/10
Fun: 0/10
Rent or Buy?: No Rent, No Buy
TOTAL: 3.1/10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/01/03, Updated 06/26/03