Sonic Heroes

"Good, but not as good as Sonic Adventure 1 or 2"

Sonic makes his historic PlayStation 2 and Xbox debut. But, does it live up to Sonic Adventure 1 and 2? Read on to find out.

Gameplay: Teamplay is the main feature of the gameplay in Sonic Heroes, although the system does work quite, Y & B enables you to switch between formations, which are Speed, Fly and Power. Although the Team System feels disjointed when you first play Sonic Heroes, after 2 or 3 levels it becomes second nature, however the team system doesn't add strategy or depth to the gameplay, this is because the game tells you what the best formation is to tackle the obstacle. Also they have tried to add depth to the combat, by adding health bars to the enemies, this doesn't work at all because, simply because it doesn't feel like a Sonic game. On the plus side however they have finally ditched the adventure elements and return to the roller coaster ride of the Mega Drive games. Plus classic levels return such a proper pinball/casino stage. Works as well in 3D as it did in 2D. However I have one other grip with Sonic Heroes, that the boss battles are two complicated, inside of the enemy heath bars for the Adventure games or the 8 hits from the MD games, you have to destroy different parts of Eggman's death machines, it might have been fine if each part didn't take over 50 hits to destroy. Plus there are annoying endurance battles where you take on wave after wave of Eggman's robots. It gets annoying when you keep going back to the start after dieing.

Story: What ever happened to the great plots in Sonic Adventure 1 & 2? Sonic Heroes return to the ‘Classic Stop' Eggman plot and it shows, there a re only 4 or 5 cut scenes in each story. Poor.

Graphics: Nice and colourful. The environments are more like classic Sonic levels than Sonic Adventure 1 & 2. The first level actually a cross between Green Hill Zone from Sonic 1 and Emerald Coast in Sonic Adventure. Also what cut scenes there are, they are very well done, as this time they are full CG rather than using the in game engine like the Sonic Adventure games. However I have one tiny gripe with the graphics that the in-game character models look worse that Sonic Adventure 2's.

Sound: As with all Sonic games, they music is pretty good, (except Team Rose's theme). The level music is much less intruding than Sonic Adventure's. Plus most of the main theme's songs are good. On the sound effects front, all of the classic sound effects are back. However most of the voice acting is squeaky pre-teen sounding, (with the notable exceptions of all of team Dark, Sonic, Knuckles and Eggman).

Overall. In answer to my question above, no. The Sonic Adventure games had stages which were closer to the Sonic formula than Heroes, plus the adding health bars to the enemies and the overly long Robotnik Battles, and the down right annoying robot endurance battles have strayed to far from that formula. However the team idea does work quite well most of the time.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/19/04